Don't get comfy, I used to be fedora, then debian, then arch. Mint + Cinnamon is my final resting place.
I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
What sort of file manager crashes were you having?
Right mouse click, it was an intermittent issue and never did get to the bottom of it as the only forum posts I could find were from 10 years ago. Yes I know I could of used the keyboard shortcuts but my muscle memory is more mouse orientated than keyboard lol
Luckily for me, I switched from Cachy to Fedora kde right before the AUR attacks started happening. Fedora honestly feels like home to me now. I customized it to have a very Gnome like workflow, and its working flawlessly for me.
Why not fedora gnome? 🤔
I've recently had some issues with Fedora (KDE). After I install any update it tells me to restart to finish installing. So I restart and it still tells me the same thing. Probably time I distrohop again.
With the usual restriction of "either upstream or Mint, otherwise you're doing it wrong". There are 6 options. Ubuntu is obviously out. Arch is not my cup of tea. Fedora is already ruled out. Debian/Mint aren't as secure as Fedora/OpenSUSE. That leaves me with going back to OpenSUSE Leap.
But the proprietary media codecs on OpenSUSE come from the AUR ... looks like I'm out of options.
This might not be your issue, but I remember for me there's this button in the tray that appears after all updates are downloaded. You click it and there's an option to restart and update. If you just go to the main menu to restart, it doesn't always show this "restart and update" option, and just restarts without installing the updates. Though even if you make this mistake you shouldn't need to re-download the updates. Just go to KDE Discover and check for updates again, and the button will appear in the tray again. I think.
Also maybe you'd like the Fedora atomic distros, like Bazzite or Aurora. Unlike installing the updates during reboot, they install them in a "disabled state" while the system is running. Then you reboot and it automatically boots to the new version, no need to wait for any installation. What's neat is that it's really hard to break. Even if you pull the power while it's installing updates, it will just use the previous version and try installing again. No risk of corruption.
What's the security issue with Debian and Mint? Debian is usually my goto but I don't want to expose myself to security issues
Linux in general is not secure for desktop users. There's basically never sandboxing, and when there is it's usually weak, antivirus is rarely used, and developers aren't vetted as stringently as with paid software. Apparently Fedora and OpenSUSE take these issues more seriously, and SE Linux does somewhat restrict what malicious things a piece of software can do.
It's a pretty widely held view that Fedora and OpenSUSE are more secure than Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch for desktop users but I'm not really an expert so I'm mostly retroactively justifying what I've heard second-hand.
There's also https://secureblue.dev/
I got fed up with Discover's whole reboot-to-update thing and just disabled it.
Eventually, I ended up just disabling updates through discover altogether, I'd rather just use my little bash script anyways.
With LUKS the whole "reboot to update" thing is 1000 times as inconvenient. I set it to install updates immediately, and even automatically, but the update process just isn't going great for me in a bunch of ways.
Debian on my severs and workstation. My laptop is also Debian, though I have a Haiku partition that has been a lot of fun to play around with. It’s way, way better than the last time I tried it.
Debian for everything.
Yes ! I don't get why debian always seems to be forgotten outside of its server use. I have been running it for 2 years now (homelab, laptop and desktop).
Beyond none of its branches actually satisfying my preferences, I feel like the way it handles major version upgrades is way too involved. I suppose it makes sense; it's paying back the accumulated debt of a couple years worth of bliss...
Having said that, my experience on Fedora Atomic is (almost) equally blissful without requiring any of that whenever a major version update strikes.
Don't get me wrong; I definitely do believe Debian has its uses on desktop Linux. But I can't shake off the feeling that they're definitely more niche compared to say Fedora.
The upgrade issue is exactly why I don’t like Debian-based distros for my desktop
I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it's installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.
First one is that it doesn't have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren't for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven't been updated since Debian Buster days!
A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.
CachyOS anyone?
For gaming, oh yes. And enable snapshots so you can rollback to a working version if the latest update shits the bed.
My partner isn't IT-literate but loves her CachyOS since it means not having to deal with Windows
I did the same thing. Settled om Baazite
Bazzite is just right for my daily driver. I was hopping around different arch distros for a while, but I had some really weird encounters with btrfs and not being able to recover after kernel upgrades. Happened to me 3 times in the span of 2 years.
I have been on this Linux jam since 1996 with a CD copy of Red Hat that came with a magazine (Byte, maybe?). In 2018 I made the jump to Debian based distros specifically because I got tired of the surprises. Now my lab runs LMDE. The only thing more stable and boring is Debian Stable itself.
Like you said, I want to focus on my projects, not have the OS be my project.
Debian for servers and fedora for desktop for me.
Some people I will put on Mint for desktop use, if they are super non-technical.
I love mint and I'm at least a little technical. Although I'm still mad I couldn't get fedora working on my laptop.
What did you struggle with?
Back to Fedora myself.
My path so far: Manjaro -> Arch -> Mint -> Fedora -> EndeavourOS -> OpenSUSE Tumbleweed -> Bazzite -> Fedora.
All distros on the list are brilliant in their own right, they just failed on my hardware in all variety of odd ways, or were simply too limited for what I want to do. Of all of them, Fedora was the least problematic in the long run, and with the snapshot experience I gained from OpenSUSE, I think I can manage it well now.
P.S. Seems like the article author also got inspiration for btrfs after using OpenSUSE, and I don't think it's random. Folks there made a truly perfect integration. If you want to know what btrfs can truly offer, look no further, this is the best use of this filesystem anywhere on Linux.
Speaking of Fedora, my experience of installation was nothing similar. It was rough all the way. From the installer literally not launching, to borked nvidia drivers, it all caused me some pain. But after I've set everything up, it was a breeze.
What is it with everyone going to Fedora? New Ubuntu apparently.
Fedora is solid these days, well the last few years. It's been so easy and everything is up to date, not lagging behind lke Ubuntu.
Ubuntu been awful since the beginning, always buggy always needing to be rinstalled at some point.
It lives on hype alone. I would choose anything over Ubuntu.
Fedora recently provided some exciting developments in the Linux world, and it's genuinely interesting to follow.
It's also reasonably new and reasonably stable, which is often so much of a pain point to balance.
Also, I mean, it is the distro Linus himself prefers.
Linus liking something doesn't mean anything. He has some other strange opinions too.
Sure, and it's not about liking. It's about being damn sure Fedora will keep up with Linux development.
Linus is not the one to distro-hop, and you can be sure that his workstation will be perfectly operational and up to date with Linux development. And therefore, yours can probably be too.
I just swapped over yesterday to Fedora from Ubuntu. It’s been a good experience so far! Except for installing nvidia drivers, still working on that
Why do distros make that so difficult?
# pacman -S nvidia
# systemctl reboot
Good to go. 🚀
Fedora doesn't ship proprietary NVIDIA drivers in its official repos and doesn't include 3rd party repos with proprietary software either. This is for licensing and I guess philosophical reasons. Arch has a different approach. That's why.
Can't you access those with RPM Fusion or something? Whenever I'm able to switch back to Linux I'd really want to start daily driving Fedora
Yes, you can easily add 3rd party repos, they just aren't included in the Fedora distribution. I'm sure there are instructions on the RPM Fusion website for it.
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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