Original question by @[email protected]
I get to say “I use arch btw” :P
How’s that working out for you? :)
It works well enough for now. Some things were surprisingly simpler than I expected them to be (e.g. gaming thanks to Heroic Launcher and Steam).
Note for the Linux-curious potentially reading this: I had sufficient experience with Linux Mint and Ubuntu as well as test runs of Arch before committing to it. DO NOT SWITCH DIRECTLY TO ARCH LINUX FROM WINDOWS. Try Mint first (or Bazzite, I hear that one is great for gaming but have yet to try it myself), and preferably using VirtualBox before committing to a switch.
It works well enough for now. Some things were surprisingly simpler than I expected them to be (e.g. gaming thanks to Heroic Launcher and Steam).
I was thinking more with regards to the multiple recent AUR malware attacks. I hope you’re staying safe, staying on top of the situation, not letting Arch bite you.
Note for the Linux-curious potentially reading this: I had sufficient experience with Linux Mint and Ubuntu as well as test runs of Arch before committing to it. DO NOT SWITCH DIRECTLY TO ARCH LINUX FROM WINDOWS. Try Mint first (or Bazzite, I hear that one is great for gaming but have yet to try it myself), and preferably using VirtualBox before committing to a switch.
Note for the linux-curious potentially reading this: You’re Linux curious, that means you have what it takes to try any distribution of Linux. Curiosity. YOU CAN SWITCH DIRECTLY TO ARCH LINUX FROM WINDOWS. It’s rare, but it does happen. Some now famous linux youtubers did just that. It will take a bit more reading to be able to get up and running, but you’ll be running all the more fast and sure-footed from the education the experience gave you.
;)
Oh heck, Arch isn’t even that hard and involved to install any more. Go for Gentoo. :) Come, windows refugees, all! Skip the Ubuntus, Mints, Suses, Fedoras, PopOSes, AntiXes, Zorins, elementaryOSes, LinuxLites, PCLinuxOSes, Soluses and whatever windows refugees flock to these days, and shoot for the moon! Heck, even try LFS! (Okay, don’t. I’ve gone too far now. LOL).
I make a backup of my project on an external hard drive twice-ish a week and pacman-Syu twice-ish a month. If anything serious happens, I’ll just reinstall and restore.
I could keep an up-to-date install USB ready, tho - but I have enough other options at the moment.
Thanks for the concern.
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. :)
No one talks about how Alpine has been doing immutable and atomic installations since way before it was trendy.
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Immutable_root_with_atomic_upgrades
Void made Linux fun again for me. It gets so much right with the rolling release model.
runit ftw
I’ve been enjoying EndeavourOS over the past three years. It works wonderfully out of the box at default settings, and was really easy for me to use and set up to my liking with minimal know-how needed.
It also works really well on the variety of machines I have in my home. My desktop, modded Chromebook, and my husband’s laptop.
It’s allowed me to get more familiar and confident with the command line, and enough so that I’ve switched to Sway from XFCE (and previously KDE).
Bazzite just works, it runs every game I have with zero fuss, it’s easy to run Windows programs / emulators / local LLMs, AND it’s basically unbreakable.
I can’t claim it’s the best, but it’s the best for me right now.
On a gaming laptop I’m using Aurora because KDE Plasma btw (:
Bazzite has a KDE version too. I think it is more popular then the GNOME version of bazzite actually. At least according to the results of the latest steam survey
Yep I use KDE-flavored Bazzite and actually forgot GNOME was even offered! It works deliciously. Came over from Windows last winter finally and boy, the UI alone is just so much nicer.
I had avoided KDE for years due to some multi-screen resolution issues back in the day.
I’d be running gnome, and install a half dozen plugins to make it look and feel closer to Windows It was just a personal preference. Every other update some plugin I was using would be broken. I’d replace it with another plug-in or uninstall it and wait for a fix. Fight fight fight fight fight fight. Some number of years later I tried KDE again, and I realized that it did exactly what I was trying to do in Gnome but it did it out of the box.
I don’t have anything against Gnome. The same way I don’t have anything against OS X’s “window manager” or even Windows 11’s “window manager” they’re just not my preference.
Bottom left navigation, thin, stacked app indicators, bottom right tray. Fractional scaling, widgets.
I’m convinced it isn’t.
Does what I want and gets out of my way.
As it should.
It isn’t, it is the least bad
Which technically makes it the best, doesn’t it?
No because best implies it’s good. Least bad doesn’t transmit the same message as best.
This week alone I’ve used Arch, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora. Its Arch. By a short way, and mostly thanks to the wiki. Tbh they are all converging, and I go with KDE variants when I use a GUI and no distro does too much to customise it
https://uwuntuos.site/ obvi?
But seriously though, Arch all the way, because it teaches me about Linux and computers, because I can customize all the packages at OS install (without the need for lengthy compiling like Gentoo) and because my Steam games work flawlessly on it.
FYI, Gentoo has official binhost now, so emerge does not have to compile the package for you any more. But you still can, if you want. Like if you want to choose different useflags, use saved configs, apply patches, etc.
Because it gets out of my way and lets me focus on the things I really want to do.
I don’t know that it is objectively the best - but its the best fit for me right now (LMDE).
My distro is the best because I don’t have the patience to try them all to see which is actually the best for me. Until my distro decides to do some silly decision that makes me think I should try another, I will stick to it.
Because I can hit “next” a couple of time and have a working install
