Free and open-source.
Receives regular software and kernel updates.
Avoids X11.
The notable exception is Qubes, but the isolation issues which X11 typically has are avoided by virtualization. This isolation only applies to apps running in different qubes (virtual machines), apps running in the same qube are not protected from each other.
Supports full-disk encryption during installation.
Doesn’t freeze regular releases for more than 1 year.
We recommend against “Long Term Support” or “stable” distro releases for desktop usage.
Supports a wide variety of hardware.
Preference towards larger projects.
Edit: I’m new to linux
Fedora, maybe?
Edit to make my point:
-
It is free and open-source.
-
Fedora has a rather fast release cycle. It offers new versions roughly every 6 months, along with regular package updates.
-
Has been using Wayland by default since Fedora 25, so it aligns with your preference to avoid X11.
-
Allows you to set up full-disk encryption.
-
Doesn’t freeze its regular releases for more than a year.
-
Supports a wide variety of hardware and aims to offer the latest kernel and drivers.
-
It is a large project.
Also, not that it matters much, but it has a strong stance towards open-source software, not allowing closed software in its repositories. Although closed software can be installed by using RPMFusion
I think Fedora finds a good balance that
- All components are OSS by default
- It’s super easy to install RPMFusion packages when needed
This was my immediate thought. It ticks all the boxes.
-
Notably openSUSE Tumbleweed is a distro that satisfies all requirements while not being named yet by others. Apart from it, only Arch and Fedora are worth mentioning as distros that also satisfy all requirements (as some others have already noted).
Those three crystallize more and more to be my favorite distros
(Have to try arch and Fedora yet, but what my friends have looks very good)
I’m of the opinion that systems and packages should be current and I find little to no merit in using a derived distro for myself. For this, the aforementioned three distros and NixOS are just plain superior over all the others IMO. NixOS was absent from my original comment due to how radically different it is compared to any other distro. But it’s definitely worth checking out if one is not scared of learning a thing or two.
😁i guess I’ll try nixOS on my current empty partition of my old iMac and see if the drivers work as well as they do with openSuse tumbleweed (they did very bad with manjaro and it killed itself twice in succession, lol)
NixOS is, if you can cope with a custom “config” language that you will have to use everywhere, your perfect fit.
Updates? Just switch to nixpkgs unstable
No x11? Just don’t install it
Encryption? Just use the config options
LTS? If you really want to, just stick to the fixed release channels and have a month of support after next release.
Hardware? Enormous hardware support range, although I don’t recommend you run it on a Raspberry pi 3b. (it almost exploded)
Preference towards larger projects? Ooooh yeah its a… gigantic project. And also not to mention nixpkgs is H U G E
LTS? Use the fixed release channels
NixOS doesn’t have LTS releases, the regular releases every six months get replaced by the next release and support stops a month later. So you still have to update every few months.
Ubuntu LTS in contrast promises up to 10 years of support for old LTS releases.
Thanks, corrected the post
Arch.
Maybe EndeavourOS (a convenient installer for Arch) with a desktop that supports Wayland.
I run that with Gnome in Wayland mode on my desktop and with Sway (Wayland equivalent of i3) on my laptop and I’ve been very happy with that. You could also run KDE if you prefer
NixOS seens to tick all the boxes
You’ve pretty much described Fedora Linux.
It’s updates are extremely stable with my record being 15 in-place upgrades without any issues.
Just pull the trigger on Arch.
I think you would get more suitable recommendations if you told us what your use cases are. Did someone else give you those requirements? Are you new to Linux?
Arch, Slackware current (KDE), Suse tumbleweed, Debian sid and Fedora tick all the boxes but I wouldn’t recommend Arch nor Slackware to someone who never used Linux before, nor I would recommend Debian sid for desktop usage (unless you know what you’re doing) because its packages are not controlled by their security team.
Free and open-source. Receives regular software and kernel updates.
All of them (desktop). The difference in updates is between a rolling release or non-rolling one.
Rolling means they receive updates to software and kernels continuously as soon as they are released, you always have the latest versions but that could lead to instabilities, non-rolling (or stable) are updated less frequently so are more stable, which one to choose depends on what you need to do with it.Avoids X11.
Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Slackware current, Debian, Arch, if you choose GNOME or KDE you’ll have Wayland as default AFAIK, probably others.
Supports full-disk encryption during installation. Doesn’t freeze regular releases for more than 1 year.
All of the above.
We recommend against “Long Term Support” or “stable” distro releases for desktop usage.
LTS is a version, not a distro. Distros that offer LTS versions also have a non-LTS ones, get those and you’re fine. Tho not wanting a stable is weird, they can be the best for desktop usage depending on what you need to do.
Supports a wide variety of hardware.
That depends on the kernel, all kernels support a wide variety of hardware, non-LTS versions are best for more modern hardware.
Preference towards larger projects.
All distros mentioned are large projects, Debian is probably the biggest, it also supports several different architectures.
I’ve already written another comment here. But I just noticed that you have edited OP’s text to include that you were new to Linux. Which changes the rules of the game so much so that a simple edit of my other post wouldn’t do it justice for the sake of visibility. Btw, perhaps you should have told us that earlier 😅.
So previously I had named Arch, Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed. These distros are still definitely worth the trouble. However, instead of Arch directly, you might wanna opt to an Arch-based distro. They often come with an installation that’s done through a GUI, which you might perhaps conceive as being more intuitive. Though, there are some that argue anything Arch-related is not suited for new users. Personally, I don’t buy into that. But there’s definitely some truth to it in the sense that other distros might be better suited for some new users. We don’t know what ‘type of new user’ you are, therefore we won’t be able to answer that for you. However, my gut feeling tells me that you’ve got some potential to start out with (an) Arch(-based distro) right out of the gate. Though, I’m not very confident (yet)😅.
With that out of the way, I think the following is important to note as well:
-
If you want to avoid X11, then you have to use Wayland. Which, in turn, implies that you’ve got to use either GNOME or KDE as your desktop environment. Unless, of course, you want to try out a tiling window manager (like Sway or Hyprland etc) right out of the gate as well. Which, again, doesn’t make it easier for you to start using Linux 😅. It’s definitely worth it eventually, but perhaps it’s better to not make it too hard on ourselves from the get-go. Coming back to GNOME and KDE, fortunately they’re very well-supported on the previously mentioned three distros. So you should be fine regardless. As to which of the two suits you best…? Well, that’s very personal. An oversimplified overview would be that GNOME is polished and ‘limited in regards to customization out-of-the-box’ while KDE allows you to customize to your heart’s content at the cost of polish. GNOME does have support for extensions that allows it to be easily customized beyond what KDE allows one. However, this comes -once again- at the cost of polish 😅. It’s best to make your own mind with this. Use both of them, and come to judge them yourself.
-
So I can’t but notice that you’re sensitive to your digital security (which is good thing 👍), but that you’d like your distro of choice to do the heavy lifting; which is totally fair. In that case, I would argue that Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed are better suited than Arch(-based distros), because they’re distros that take security very seriously. Heck, they’re the only popular ‘upstream’/‘independent’ distros that have managed to configure SELinux for use on their distros. On Fedora this is done by default regardless, while on openSUSE Tumbleweed it can be installed at a later point. (IIRC openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa (old MicroOS Desktop) shipped with SELinux by default, but the linked article suggests otherwise 🤔.) In contrast, while you can make it work on Arch, it’s not officially supported. AppArmor is still great though*.
-
If security is indeed important to you, have you perhaps considered using so-called ‘immutable’ distros? Btw, the name ‘immutable’ is not entirely correct as in most cases only some parts (mainly related to base system components) are read-only during runtime; changes to said base system components (through either installing/remove a package or upgrading) happens atomically and often times requires a (soft-)reboot to actually take effect. Some ‘immutable’ distros even manage to be reproducible and yet some actually manage to be declarative as well. The security-benefits for this can’t be overstated. If you’re interested in ‘immutable’ distros, then it’s worth mentioning that both Fedora and openSUSE offer them through Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea and Aeon/Kalpa(/Greybeard) respectively. The exact implementation of ‘immutability’ across Fedora’s and openSUSE’s offerings are different. However, I won’t go over that for the sake of brevity 😅.
