it's a simple question - AOS for Lemmy.World - A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.

681238

it's a simple question

4mon 21d ago by lemmy.world/u/Agent641 in linuxmemes

I know you're not impressed that I use Ubuntu but it's not Windows, and I can't be bothered to learn a damn thing about how to operate a system.

If Ubuntu works for you then keep rocking it

I wish Linux distro devs would interview you about your experience. If the goal is wider adoption, we need to understand how to make it friendly for real. Your opinions are very valuable.

Switched to Mint recently and had 0 problems, took no effort to make the switch at all. I still have Windows if I need it, but why would I ever need it, Mint isn't all that different from Windows, but better

I used to use ubuntu but stopped bc i couldnt really game without dual booting to windows anyway.

Would you recommend ubuntu now? I know linux gaming is in a much better place, it just wasnt user friendly as an OS back in 2010

I switched from win 10 to bazzite the hardest part of the process was remembering my steam password and finding the setting in bios to boot to the usb. Ill never buy another windows pc again.
Luckily im forces to use win 11 at work./s

Its always fun to go from your smooth Linux work flow over the break, then back to windows for work.

No joke, last year. Day 1 back at work. Pop up notification about an adobe PDF subscription thing.

Currently running cachyOS and have almost no problem running games besides having nvidia 1060 3GB so just old hardware not for modern games. But I can probably run anything and what's not for Linux just use wine, that works much better now than I remember. Also I'm very much a noob that just can use a search engine.

There's no reason to choose Ubuntu over Debian these days, and plenty of reasons to use Debian over Ubuntu.
For context, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so most of the stuff under the hood is the same, but Ubuntu keeps forcing background decisions about things that are not always in the user's best interests.
As for user interface, if you're used to Ubuntu with Gnome, try Debian with Gnome. If Ubuntu with KDE, try Debian with KDE. That way you get a familiar desktop environment and a sensible base OS.

Could you translate this to stupid please

I'm no expert, but here's my working knowledge: If Debian is the engine/frame of the car, KDE and Gnome are different versions of the body/interior. KDE looks more like windows, Gnome looks more like macos or andriod maybe? Standard Ubuntu does aftermarket mods to Debian with Gnome.

That's pretty good.
I'm gonna piggyback your analogy:

Ubuntu is like an aftermarket car company that put in their own engine. They've started putting locks onto things, and when you ask them to install certain options, they say "yes, here you go" but secretly put in a worse version of that thing that only they can fix.
Then you take it to a shop and say "please fix this part, it's one of these" and they say "that's clearly not what's in here, you're on your own".

KDE and Gnome are like different consoles and steering wheel, if you could bring those with you into your next car. If you're used to where the buttons and knobs are, you have the option to bring the whole thing over into a different car.

So if im most used to windows i should try debian with the kde stuff? Whats wine in this metaphor? Is that the same thing as kde?

Okay so i do know what dual booting is. So wine is sorta like ezpz dual booting without having to restart my pc each time?

Ty for your patience

It's a "compatibility layer".
Wine tricks Windows programs into thinking they're running in Windows.
It sets up a fake C: drive and intercepts requests for built-in Windows features with Linux equivalents that are wearing Groucho Marx glasses and T-shirts that say NORMAL WINDOWS FEATURE.

I'd say Debian with KDE would perfectly fit your use case and level of experience.

Debian is your most basic Cheerio cereal. Cereal in a bowl with milk and a spoon. Ready for you to eat.

Ubuntu came along and is all that plus berries, bananas, sugar, and many other toppings. They also give you a fork and knife if you want to eat using those as well as a napkin.

If you like bananas on your Cheerios and nothing else, I mean, sure you can go with Ubuntu and get bananas on your Cheerios with milk and a bowl and spoon, but many people prefer to just go with Debian and then add bananas on top on their own because they don’t want everything else that comes with it. They may not hate it, it’s just going to be a waste of food to get all that extra stuff and have to remove it after the fact.

For some people that only want bananas, they’ll go with Ubuntu because adding bananas on your cereal involves opening the banana and using a knife to cut the banana into slices. Ubuntu may use a machine to cut your bananas into perfect, equal slices, so some people want to go with Ubuntu for those reasons, whether it be because they’ve done the legwork or because they did it in a way that is the most clean method whereas you doing it ended up with you needing to redo the process 3 times and now you have little bits of excess bananas from your past failed attempts and not doing the best job cleaning it up.

TL;DR: Ubuntu took Debian and added a bunch of stuff on top of it for their users. Some people like Ubuntu because of that and it makes it easier because Ubuntu included everything whereas some people want the source Debian because they will add their own stuff on their own the manual way.

