During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
Bending the question a little but my second “first impression” of Arch’s “simplicity” surprised me the most.
I was running Gentoo for a while before deciding to move back, and I was surprised that somehow I had
- saved space
- gotten faster at doing new things (…)
- didn’t lose any boot speed or anything like that
Granted, I had jumped on Gentoo because of misconceptions (speed, ricing, the idea that I needed USE flags), but going back, I saw things more clearly:
- the AUR being basically a shell script download + 300 MB of base-devel was simpler and more space-efficient than /var/db/repos (IIRC – since the portage and guru ebuilds were all held locally anyway after syncing, an on-demand AUR saved space).
- the simple automatic build file audits on Arch felt more clean to me. I like checking my build files; had to make a script for the guru ebuild equivalent (but maybe there’s a portage arg i missed somewhere – wouldn’t be the first time)
- Arch repos separating parts of packages in case you don’t need some part (like splitting some font into its languages, or splitting a package into x and x-doc and x-perl) was almost a simple USE flag-ish thing already
- /etc/makepkg.conf was Gentoo’s make.conf. And its build flags looked similar to the CFLAGS I manually set up anyway.
- My boot time (btrfs inside LUKS with encrypted /boot) was the same with systemd vs. openrc
- I realized I liked systemd (because of the completeness of my systemctl muscle memory, like with
systemctl statusandjournalctl, or managingsystemd-logindinstead of usingseatdand friends).
Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it’s when I realized why Arch was “simple.” Even me sorely missing
/etc/portage/patcheswas quelled byparu -S <pkg> --fm vim --savechanges.And Arch traveling at the speed of simplicity even quantifiably helped: Had to download
aur/teamsthe other day with nine-minute warning.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just wish more distros made their terminal prompt and updater look as good as Gentoo’s, it’s weirdly the one thing I miss most about messing around with it
Not bashing on Gentoo or anything, but it’s when I realized why Arch was “simple.”
That’s funny. I switched from Slackware to Gentoo in 2003 because it was simpler.
Yeah, it’s pretty funny how distros just passed each other by like that. Back then it was Debian that was regarded as the hyper-poweruser distro:
The reason I havn’t used Debian is because I can’t install it. “This guy is totally clueless” you might think. My only response is that I’m writing this on a Gentoo box that I have installed myself.
And then now there are plenty of people reading this thread who liked Windows 7. As time passed, their grade on the ease-of-use of A passed the don’t-get-in-my-way of B, and a load of Windows 10ers jumped ship to Linus & Friends, the last place their Windows 7 selves would have expected to go. Always a reminder that the end of history isn’t now.
Alpine It just gives me the system and go “do whatever” It’s snappy, decluttered, doesn’t get in the way It doesn’t have a bazillion systemd components, it’s as barebones as it can be
@AkatsukiLevi @Sunny Alpine’s installer is simplest indeed, and it just works. very similar to OpenBSD
LFS: Not being so complicated actually. Arch: That a fully fletched OS install can be done in less than 10 minutes.
Isn’t maintaining LFS a pain for the long run?
It is. Especially when you need the night to compile FF and it constantly fails. But I learned a lot.
LFS isn’t a distro.
Then let’s call my install 30p87OS, that was made from scratch. Now it’s a distro.
Deal. :D Edit: Congratz BTW, that’s a huge feat to create own distribution from LFS. My hats off!
Puppy linux seems like its still one of the more unique Linuxes around. Its my go-to when I need to do a recovery for family/friends and seems to almost work with any system. If it can, it will load its entire system into the RAM and go to town. If it cant. then it will act like a live disk…but you can “save” the OS multiple different places. Its a fun little OS.
If you like Puppy, also have a look at Easyos. Created by Puppy’s orginal creator.
Ha. Was about to say the same. Running EasyOS on one ofy extra partitions for testing, and I end up using it as semi-daily driver often due to how light it is. Great on a USB key, too.
It is also somewhat unique, on top of other Puppy distros.
I ran Puppy as a daily driver for about a year before I finally got a new hard drive for that computer. It’s surprisingly robust for such a tiny footprint.
I installed Pop in a VM (I use Debian usually) and was surprised how usable it was sans-graphical acceleration. Ubuntu is pretty much unusable these days in a VM - it can literally sometimes take 30 seconds for a button press to register where it works instantly in VM Pop or Fedora.
voidlinux: gave me much better battery life - I assume because it starts as a minimal system and one adds only the essentials to do the job - compared to the soup-to-nuts distros that pile everything in so that newbies are acccomodated. Of course, the voidlinux approach needs more linux skills - but it’s not that hard and the doco is great.
Also, I love the back to basics runit init system and runsv service runner (I’m old so I like that stuff) and the ultra fast xbps packaging system.
Been curious to try. How is your RAM usage on it? Like that it uses runit. Like my systems to be minimalistic and with little bloat.
