During the first impressions of said distro, what feature surprised you the most?
Endeavour OS
I’ve tried all the usual distros many times over the years but never an arch based distro until last year. I gave arch a go first and it was great but then tried endeavouros and it came with the fixes I needed and was more instantly good from the first boot. The AUR and arch wiki stuff just makes the whole experience most (sry to use this term) Windows like in terms of fixes and support.
Arch Linux. Many people said it is unstable and hard to setup. It turns out very stable as long as I update it frequently and AUR makes installing software easier. Even easier than ppa-based ubuntu as it will destroy your dependency if you are not careful. Lol.
Isn’t installing from the AUR equivalent to installing from a PPA, in terms of security and trust?
Almost. But with one key difference. PPAs are precompiled binaries where you cannot inspect the source - you have to trust the maintainer of the PPA. AUR is a repository of source packages which you can download and inspect yourself (or hope others have done this). This makes AUR more community focused than PPAs I feel. AUR is also a central repo managed by people that dont own the vast majority of the packages hosted on it and where packages can be taken down if found malicious. PPAs are lots of separate repositories all managed by different people that generally maintain all the packages for their PPA.
Though in both cases anyone can upload anything to them, so they are not 100% trustworthy. But I do think the way AUR works puts them ahead of PPAs.
there is one more thing - unless you are using something like chaotic aur, or a very popular package, please pay attention to PKGBUILDS. These are essentially bash scripts which can (depending on your package manager) will run with highest permissions. They can do anything
They also may not compile stuff from source, they can download and install binaries and some AUR packages do exactly that.
There’s zero guarantee when using AUR. It’s not supported by Arch for a reason.
Also you can’t just install these packages, you have to import the keyrings of any packages that access the kernel. That requires you to go to the website, check out the owner of the key, see their contributions and decide for yourself if you trust it
There no security and trust when it comes to 3rd-party repos. There can be anything in there. Neither the AUR nor PPAs come with any guarantees.
Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.
Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.
I heard all the stability concerns when I first started using it. That was in 2008. It’s been my main distro ever since. Apart from 2 or 3 major changes over the years (eg, the infamous /usr/lib migration) it’s been rock solid and very up to date
Arch Linux has by far the best community, the support wiki is the most useful wiki to Linux there is, it basically covers everything. Mad props to the arch Linux community.
Agree, but mad props to the Gentoo people too. Nice community and incredible wiki as well.
I second this - for some reasons, my (almost) first distro was arch (first was a fedora for 3-4 days). Arch is great if you know what you are doing, you can have a lean mean compute machine
Yeah I feel like even if arch is a little easier to break than other distributions, it’s also way way easier to fix which basically cancels it out.
NixOS. Not in a good way. I love the idea of configuring your entire system with a configuration file. However, on my laptop I couldn’t get the KDE live boot image to boot into the GUI. So, I tried the gnome live image, successfully, and used it to install KDE. I thought that I was in the clear but then sddm wasn’t working. I had to disable it to get nixos to boot into KDE.
I mean, I fixed it. But, with an intel APU from 2014, I haven’t had any problems with this laptop running Arch, Debian, Linux mint, or Fedora.
I, a systems guy, have a better time learning go than nix packages.
The lang is just rough for me for some reason. I use it as glorified pigs.txt atm instead of my single source of truth for my system.
I, a systems guy, have a better time learning go than nix packages.
Go is a simple and elegant imperative language (that does come with its downsides); Nix the DSL is a functional language which requires a different way of thinking. Systems usually are operated imperatively, so it’s normal that you’d find it easier.
It’s not an easy language at all and once night ask if another one wouldn’t do the job better, which is what Guix System kind of explores, but its design goals make a lot of sense.
Tails is easily the distro which surprised me the most. This is because, even tough I would rate myself a well aware privacy advocate, I didn’t expect to see a full suite of privacy tools. I somehow just expected, that it would be just the Tor Browser and nothing more. I don’t know what I thought tough. I need to mention, that Tails was one of my first distros I’ve used so I was kind of mindblown that all these tools could fit onto a USB Thumb drive.
Debian. Since so many distros are based of it I always thought of it to be a stripped down, minimal and basic distro, but after daily driving for a year now in suprised how feature complete and pleasent it is out of the box with kde DE.
Yeah, I tried a variety of Debian based distros to start my Linux journey and but eventually just settled on Debian stable and haven’t looked back.
Many have surprised me for different reasons.
