What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.
I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.
Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.
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OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
Up to date and stable. Best of both worlds.
For me, it’s Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it’s Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it’s always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it’s fast because it doesn’t enable many things by default, and it’s honestly been the most reliable distro I’ve ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.
I personally feel like Arch’s unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like
paru) and merge yourpacnews then you’ll likely have a rock solid system.Again, this is all just my opinion. It’s easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won’t recommend it to you, but I’ll happily say how much I’ve come to enjoy using it.
For me I find endeavoros to be the goat. I realized that when I install arch and then the “essentials” for me - I basically recreated what endeavor does. Except endeavor does it with like three clicks on the installer. So now I just install endeavor. Gnome, nvidia drivers, pacdiff and meld, text editor, yay, you get the idea…. No bloat, no bs, quick install with exactly what I would do manually with arch.
I also know this take is controversial-but I like flatpaks as well. Sometimes you gotta mess with flatseal, and sometimes the AUR package is clearly superior. But they usually get the job done well.
It’s nearly impossible to break arch if you use the AUR as little as possible AND read the arch homepage for manual steps BEFORE doing an upgrade.
I’m a long time Arch user (10 years) and I love EndeavourOS + Pamac (from Manjaro) as a simple install that I can easily maintain on family members computers or on our Laptop if I’m feeling lazy.
+1. Arch is super easy to install, just open the install guide on the wiki and do what it says.
It’s also really stable nowadays, I can’t actually remember the last time something broke.
As a counterpoint, on ubuntu I constantly had weird issues where the system would change something apparently on its own. Like the key repeat resetting every so often (I mean multiple times an hour), weirdness with graphic drivers, and so on.
That said, I also appreciate debian for server usage. Getting security updates only can be desirable for something that should be little more than an appliance. Doing a dist upgrade scares the shit out of me though, while on arch that’s not even close to a concern.
Arch at home debian on the server is a great experience
I started using Linux almost exactly 1 year ago and this is the conclusion I’ve come to. Although I do play around with nix on the server every couple of months, I’ll figure it out someday.
I agree. Arch really won me over with how they do things. Sometimes less is more.
- Not splitting packages as much means that I can compile pretty much any program without thinking about dependencies most of the time.
- Arch doesn’t autostart programs just because I downloaded them.
- While I’m not necessarily attached to having the latest and greatest of every package. There are often times where I do want the latest and greatest of some package and it was out of date on point release distributions. (Before someone comments flatpak. The most important collection of software I want up to date is the Desktop Environemnt and my Desktop Environment of choice is KDE Plasma.)
- Lastly, the pkgbuild format is dead simple and I have actually managed to roll my own packages compared to some other distros.
Sounds like you want EndeavourOS.
Installs in a few minutes to a fully configured and usable desktop environment of your choice. It is Arch ( uses the same packages, uses the same kernel, has access to the AUR ). A huge benefit of the Arch repos is the up-to-date package universe as well everything you are likely to want being in the repo or AUR.
Don’t underestimate the maintenance and reliability benefits of not having to cobble stuff together from multiple sources.
EndeavourOS was my 3rd repo and has been my go-to ever sense.
Fedora. Silverblue if you want even more stability.
For me atomic distributions are the way to go.
You get a rock solid base system that get updated automatically, and every single user has the same image so you can’t get into a bug that’s only reproduced on your system because of your combination of system packages. If for any reason you have a problem with an image update, you can always boot on the previous image from grub.
Then user apps come on top of that, and can’t break the base system.
I know you tried Kinoite and got stuck, but there is always a way to unblock yourself and install what you want. If it’s not in flatpak there is homebrew (for CLI), and if it’s in neither there is distrobox. You can also do a rpm-ostree for native packages if all the others fail.
You can also check universal blue, Aurora in particular if you want KDE. It’s based on Fedora Silverblue but with an improved out-of-the-box experience.
I have yet to successfully install the Private Internet Access client on Bazzite. It does a lot of system modification at runtime, which doesn’t play nice with the immutable system.
There’s definitely limitations like that one, so I’d say there’s a solution for most, but not all cases. Hopefully, that will become a non-issue when
bootcis fully ready.Private Internet Access
Can you simply get the OpenVPN or Wireguard details from in PIA, and then put them into Gnome/KDE’s built-in VPN app?
Like this: https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/kb/articles/where-can-i-find-your-ovpn-files
Will be something similar for Wireguard.
Yes and no. WireGuard configs are still not something they offer, despite customers asking for the last several years. They have often said they would do it, but they have yet to deliver on that promise.
OVPN configurations are an option, but the main benefit of the client is the ability to change tunnel configurations on the fly. If there’s something you want to change, such as connecting to a different endpoint, you have to go back to the website to configure that tunnel and generate the config.
So you basically get 40% of the service you pay for if you try to use PIA with an immutable distro like Bazzite (which is not the various distros’ faults).
I’m not sure how it works with PIA, but on Proton I can export multiple configs, let’s say 6 different ones with a combination of countries and other options.
