Hi, I’m looking for a distro for my laptop. My first distro was Pop!_OS, then I switched to Fedora, then Arch for a year and 2 months ago I switched to Fedora Silverblue, because I wanted to try immutable distro that relies on containers and flatpaks to be usefull. Silverblue is great but not so much for me, its not flexible enough.
I’m thinking of switching to Arch but maybe it’s time for something else. Maybe NixOS or Void, Gentoo probably not, I don’t have time for compiling everything. What do you recommend?
It must support full disk encryption, secure boot with signing with YOUR OWN KEYS, systemd (because of MullvadVPN), everything else I think can work on any distro (Gnome, podman, kvm, etc.).
Switch to debian and go outside
Since I’m the NixOS guy, I recommend GUIX. 😉
I always wonder why GUIX seems to get left out vs NixOS
If NixOS isn’t ready for mainstream work, GUIX is at least doubley so. It is SUPER white beard while IMO, even an idiot (👋🏼) can grasp NixOS.
NixOS isn’t coming very naturally to me. Just can’t quite grasp it.
If you want, here’s my config. Feel free to fork it.
https://github.com/harryprayiv/nix-config (you’ll have the most luck with the “plutus_vm” machine config output in my flake at first since the main output in my config is somewhat obscured by encryption).
I also have a Nix-Darwin config that I haven’t consolidated into my main one:
That looks sharp, thank you.
No problem. Real thanks goes to gvolpe who I forked my config from.
I’ve not used either, just look on as a curious spectator, I’ve yet to leave the more idiot proof distros of mint and fedora. What makes it so hard to deal with vs nix?
From what I hear, it’s a much newer and less popular project, so I expect it to be even more difficult than nix was for me.
I’d recommend rather boring Debian. Archlinux as well if you want to dive deeper.
EDIT: For Debian, you want Debian Testing.
Debian is only as boring as you want it to be.
I installed Debian so I could install Proxmox. Now I have like 10 VMs with every flavor of Linux I could want. Still partial to Arch tho.
Don’t sleep on OpenSuSE. It supports everything you’re looking for and has options for periodic and rolling release.
OpenSuse is great except for one (imho) zypper. When I do updates zyper has this huge section which is labeled “will not be upgraded”. For me it’s really distracting and makes reading which packages will be upgraded harder to parse visually at a glance
This is what I mean: https://superuser.com/questions/273424/am-i-using-zypper-correctly#361047
I’ve been using Linux for 2 decades and I still use Debian for containers and servers and Pop_os for my desktop and laptop. If I was going to run a straight gaming machine I’d probably use something Arch based.
What kind of experience are you looking for? Something that’s bleeding edge? Something that’s going to give you 99.999% uptime with minimal hassle? Something to give you a hobby?
Likewise, been using Linux for over 15 years but my main gaming PC runs Mint because it gets out of my way when I want it to
I’m sure many petrol heads enjoy fine tuning combustion and make sure the suspension is tailored 100% to their neighborhood roads and all… but sometimes they just need a car with which to pick up some groceries.
Two decades here as well. And I run mint.
Linux user since 2008 here.
Boring Debian for servers and Pop Os for my desktop because everything works out of the box
I’m thinking of switching to Arch but maybe it’s time for something else. Maybe NixOS or Void, Gentoo probably not, I don’t have time for compiling everything. What do you recommend?
I’m a bit biased of course but you sound like you’d enjoy NixOS.
NixOS is immutable but quite a bit more tinkerable than Silverblue. Not quite Arch or Void levels of tinkering but this topic is not as black and white as it may seem.
secure boot with signing with YOUR OWN KEYS
Not yet in upstream NixOS but: https://github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote
systemd (because of MullvadVPN),
Unrelated to evangelising you into NixOS but I’m curious: Why does a VPN proxy software have any hard dependency on a process manager?
Why does a VPN proxy software have any hard dependency on a process manager?
Probably because of killswitch. App installs a service that manages internet and vpn access, the app is just a GUI for communicating with that service.
Can confirm NixOS is the shit. Can’t imagine myself using anything else
You want immutable distros but Silverblue wasn’t flexible enough? Why not try NixOS? It’s really nice.
I’ve been using it for two years and I love being able to make changes to my config and having those changes apply to all my computers. It’s also basically unbreakable, if my computer explodes I can just reinstall NixOS with my config files and it will instantly be set up exactly how I want it.
Linux From Scratch 😉
Whichever one works best for you.
Now that’s an experienced user.
All distros are exactly the same. Theres no such thing as a “distro for experienced users”. With that said, just do a minimal install of (pretty much anything you want).
Different distros have different limitations and advantages but there are usually good reasons for these things. For example, Debian strives for stability, but that also means fairly old packages. Some other distro might not have a very wide selection of apps in the repos, but it might have some other areas where it excels. As long as you agree with these sorts of design decisions, it should be a good distro for you.
You don’t even have to like the default DE or any other package related decision that comes with the default image. Maybe there’s a bare bones image that allows you to build your OS which ever way you like, and install only the packages you really need. in this regard, every distribution can be made more or less similar, but your decisions won’t change what is or isn’t in the repositories or how the devs make their decisions.
For a lot of people, the default image is the one they’ll use. In that regard, every distribution is different, but can still be made similar if you put the time and effort into it. Some people prefer to have this and that preinstalled, while other people want something else to work out of the box. With these sorts of decisions in mind, there are huge differences between distros.
Guix !
every distro is for experienced users, you can tranform arch in ubuntu and vice versa, but if you want sumething different try fedora silverblue, or other nonmutable distro, it’s fun learning how to use it(it’s what i’m doing with my laptop)
I don’t know who downvotes this, but it’s true, you can get your hands dirty with any distro.
I prefer doing useful things with my workstation vs playing with the OS itself, so mint cinnamon is my recommendation. Servers are ansible-managed alma. Professionally I’m a Linux systems architect and devops engineer.
Since you’re experienced with Linux already try a BSD for something new.
BSD sadly lacks a fair amount of support for things that Linux does. I gave FreeBSD a try a few years back and it annoyed me, especially coming from Arch. All the packages were so outdated and compiling updated versions from Ports took forever. Also the BSDs are just different enough from Linux to be annoying.
I’m a Linux System Engineer and at my former job we had a few thousand Linux hosts but a handful of Solaris 5 hosts. Shelling into one of those, expecting it to be Linux and then raging when something didn’t work but then realizing it was Solaris and not Linux was always fun.
I use Arch (btw) because of the ArchWiki, and I’m totally comfortable configuring my system how I like it.
But I do appreciate Debian a lot. You can customize things to almost the same extent, but packages come preconfigured with great defaults and designed to better work together, unlike Arch which uses the upstream defaults almost universally.