Please feel free to inquire if you so desire!
What are your thoughts on openSUSE’s immutable stuff?
That’s perhaps a bit too open of a question to ask 😅. But I’ll give it a try:
I’ll assume the following:
- You asked specifically for the ‘immutable’ distros that are intended to be used on desktop. Which, moving forward will be referred to as ‘immutable’ desktops.
- You asked me to look at them in a ‘vacuum’, thus not comparing it to other ‘immutable’ desktops. Or at least, it shouldn’t be the primary focus.
So without further ado:
- Out of the earlier named ‘versions’, Aeon (GNOME version) is clearly the most polished and the only one I would actually recommend using. Regarding Kalpa (KDE version); just a few months ago its (then) most active maintainer had stated the following:
This, indeed, is quite worrisome 😅. Unfortunately, Greybeard (Sway version) is arguably even less production ready… So for starters, if you want to use any of openSUSE’s ‘immutable’ desktops, then you should definitely use openSUSE Aeon.
- Regarding the inner-workings of openSUSE’s immutable desktops: -though this is merely an oversimplification- one could understand it as openSUSE Tumbleweed’s model with some ‘extras’. With those extras being:
- The base system components of the currently running system is snapshot and copied
- Changes (be it installing/removing packages (natively) or upgrading base system components etc) are applied on the newly copied snapshot atomically; which means it either happens or doesn’t. There’s no in-between state, even with power outages and whatnot. Thus guaranteeing that a lot of the complexity with updating that would be found on traditional systems is removed. Btw, atomic updates is almost like a basic requirement with how prevalent it is on any distro that’s considered ‘immutable’.
- After the changes have been applied successfully, the copy is made read-only.
- Changes are then supposed to require a (soft-)reboot for them to take effect.
As this model is relatively ‘simple’ compared to other immutable distros and doesn’t seem a radical departure from traditional systems, one might expect a lot of things to ‘just continue working’. However, I’m not confident if that’s actually the case. Though, I’d love others to chime in and tell us their experiences. This more simple model does come at a ‘cost’ though; as it stands, this model is not declarative, nor is it reproducible. Which are qualities found on some other ‘immutable’ distros.
- The implementation of its release cycle, however, is a major win for openSUSE’s immutable desktops and probably the best reason for choosing it over the others. For years openSUSE has pioneered what a stable rolling release is supposed to look like with their Tumbleweed. And its immutable desktops continue to benefit of this. So while blendOS, Fedora (on Rawhide) and NixOS (on unstable) technically are other ‘immutable’ distros with rolling release cycles, one simply can’t deny that they’re inferior (in the rolling release aspect) compared to openSUSE’s immutable desktops.
- On a final note, I’ve often heard that openSUSE’s ‘immutable’ desktops have more ‘sane’ defaults compared to some of the others. Things like offering Firefox as a flatpak instead, shipping Distrobox by default or installing flatpaks not system-wide but per user etc. These might seem like little nitpicks, and arguably others might simply not agree with these choices. However, I agree that generally-speaking most users should prefer these defaults.
Please let me know in case you were expecting a different type of answer!
That was perfect! Thanks for sharing. 🙂
I myself haven’t used any of the immutable desktop offerings yet, but I do have some familiarity with openSUSE which was why I asked.
It does sound alot like they are taking time tested designs that have been in use in the datacenter & Infrastructure side within virtualization offerings for years & applying them to a desktop OS, which is very interesting.
That was perfect! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for your kind words. Much appreciated! 🙂
It does sound alot like they are taking time tested designs that have been in use in the datacenter & Infrastructure side within virtualization offerings for years
To be honest, I’m absolutely clueless on any of that 😂. So, unfortunately I don’t feel confident to talk about that. Would you be so kind to enlighten me?
-
Debian Unstable
Gentoo technically qualifies, but probably isn’t what you want for other reasons.
What’s wrong with Gentoo?
Nothing, since I use it myself. But it’s likely to be a massive shock to someone who was expecting a binary distro.
@luciferofastora @nyan I love me some gentoo. But the idea of eeking out significant speed improvements by compiling a very package from scratch is just not going to appeal to many people.