Then I add them all into KDE and I can switch between them at will.
It’s a slight extra cost of time at the start, but after that it’s smooth and easy.
Their OVPN performance isn’t as good as WG, so it’s really just a backup solution in my mind.
But my main point is that there exist edge cases like that where “install it in a distrobox” isn’t a panacea. You either have to learn
podmanand how to forward your network traffic through the container or learn how to pack your own flatpak/appimage/RPM.
Private Internet Access is just a VPN?
I’ve had no issues installing the flatpak for ProtonVPN and using it.
Okay. There’s no flatpak for PIA’s client, so that doesn’t help me, and I don’t know how to create my own (not for lack of trying). Same deal with RPMs and Appimages.
Also, just FYI, the flatpak for ProtonVPN is unofficial, in case you weren’t aware. Make sure to double check the source files.
Just install wireguard and download a wireguard config file for PIA
Doesn’t exist. You’d think that after several years of customers asking, they’d have one.
NixOS. Declarative system management is just so unbelievably simple and reliable that I couldn’t ever see myself going back to a traditional Linux system.
NixOS is too different and poorly documented for me to call it the true goldilocks distro, but man am I loving it
I’m building a batteries included desktop OS based on NixOS. A bit like ZorinOS, ChromeOS or Mint but with NixOS as a base. It’s a bit ambitious and still in an early stage, but it’s been great fun for me using the Nix package manager as a solid tool to build stuff. Check it out at https://nixup.io/ or https://github.com/nixup-io/desk-os if you’re curious. Anyone with the nix package manager installed and flakes enabled can just execute
nix run github:nixup-up/desk-osto spin up a VM with a demo.
Fedora. Specifically I’ve been using Silverblue recently, very stable system for me.
If it wasn’t in the experimental stage I’d say openSUSE Slowroll.
Debian Stable + flatpaks. If I were to install it again, I would probably use spiral Linux.
I’ve moved to cachyOS, I’ve been getting into running local AI, and they offer an optional prebuilt SDK.
(with Debian I would have to install CUDA myself, which would cause issues on kernel updates)
love debian stable but ive veen wanting to try kicksecure
Maybe Fedora?
Personally, though, I’m a Debian guy - Testing on my desktop and stable with Flatpaks and a few backports on my laptop.
Popos for me. It’s my daily driver.
NixOS is super easy. It gets a bit complicated when you use flakes, but you don’t need to to start.
You just put the system packages into the configuration so you can replicate that system everywhere.
But if you don’t care, just install everything to the user profile! It just works like any distro then, no config files to mess with
The first power spike you will experience is actually setting up a service like Jellyfin by just editing the configuration.nix, though. It’s so much easier than having to mess with the configuration yourself (someone already did the work for you)
i love my void…
Eh, the way you phrased that I think it’s either fedora or opensuse. The up-to-date criteria basically knocks out everything with a fixed release cycle besides fedora which is pretty bleeding edge since they update certain things like kernel between releases.
Some criteria are non-sensical though imho. Ease of use? Speed? They are all the same, sure pacman works faster than zypper but it’s not like I’m waiting for either, they work in the background while I do stuff. As for ease of use … kde is kde, terminal is terminal. I think you would have to branch into the realm of the BSDs to get real differences there.
Debian is really solid, prefer it over any of its derivatives. You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part, ofc you’re going to have issues with a distro if you don’t know how to perform the most basic stuff. Stay far away from nix if kinoite gave you issues, with nix 90% of your pre-existing Linux knowledge will not only be useless but actively harmful.
Reading between the lines I think opensuse tumbleweed might work for you. Stable, powerful installer, very up to date and most of your pre-existing knowledge should transfer. Fedora is nice but you mentioned the magic word production, I don’t like fast cyclers in production, major version updates are a hassle at the best of times.
I really like the idea of Nix, but the fact that the learning curve is so high and the skillset isn’t really transferable keeps me away. Also, you can make your own declarative build using BlueBuild, the template provided by Universal Blue, Vanilla OS, etc., so its unique use case isn’t so unique anymore.
You being unable to install something in kinoite is just lack of research on your part,
OFC, That’s what I implied in my post. That I don’t want to tinker more than necessary. I’ve been doing Linux things since the 90s, installing from diskettes, spending hours and hours on the CLI, compiling shit on a 40Mhz 486… Right now I want something that mainly just works, mainly being the key word here. I don’t mind doing the odd tweak here and there, I just don’t want the tweaking to be a main feature.
Installing things on fedora atomic spins is hardly tinkering more than necessary. You either layer the package, install it in a distrobox, use something like homebrew that installs packages outside of /usr, use app images, nix package manager, docker/podman or a flatpak.
These things exist for a reason, because they complement many distros that would be otherwise lacking. They can add a new app to a stable Debian, a stable dev environment to a bleeding edge arch, an isolated environment to use a untrusted app. If you use Linux these days you should be aware of these distribution agnostic options, or you will have issues understanding what is even going on and limit yourself unnecessarily.
