• Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
    0·
    9 months ago

    I started with Mandrake back in 2000 and used Red Hat at school. In 2004 Ubuntu was released and I adopted it for life. I switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu to Ubuntu MATE to Kubuntu up to this day. It’s the best because of all the quality of life additions, the stability of the LTS releases, the amount of widespread documenation, and general size of the community of users. This makes it a lot more easier to use and get help to troubleshoot any problems. So far it’s been mostly a problem free and easy experience.

    Until recently…

    I just discovered Zorin OS and started messing around with it in a VM. I gotta say it’s of of the best, most polished Gnome desktop experiences I’ve had so far with their free core version. While I love KDE for it’s desktop experience being the closest to Windows there is, I usually find it has WAY too many customizations to a fault. Some people like this, but I find that the more you mess with configs, the more prone to problems it gets. I also find Gnome to be more well put together and well integrated. The fact the customization options are limited means I spend more time doing what I need to do than messing around with getting my desktop just right. I just hate the default Gnome destop and whatever paradigm they tried to make. That’s why I’ve stuck with Kubuntu for a while. But with Zorin, I think they found the sweet spot. This might be my next install and I might recommend it to anyone who wants to get into Linux over Mint.

    • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Tried CalculateLinux or any of the other Gentoo respins?

      Toorox was the best Gentoo respin. Nothing more than a pure straight gentoo respin. Sabayon was superb before they started to try too hard. Redcore started to try too hard too. Calculate did a little bit of try-hard, but managed to retain enough modest sanity to remain good (at least, still true of the last few times I saw it). Even Funtoo started to go a little wonky.

      But if you ever start to think Gentoo’s too easy and not taking up enough of your time, you can always go the other way, and jump ship to Exherbo.

        • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Oh, and also…

          Would I leave Debian behind for it?

          No need to leave. There’s BedrockLinux, or just distrobox.

          ~ for the latter of which I was shown this article (titled “I stopped distro-hopping because this tool lets me run everything at once”) earlier today on libera.chat from someone who know’s Bedrock’s been my daily driver for over a decade, with Bedrock being how I ended my distro-hopping, and DistroBox being another way to end distro-hopping. ~ We’re now ((at least) two ways) past the days of having to pick just one distro. ;D

            • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
              0·
              8 months ago

              Hrmm. While I’ve never bothered with containers, I don’t see why bedrock wouldn’t work in a container. Could be easy to test… set up a container with whichever distro, and try run the BedrockLinux hijack installer script on it… Don’t blame me if somehow it escapes the containment and eats your whole system … (~ I don’t see why/how it would ~ should be safe ~ but like I say, I don’t have experience with containers.)

        • Digit@lemmy.wtfEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          I’ve tried Exherbo more times than I can count, but never managed to make it my daily driver. It really needs that kind of commitment to make the best of it. With Exherbo, you’ve really got to go from 0 to >9000, with nothing between, becoming a developer of it straight away.

          And yeah, +1 Gentoo+binhost. Though I do miss the USE=“-*” approach to gentoo (like I did in 2011(ish)), adding things only as needed, per package. Great education. And keeps the system very tight to just meet needs, and no more.

  • kyub@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I use Arch since approximately 2006 or so. I like its stability (yes!), performance, rapid updates and technical simplicity. It never stands in my way and it’s fairly simple to understand, administer and modify. It’s probably the most convenient OS I’ve ever used - sure it takes time/effort to set it up but once you’re past that it’s smooth sailing. It also doesn’t change dramatically over the years (it doesn’t need to) so it’s easy to keep up with its development. Plus, I have a custom setup script for it that installs and sets up all of the basics, so if I ever need to reinstall, I’m not starting from zero.

    I am eyeing NixOS as “the next step” but didn’t yet experiment with it too much. Arch is just too comfy to use and the advantages that NixOS brings aren’t yet significant enough for me to make any kind of switch to it, but I consider NIxOS (as well as its related technologies like the Nix package manager) to be the most interesting and most advanced things in the Linux world currently.

    If you’re reading this as a newbie Linux user: probably don’t use any of the two mentioned above (yet). They’re not considered entry-level stuff, unless you’re interested in learning low-level (as in: highly technical) Linux stuff from the start already. NixOS/Nix in particular is fairly complex and can be a challenge even for veteran Linux admins/users to fully understand and utilize well. Start your journey with more common desktop distros like Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu.

    • wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      11 months ago

      I’ve been using a debian based system for a dozen years. Then I decided to buy a NAS and turn it into a NixOS driven media server.

      JFC I thought I knew linux and I was so wrong.

  • rarsamx@lemmy.ca
    0·
    11 months ago

    You mean my distros?

    Different distros are the best for different purposes.

    My Fedora is the best for my laptop because it just works and all the hardware is supported.

    My Arch is the best because it’s a super fine tuned setup that prevents distractions and doesn’t waste memory or CPU doing things I don’t care about.

    My mint is the best because it’s simple, stable, beautiful out of the box.

    My debian is the best because servers are no nonsense.

    My puppy Linux was the best when I was a developer for the distro because it was the smallest lightest and fastest distro I’ve ever used.

    Etc.

  • frostypanda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    It’s not the best, but Pop OS because it’s the only one that actually worked without any other setup (Mint didn’t appear on my screen, and I couldn’t find anyway to access a terminal or troubleshoot that). Starting to regret it, though, especially as the Pop community devolves into the Cosmic cult and 22.04 has more issues (some of my flatpaks refuse to open now, sometimes I get a black screen when starting the computer, bluetooth headphones no longer work, etc.).

  • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Zorin is boring. uses ubuntu stable, out of the box distro so you can do anything you want to do right after installation (including installing a windows program with play on linux but also like burning a disk), emulates windows. Add kde if you want to spice it up (distro really needs to change to kde out of box.). If someone is from windows and does not want to learn all that linux stuff they can pretty much go for most things right away and they can use the software store, choose the debian download for anything they find online if its available and if not they can download the windows right click and say install with play on linux. Its the lazy mans linux and im plenty lazy.

  • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
    0·
    1 year ago

    NixOS. My entire config is source-controlled and I can easily roll back to a previous boot image if something breaks like cough Nvidia drivers. I also use it for my home router and all self-hosted services.

      • dwt@feddit.orgDeutsch
        0·
        1 year ago

        Out of all the ways that I have tried in the past, to reproduce not just the initial state, but also the ongoing changes of a disto (ansible, saltstack, chef, bunch of Shell scripts) — nix is by far the shortest. With all of these technologies I would never have dreamed to do this for a single Maschine. But now it’s not only possible, but actually gasp enjoyable!

        Mind you, if that is not the problem you want to solve, maybe install just the nix package manager in addition to your distribution, and learn to enjoy it without having to run your whole distribution this way.

        • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
          0·
          1 year ago

          You misunderstand! It has also turned into basically a hobby (and recently, a job, lol) to manage nix configs.

          Those 19k lines are clean, well-structured and DRY, and do describe every little thing about ca. 30 machines.

  • crankyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    1 year ago

    I use Arch, btw, but I don’t consider it the best (yes I do.) I could easily transition to Fedora, for example (I would never do that,) and be completely happy (I would rather continually hit my head with the metal stapler gun on my desk.)

  • DivineDev@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Nobara: It works well most of the time and has pretty much everything needed for gaming preinstalled. I had a bad update once that prevented booting past the command line though. Now that I’m more experienced I’d probably use a more mainline distro and install the gaming stuff myself.

    • Shareni@programming.dev
      0·
      1 year ago

      It’s decent, but screw using someone’s personal distro. Glorious literally dropped every scrap of his default de config, and switched to another. No transition, no migration, just deleted everything and went on with his day.

  • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    openSUSE Slowroll and Secureblue are my favorites ATM. Slowroll for gaming, Secureblue for mobile device. Both are hardened for security because that matters to me.

    • woelkchen@piefed.worldEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      I recently installed Slowroll in Steam Deck’s Distrobox. First day and yt-dlp was already too outdated.😅

      Adding OBS repos got weirdly broken since the last time I did it. Some packages cannot be forked into one’s home repo because they are on openSUSE’s git and zypper ar does not add the repo type to the offline file, so zypper ref complains about an unknown repo.

      In the end I found some other repo containing a recent version of yt-dlp that I could fork into my home repo and edit the file in /etc/zypp/repos.d by hand. I assume this is transition pain during the move from OBS to git. I hope they’ll get this done soon.

  • jakeCubes@lemmy.zip
    0·
    1 year ago

    Can’t say it’s the best, but I love Alpine. It’s light, fast, versatile and easy to use, runs on anything, and despite it being used mostly in containers and VMs, it makes for a great desktop distro aswell. :)