Other major distros

[ColonelPanic232]

Fedora 39 has just come out and I'm thinking of giving it a go, having had good experiences with Fedora Rawhide in the past as well as distros based on Fedora such as Korora, Nobara and Ultramarine.

We've covered OpenSUSE and Debian Stable recently. Any thoughts about the other major Linux distros such as Arch, Slackware, Fedora etc.? Or even the BSDs?

Thanks in advance,

CP .

[geckolinux]

Hi there,

Arch is not my cup of tea. It requires too much time and effort to maintain the system, especially the non-stop updates that require the user's attention to specifically inspect update alerts before applying them, resolve conflicts, and occasionally fix breakage. This is completely inappropriate for newer Linux users, and even for a long-time user like myself it's very disruptive. For example, when I'm working on a long project (nothing software-related) I might have a ton of apps and windows open during the course of a week, and I'm not going to update anything to avoid breaking something. But if during that time period I need to install a new app, the Arch repos may have moved to a newer version of a core library like glibc since the last time I updated, and me installing just one app will upgrade a long chain of low-level dependencies and other apps that also depend on them, and it can even break the system if I do a partial upgrade and then forget about it and later reboot the system. Also Arch doesn't have some important apps in their repos, so that requires using the AUR, which is always a bit of a crapshoot and often compiles the software from source, which takes much longer than installing a binary package. Then updates for AUR packages are even more chaotic than the system package upgrades.

Slackware seems like more of a memoir of bygone computing paradigms than a pragmatic solution for getting work done. I maintain two Linux projects myself, but I ultimately just need my computer to work for getting other "real" work done without fussing about with the operating system.

Fedora has some positive aspects, specifically their good support for community spins with most of the major desktop environments available. But their update cadence feels like the worst of both worlds, support lifecycle too short for LTS installations, and yet not fully rolling either for users that really do want / need the latest versions. Fedora is on the cutting edge of Linux development, which often goes in a direction that I don't like, and they're usually the first to implement new stuff that is still unfinished while also being the first to jettison "old" but functional solutions. Plus I don't trust Redhat or IBM as far as I can throw them.

I really like and respect the BSDs for their insistence on technical correctness, and I'm extremely jealous of ZFS. But their hardware and software support is still too patchy, and it's not a pragmatic choice for my desktop computing needs. Even in the server space, for better or for worse most webapps have coalesced around Docker on Linux, and I don't have the time or skills to go against the grain and implement a custom solution for BSD even if it is technically the superior choice.

[ColonelPanic232]

Hi again,

Thanks for your very full reply to my question. In my experience of Fedora it's almost like Arch in that it requires very frequent updates involving heavy downloads - 800-900 MB is quite typical even if it's updated once a week, and I've had several over 1 GB - but once done the updates don't seem to break anything.

I agree about Arch too. I once had an Arch-based distro called ArchBang, which was great on my old computer with only 512 MB of RAM until I made the mistake of trying to update the whole thing at once and broke the installation completely. Manjaro tries to avoid this but limits what you can do with it (it stops you using AUR, if I remember rightly) in the interest of stability, so you're confined to its own repositories which aren't as extensive as Debian's.

Slackware; I've been told it's one of the best distros you can use if you want to learn about Linux, because it makes you do a lot of things the hard way. One of the first distros I used was Vector, which was based on Slackware but had a couple of extra tools added to it for ease of system maintenance and installing new programs. I liked it a lot but it but it went the way of a lot of distros over the years and no longer exists.

Salix is based on Slackware and is pretty good in my experience, as is Slackel (a Greek distro which is based on it), but in both cases, once you get outside the fairly small repositories you're reduced to compiling everything from source the Slackware way.

I'm not brave enough to try and install any of the BSDs on my hard drive although I used to use a GhostBSD DVD as a live disk and it worked well.

[Dani3I]

I am curious about Void Linux, NixOS and Alpine Linux.

• NixOS have hard learning curve but the fact that app can use specified version of library without conflicts looks great to me (which is kinda simmilar to gobolinux but gobolinux is cery rarely updated) and considering that nix package manager can be installed on almost any linux makes it alternatve to flatpaks or snaps. I wonder how will be looking "beginner friendly" SnowflakeOS based on nix (which is part of "snowfall") though.
• When it comes to Void I guess that Tumbleweed is more stable becase of automatic testing, although I didn't encountered any real problems with Void. I like runit and xbps for no particular reason. Also having possibility to use musl probably can be something that distinguishes it from other distros but idk much about it. There oficially is only xfce desktop, although there are ready to use scripts to make iso with other DE, or website called "voidbuilds" which adds some more useful packages.
• Alpine linux have only images based on musl but I guess main advantage would be small footprint. There is also distro called Adélie which uses the same package manager although it is not fork of alpine.