OpenSuSE - YaST is as good as is made out to be. I like how many fundamental parts of linux are managed via one tool. Other distros I’d used before were heterogenous mix of tools that felt cobbled together and inconsistent, while YaST feels well designed, integrated and consistent.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. Also
zypperhas fun arguments, likezypper upMy weapon of choice
Tumbleweed surprised me with how it receives constant, up-to-the-minute updates yet somehow doesn’t ever seem to break.
It also surprised me with how much I like KDE. I had used it way back in the day when it was a bit complicated looking and ugly. These days Plasma makes the whole experience nice.
NixOS is surprisingly easy to use
Kubuntu.
The prevailing wisdom used to be that if somebody is tired of Windows and wants to switch you would send them to Ubuntu. Having used Ubuntu and Debian and Mint and Pop! OS and CentOS and Red Hat and Fedora and Kubuntu, Kubuntu with the new KDE plasma desktop seems to be the most Windows like while still retaining the Linux flavor OS that I have used so far.
Ubuntu by comparison is slow and convoluted and those are huge turn offs for neophyte Linux users who want to get away from Windows.
I think KDE is doing the heavy lifting of being like Windows. As a long time Windows user who would every now and then try Ubuntu and hate it, it was Gnome that really turned me off. KDE is so much nicer, IMO.
I’d argue it’s the other way around. Windows is doing the heavy lifting of being like KDE and when they try to do something themselves everybody hates it.
I agree. It’s not that I expect Linux to be like windows. It’s not and that’s a good thing. I’m just thinking for when I encounter people and they ask me, “Hey, I was thinking about trying a Linux. What should I do? Which one should I pick?”
I’m going to recommend Kubuntu.
Spiral Linux. It’s like Endeavor, but it sets up Debian with sane defaults for people who want a GUI installer experience.
I liked that it basically felt like any other distro, but it was surprisingly fast to boot and shutdown.
Just switched over to EndeavourOS & it’s been great
The entire Ublue project is freaking amazing. But Bazzite finished off my distrohopping. I work by day and game by night. Bazzite has eliminated all maintenance tasks for me. It just works. It makes things so damn easy. Also, the Ublue CI/CD builds is crazy cool. It allows them to focus on the important stuff, while all the chores are done automatically. Truly amazing stuff. I also heard lots of praise about the dev oriented spin: Bluefin.
I’ve tried bluefin and it felt like when you turn on someone’s old computer they forgot to erase before giving to you, there was just so much useless junk installed. Are the other Ublue distributions a little more normal?
Ublue are based off of Kinoite. If you want something less “bloated”, try that. You can even rebase from Bluefin to that, I believe.
Keep in mind there are two versions of Bluefin/Aurora. Regular, and “-dx” which is more developer focused with more developer tools.
Yeah I know what they’re based on, I use silverblue on my laptop. I just personally really disliked bluefin when I tried it and I was wondering if that’s what all of the ublue images are like
I started on Bazzite as my first real Linux desktop. After a while I rebased to Aurora (Bluefin but KDE instead of Gnome) and I really liked it. I ended up rebasing back to Bazzite for a while.
My only issue is around a very specific piece of software that has issues with Wayland. That’s why all the rebasing.
Being able to rebase so easily like that is so freaking cool.
Which software ?
Any software KVM like Synergy.
I work from home and Synergy has been a core part of my setup for many years.
It lets me use my personal PC and work laptop from one KB+M seamlessly.
I’ve tried so many different things. Input Leap, installed on Aurora by default, is supposed to work with Wayland, but doesn’t work out of the box.
I’m resigned to using Windows during the week so I can use Synergy and switching back to Linux over the weekend because I prefer it now.
Just a suggestion for you to try out https://github.com/feschber/lan-mouse
Update: I love you.
It took a couple tries to get my desktop and laptop connected, and I don’t know why, but it definitely works.
I’m going to really miss clipboard sharing, but I can make do for now.
I don’t think I mentioned it, but my work laptop is Windows 11, so I’m happy to report that this is working great even on Windows.
Are you aware of KDE connect? It can do clipboard sync, and more. Also available on Windows.
seconded for bazzite. I just came from cachyos (arch based) because it was missing a wayland component to make vr work. I had bazzite on my steam deck already so I figured I’d give it a shot on my pc. everything I wanna do works with minimal to no tinkering required, and I’m glad to know if I break something I can easily roll back in grub.
Endeavour OS
I’ve tried all the usual distros many times over the years but never an arch based distro until last year. I gave arch a go first and it was great but then tried endeavouros and it came with the fixes I needed and was more instantly good from the first boot. The AUR and arch wiki stuff just makes the whole experience most (sry to use this term) Windows like in terms of fixes and support.
Void Linux, very clean and fast on old hardware.
Fedora Atomic/Kinoite, just so relieved when one day I fucked the bootloader, and it didn’t boot anymore, and I only needed to rollback in grub to a perfectly working system
You were able to get to the bootloader with a fucked up bootloader?
Maybe i “fucked the bootloader config” should be better, and with fedora unified kernel support, you can rollback using the UEFI entry so even a fucked bootloader wouldn’t stop you