The most recent that did is Alpine. I decided for some reason to install it for regular desktop use on an RPI400.
First surprise, the ISO was so small. Second surprise, everything installed so fast when I used the install scripts. Third surprise was the up-to-date repos. The final surprise was the community: it handled noob questions and complicated questions so we’ll, walked users through click by click and one command at a time. Awesome and totally an acceptable option for a desktop which is why I immediately installed it on my main laptop and used it for a number of months.
+1 for Alpine. I had my reservations due to their mistrust for glibc which rattled my GNU sensibilities, but musl is rock steady and all my apps feel stable and hackable.
Slackware. Turns out dependency resolution isn’t really an issue at all.
The package manager doesn’t need to do it cause it’s done by the distro’s maintainer.
Also, how easy it was to add FlatPak support.Any distro with KDE, when I was on Windows I thought Linux always looked like Gnome.
Gnome is a harmless though. It’s so benign it’s reliable.
KDE is glossy and featureful and sometimes my CPU fan doesn’t go down for whole hours because baloo is scanning my entire filesystem (including various conda installations) despite me repeatedly asking it not to.
I think it depends on how you use the OS, Gnome is great until you have a bunch of outdated extensions that break stuff. My impression is that KDE is better for the “advanced” use case and gnome is better for the “default”. I tried gnome recently and I found it very pleasant and easy to use but I prefer KDE since it has more customization.
Baloo only takes up a lot of CPU if you have it set to index file contents and hidden files. Shut those off, let it index completely, and it won’t happen ever again.
You might be able to keep “hidden files” on, but indexing file contents always bogged my laptop down.
I was surprised by how well Garuda KDE just… Works. Many users warned me to stay away from the smaller distros like Garuda but I’ve had zero issues after 6+ months of everyday use on 2 devices.
This is ancient history and will probably make me sound older than dirt but when Ubuntu first came out, it felt so easy to install and use. I don’t know that any of the innovations were wholly theirs as other distros were trying the same stuff. But it was the first distro I used that really tried to make it all easy and it felt like a complete OS.
Fedora Core was doing the same stuff and now, we have tons of tools but whether you like it today or not, the early Ubuntu releases were like, “Holy shit. I can partition from the Live CD? What is this witchcraft?” Debian obviously was the core project but little niceties were rare on Linux back then. I did want to install multimedia codecs when I was a teen. I did need guidance and documentation.
Not defending Snaps or whatever here but early Ubuntu was user-friendly and made it easy to transition off Windows ME or whatever was dominant and shitty back then.
A separate shoutout to Chrunchbang for customization and minimalism. That was probably the distro that got me hardcore hooked on Linux. I had enough experience at that point to not need hand holding but it was cool out of the box.
Ubuntu was very good, changed a lot of people’s perception of Linux, and made the user experience much nicer. It still is very good, but many have caught up, or are surpassing Ubuntu in user experience. The issue with Ubuntu is the progressive enshittification.
Mint is, so far, the un-enshittified Ubuntu alternative. Plus it’s main DEs. Cinnamon and MATE provide a fairly Windows like experience for those landing from the Windows world.
I remember mint being billed as essentially just that like a full ten years ago. I’m actually surprised to hear mint hasn’t been enshittified itself at this point, I just assumed that would have happened by now.
The only problem I have with Mint is that they are super conservative, which translates to stability, which in turn makes it less up todate in certain applications. While based on Ubuntu it un-shittifies by using flats instead of snaps, for example. I have not noticed any shennanigans like Ubuntus
Void Linux, very clean and fast on old hardware.
Void. Boots in 2 seconds to Xfce if not for udev. Maybe i’ll try mdev.
Fossapup 9.5 how fast yet compitent it is at what it can use. Loading into ram with just 300mb or so ram being used it’s blazing fast the newer the machine it runs on. It’s downside is it’s smaller community driven development being in need of consistant conversion of regular apps to it’s own puppy .sfs format which is needed to install them, if they had people churning new .sfs apps out all day every day of the year then eventually it would over-shadow many mainstream OS’s it’s just nitro level speed and stable to boot. It needs more love from the dev community to go that extra mile.
I tried Pop!_OS alpha1 with Cosmic Desktop and I even if the general software quality is still what you might expect from the first alpha release, I was impressed on the high-level design decisions they made with Cosmic. As a sway user who would like a bit more structure and hand-holding in my desktop, I think I’m gonna like Cosmic in a year’s time.