Understandable, yeah
I’d say Archl``inux
Foss
Bleeding edge updates
Only uses X11 if you install it (same for wayland)
Supports disk encryption
Cannot freeze regular releases as there is only one wich get constant updates (rolling release)
As stabel & LTS as you make it
Supports latest harware
Not quite sure what you mean with larger projects but arch is a minimal distro as in you have to install almost everything yourself
Hot take, Manjaro?
A scoldingly hot take.
clearly the hive mind seems to think my choice in distro is akin to eugenics!
Off-topic, but how long have you been using Manjaro? I am genuinely interested, btw*.
Man, um… not sure. I think I installed Manjaro in 2018 or 2019. nice thing about Linux and rolling updates is I have been on the same install and been updating that whole time. Even swapped to a bigger m.2 without any issues.
Thanks for answering!
Just to be clear; the ‘metrics’ on how popular Manjaro is compared to Arch and other Arch-based distros reveal to us that Manjaro has been going strong for quite some time. While the numbers of its adoption during its heyday were IMO completely justifiable. I think that -currently- it continues to stay more relevant than it otherwise would have any right of based on its merits. Which has been something that has caught my attention and made me curious to find out why that was the case.
Thus, if you had been a relatively newer user, then I would have loved to know what made you gravitate towards Manjaro in the first place. But, as you’ve been using it since before the controversies and
archinstall, I think your reasons to start using Manjaro were completely legit and the continued use of Manjaro is at least justifiable.Don’t get me wrong; I’m not in the “Manjaro is blatantly bad”-camp, I just think that it attracts more newer users than is desirable.
Interesting… I saw that there were some controversies but honestly if I avoided everything in my life over every little bit of bad press or disagreement I would have nothing left to eat and nowhere to live.
I am not sure why any distro that attracts new users is an issue considering we want Linux as a desktop to keep growing as it improves the lives of all having both more users, contributors, and devs building software.
The main reason I have stuck with Manjaro is that for the most part I dont have to mess with it. I have other computers I mess around with my main PC is where I go when I just want to surf the web, game, and just decompress.
I saw that there were some controversies but honestly if I avoided everything in my life over every little bit of bad press or disagreement I would have nothing left to eat and nowhere to live.
The choices we make and the actions we take mostly come with compromises anyway; just because it’s on topic: Manjaro probably continued to function as you were used to and thus you didn’t see any reason to change that which “just works”. Which, I somewhat alluded to in my earlier comment with:
the continued use of Manjaro is at least justifiable.
Moving on.
I am not sure why any distro that attracts new users is an issue considering we want Linux as a desktop to keep growing as it improves the lives of all having both more users, contributors, and devs building software.
That’s not what I said, nor what I implied. What you just said assumes/implies that people start using Linux because they want to try Manjaro, which is just simply not the case. You might have mistaken Manjaro for Valve’s Steam Deck. Perhaps this chart does a better job at conveying my thoughts. As you can see, the search “install Manjaro” has for a considerable period in the last 5 years been more than half times as often searched as “install Arch”. By comparison, it just dwarfs the hits for “install EndeavourOS” and “install Garuda”. That’s the problem. To put it onto perspective, I’ll follow it up with charts for Ubuntu with its popular derivatives and Debian with its popular derivatives. I tried doing the same for Fedora and openSUSE, but their respective graphs just showed me why their derivates aren’t talked about that often 😅. Even Nobara is absolutely dwarfed compared to Fedora.
I assume you do not use the AUR much then? Personally i tried Manjaro in the beginning and broke it in less then 2 months. Hat a ton of dependencies conflicts due to using AUR packages. installed arch and everything was fine. Now using tumbleweed just to switch things up a bit.
I use AUR sparingly for the reasons you describe. It has not been a perfect experience but its been good enough I have had it on my personal gaming machine, and both my kids computers for several years now. I really only use my personal machine for games and for that Manjaro has been fairly reliable, I have run into the credentials bug a few times but its fixable.
The overall stability has kept me from disto hopping and its been as close to a “it just works” experience I have ever had on linux.