I gamed on it when Proton magically made it so games I bought on Steam worked. Otherwise I just gamed on an Xbox before that. I only recently switched to popos, (still gaming on it). I started on Slackware 3.4 and switched to Ubuntu in 2006-2007. I think as long as you aren't on the LTS version, you should be good. In any case, it's not a permanent decision and seems like every distro is crazy fast at installing these days. Worth a go whatever you try or where ever you land.

I’m on Kubuntu and loving it. The most I’ve had to go for a game on steam is change a compatibility tool (literally right click and click a checkbox and dropdown). Final Fantasy XIV (MMO) was mostly straightforward, but I had very specific mods and 3rd party tools I wanted, but they all work still after going down a mostly straightforward rabbit hole. Not a lot of weirdness there, just learning how to mod on Linux.

Lubuntu brother reppin'

My poor 2011 laptop is begging for the sweet release of death, but not before Linux keeps performing CPR on it.

See? That's that I'm talking about. Good ol' red-blooded Linux user.

You’re not meant to operate the system. That’s what the operating system is for, silly

i thought it was to operate the computer

Shoots you and rolls you into the pit of bodies.

That's Linux and I say it counts :3

If Ubuntu works for you then that's good. Don't listen to the gatekeeping weenies who shit on people for not using arch or whatever. Most of them haven't built their os from source and are just roleplaying having a unix beard.

My university had the head of cyber security for a bank over to talk about pen testing, and one of the questions he got was "What Linux distro do you use at home." He said Ubuntu, because he wants a system that's stable and has support. If it works, it works.

insanely based

Add a 3rd Dimensions and you will find BSD chads laughing at us from their jail's

They should laugh. When I switched from FreeBSD to Linux felt it like such a downgrade.

Im curious what you felt was a downgreade. I think its much better designed but I feel it lacks so many more features vs modern Linux

I think it was the general lack of consistency. Everything felt a bit messy. This was almost 20 years ago and back then the BSDs had some features that were missing in Linux.

ah yeah that makes sense

i lub me some gentoo...

... but ...

K.I.S.S.

...?

Keep it simple, stupid!

Gentoo is many things.

KISS is none of them.

change it just works to "m'lady"

This is the most accurate chart I have seen so far; I can relate to all of them except NixOS, because I have tested it only briefly in a container.

I first settled on Ubuntu and than moved from that along the chart and I am know in the Debian phase for my main distro after ~10 years with Gentoo.

For others I recommend Fedora or Debian depending on their needs and skill. Arch has no place for me anymore. I can live with Ubuntu on servers, if someone else had it already installed, but I would never use it on a desktop. But Debian is a default on servers/VMs for me, too. And: I can see, why people choose rocky on servers. I am partly responsible for some rocky servers and they seem to behave nicely.

boot

open librewolf

open neovim

code my silly lil' Dreamcast stuff

close neovim

play quake arena

shutdown

What do you code for the Dreamcast?

I'm doing a small racing game inspired by Aerogauge(N64)

ATM its a proof-of-concept esque... demo... ish... thing, for the DreamDisc '25 jam But after the jam, do want to continue developing it and make it a full game

Dad energy. Debian + XFCE. Get off my lawn.

I’ve been considering this actually.

On my main pc, which I mostly use for gaming, I’m running CachyOS, which was great when I actually had time to play games, but I’ve got a kid now and just got promoted to manager so I don’t really have a lot of time these days. I have a second pc which is technically a laptop but the battery is completely gone (and it’s also somewhat old now) that I’ve been planning on using more for office-y stuff. I’ve currently got it running Mint but I’m heavily considering hopping to Debian.

I'm the kind of user that spends a whole weekend to fix a driver issue for an obscure 2000s sound card, then proceeds to erase the entire process from memory to repeat it from scratch on a new system next year.

I'm a Mint user, because I don't want to use Windows 11, and I realized that about 95% of what I was doing on Win10 was FOSS. The only thing I miss is Notepad++.

You could try Notepadqq, which is similar and runs natively on Linux

Edit: just learned this isn’t actively maintained anymore :/

Honestly, I think gedit might be the best play.

True, or Kate, definitely solid

I'm using Mint too, and have tried installing Notepadqq and Kate. Notepadqq just crashes immediately even with the fixes I found online.

Kate is really good, just be aware that the version in the Mint repo doesn't save the session automatically. It can save it, but only manually, and only for saved files. It doesn't recover files that haven't been saved yet like Notepad++ does.

