Hey folks! I’m getting a fresh laptop for the first time in about a decade (Framework 16) in a couple of months and am looking forward to doing some low-level tinkering both on the OS and hardware. I’m planning to convert into a “cyberdeck” with quick-release hinges for the screen since I usually use an HMD, built-in breadboard, and other hardware hacking fun.
On the OS, I’m planning to try NixOS as a baremetal hypervisor (KVM/QEMU) and run my “primary” OSes in VMs with hardware passthrough. If perf is horrible, I’ll probably switch back to baremetal after a bit. But, I’m not likely going to be gaming on it so, I’m not likely to have much issue.
Once the hypervisor is working in a manner that I like, I should have an easy time backing up, rolling back, swapping out my “desktop” OS. I’ve been using Linux as my pretty much my only OS for over a decade (I use MacOS as a glorified SSH client for work). Most of my time has been on distros in the Debian or RHEL families (*buntu, Linux Mint, Crunchbang, CentOS, etc) and I pretty much live in the terminal these days.
With all of this said, I am coming to you folks for help. I would like you folks to share distros, desktop environments, window managers that you think I should give a try, or would like to inflict on me and what makes them noteworthy.
I can’t guarantee that I’ll get through suggestions, as my ADHD has been playing up lately, but I’ll give it an attempt. Seriously. If you want me to try Hannah Montana Linux, I’ll do it and report back on the experience.
LFS. At least once.
This is the next step after maining gentoo 😂
Garuda might be worth a try. I used it for a couple months and really enjoyed it, I only stopped because Nvidia drivers kept breaking.
I’m going to be on an AMD CPU and didn’t opt for the discrete GPU at this time, nor will I be purchasing an Nvidia device until they start being consistently FOSS-friendly.
Yeah, I unfortunately didn’t know about the “Nvidia hates Linux” thing when I bought this laptop. I guess I know better for next time.
Oof. Yeah. Years ago, it was the other way around.
TempleOS
You know what? Yeah. I’ve wanted to try that product of schizophrenic mania for a while.
Forget a DE, sounds like you need a WM. Definitely check out some tiling options like i3 or sway, especially since you spend so much time in the terminal.
Some great newer tech distros would be Fedora Silverblue, or if you like Debian, there is VanillaOS. They are immutable distros, and they introduce a new way of using Linux. I like to pair it with distrobox, which lets you use regular Linux applications in a container.
My #1 distro recommendation would be Fedora Atomic (immutable Fedora variants).
It’s still a bit “underground” and hasn’t reached huge popularity yet, but I see its potential that it will very soon.
I have ADHD too and Fedora Atomic is a lifesaver. Why?
- You can “distrohop” anytime you want by rebasing. With that, you basically swap out the OS with something else (examples will follow), but keep your data and some settings. If you are on Fedora Workstation (Gnome) and want to have KDE, installing and removing those packages is a huge huge mess. On the OSTree variant, it’s just one command, 5 minutes of waiting, and bam, you have a clean install. I do that all the time.
- Less bugs and better security by reproducibility. Every install is the same.
- Very quick rollbacks if something did go wrong. You can’t brick your OS, which I did a lot before.
- Huge choice. See at universal-blue.org , it provides vanilla images with some quality of life changes, as well as custom ones, including “unsupported” DEs and spins, e.g. a gaming distro. They aren’t forks per se, they are basically build scripts and maintain themselves, which is why they’re always up to date and way better than Nobara for example.
- Distrobox pre-installed: you can just create an Arch container and use the AUR from it. So you don’t need to run (and troubleshoot) Arch on bare metal, but can comfortably benefit from all great things Arch provides
if you’re looking for an original distro, you should try void. it’s super lightweight. i used to keep away from gentoo because it was a source only distro, i would otherwise go fulltime on it, but now that it also has binary compatibility you should check that out, too.
as for wm, i love wayfire as a floating wm, and sway as a tiling wm.
Coreboot. As low level as you probably get. Embedded secure element OS maybe
I do intend to dig deeper into OSHW and eventually build a modern, fully open-source laptop eventually but, we’ll see if I can get there within the decade. Coreboot/Libreboot would definitely make the mainboard implementation a lot easier. Hopefully, Framework gets around to Coreboot support.
Cool. There are definetly companies working on that, so its just a matter of getting stuff to work, like Battery life etc.
- Chromebooks (hardware is shit and often unrepairable and un-upgradeable)
- Novacustom / System76 / Nitrokey using 3mdeb Dasharo
- starlabs
Framework tried it afaik, but it gave problems. But then they should fix them…
If you are an advanced linux user then I would suggest giving a try to the following distros: arch, void, gentoo and (like you said in the post) nixOS.
The reason behind is that this distros are focused on the tinkering aspect of linux, the experience of setting up everything the way you want.
If you want to give a shot to WMs I would suggest i3, sway, dwm, dwl, river, bspwm, Qtile and hyperland (maybe focus more on the Wayland ones if you want to try the latest software).
Every linux enthusiast should try Qubes at least once. The architecture is totally different, vastly more secure in many ways than most Linux distros. It’s definitely not for everybody, but if privacy and security rank high on your priority list it’s worth a look. It never ends up in Linux top ten lists for some reason, but it’s an incredible OS.
I’m slightly biased, but if you already know a bit of Linux and desire more control / customisation, or want to understand how a system is put together, then I highly recommend Gentoo Linux. The install process is pretty simple, and with the new binary package hosts you have the option of quickly installing precompiled packages to get a system installed or up-to-date.
The
USEflags on packages, combined with portage the package manage enable an unparalleled level of configurability, the community is welcoming and respect user choice about how they want to configure / use their system, and the documentation on the wiki is top notch - I’d say better than the arch wiki in terms of quality overall.Yeah. Gentoo has been on my list for a while. I’m pretty comfortable building things from source (don’t even bother with packages for Neovim these days - they never seem up to date for my distro). Curious to see the workflows.
Chiming in to also recommend Gentoo. It’s a pretty stable rolling release distro, with access to pretty new packages when necessary.
If you still want Gentoo, but you are human who don’t have infitive amount of time - Arch would do.
Or try Gentoo’s new binary repo.
why though? what is. the point of gentoo than
Why not? Best of all worlds. Convenience of a binary package repo along with the benefits of still being able to use portage and use flags for packages where the default build doesn’t meet your needs.
you can build from source on any distro though
You typically cannot have the package manager handle, track, and manage all of that for you though. Especially not USE flags / toggling package features
oh I didn’t know that the gentoo package manager could do that, that answers my question
Choice. Customisation. Building from source is a means to an end, not an end itself.
You obviously missed the part where I discussed the option to use the binary package repository and mix and match binary and from-source packages.
I wouldn’t recommend specific ones, but I would recomnend you try out distros with unique features. Such as an immutable one, one that is built from source, one with packages, one with snap, one with flatpack, etc.
This will help you understand and evaluate what you like.
One neat little distro is bedrock linux. Its pretty sweet being able to grab packages from the aur on something like Debian.
We just had a post about Distrobox earlier today. It gives you the same funstionality on any distro.
|Original | free version to try|
|Debian|PureOS|
|Ubuntu|Trisquel|
| | Guix |
i don’t think lemmy markdown supports tables, though it should
edit: lemmy uses commonmark which doesn’t appear to support tables