That’s good to know, ty for the info. I’m a nvim guy so these reccs are from limited experience, i appreciate your firsthand knowledge

No worries 🙂

You should be able to use Notepad++ with Wine.

The only way I interact with Wine is through Bottles, honestly. It just doesn't seem worth the trouble to go through all that for a text editor.

Totally fair. I generally try to avoid it when I can. And it's pretty rare that I can't find a native Linux alternative that works for me.

It works, but it's a lot slower and clunkier. And looks worse. Probably could improve with some tweaking, but I don't use its special features and addons that much, and gedit works quite well for me.

I'm surprised it has that much impact. I try to avoid wine when I can, but when I have used it I haven't generally noticed it slowing anything down.

I have it running with Wine on LMDE6. Only thing that doesn't render properly are the individual document minimise/maximise/close buttons.

good time to go exploring others... e.g. emacs¹, neovim, mcedit (from mc (midnightcommander)), geany, kate, nano, or even go crazy and write your own (... no kidding. I did, last year. fin)

¹ probably best avoid emacs, unless you want it to take over your computing and your life.

Writing a good text editor is something to be proud of, so that's awesome!

I don't use any version of Commander on this machine, and I don't plan to. I used the original from Norton back in the day, but when Windows 3 hit, I used Norton Desktop to improve it (basically into what Win95 became), and never looked at a Commander interface again - if I want two side-by-side directories, I have a windowing system. I've tried emacs and vim briefly and they're well beyond what I'm ever looking for. geany is an option, but gedit seems to be doing the job. I've never heard of kate before this thread, I'll have to look it up. Never looked at nano, but I heard of it.

Based on the interface and what I've needed it for, gedit works, and so does Sublime Text. Honestly, Notepad++ was/is my third-most-used text editor on Windows, behind M$ Edit (I have FreeDOS Edit in DOSBox) and M$ Notepad (replaced with xed, except the .LOG function, which is sorely missed). Npp is the one I use for editing HTML/XML, Excel functions, the odd Excel macro; and subtitle files, transcripts, and scripts (where line numbers matter and I need fixed-length lines). FocusWriter is #4 on both OSes.

Writing a good text editor is something to be proud of, so that’s awesome!

Well, proud of my accomplishment as I am, ...

I never said it's good.

It's merely usable.

And even that may yet prove debatable. ;)

I don’t use any version of Commander on this machine, and I don’t plan to. I used the original from Norton back in the day, but when Windows 3 hit, I used Norton Desktop to improve it (basically into what Win95 became), and never looked at a Commander interface again - if I want two side-by-side directories, I have a windowing system.

First time I recall anyone responding to my suggestion of mcedit in a way that looks like they know what I'm talking about. :)

gedit seems to be doing the job. I’ve never heard of kate before this thread, I’ll have to look it up.

Kate is to KDE, like gedit is to GNOME. It's been a while since I used gedit, but Kate recently [(well, a couple years ago]) inspired me to add one of it's nice features (the minimap) to my emacs.

Never looked at nano, but I heard of it.

M$ Edit

Just remembered, there's now also M$'s edit (iirc that's the name "edit") available for windows, that's basically notepad for the terminal user interface.

My "fin"'s similar (and simpler ~ because I've yet to get back to padding out its [even basic] features), in that it also uses cua keybind model (ctrl+s = save, etc).

whats's a distro? :3 My UI looks like Windows 95 and i have cute cats in my terminal :3 i can text my friends, play games, surf the internet and do arts :3 what else does a girl need? :)

This is as it should be

I actually want this as a distro

Would I be immediately shot if the answer is FreeBSD?

Never! BSD bros are fellow comrades in arms against the corpos.

BSDs get too little love imho. They have more potential of becoming complete, usable and safe OSs than most Linux distros. Wish they would be discovered/talked about as much as Linux this past year.

solaris (and other foss os) users get even less

Some dev at my company uses BSD and its like insane Aura

Nope, BSD is perfectly respectable

It being libre is what matters

I'm a nightmare for any IT department and software developer. I know enough to do damage, but don't have the patience and knowledge to wield this power. I go around editing shit in random config files in order to "temporarily fix" an issue and then forget that I ever did it, slowly turning and system I touch into a ticking time bomb. This also combined with my unique ability to seemingly break any piece of software by merely interacting with it, especially on Linux, before I even had the chance to install anything. I've installed and used Linux on countless devices and haven't ever had a smooth ride, yet still I'm completely daily driving Linux at this point.

I use Arch by the way :3 (and Fedora, and Ubuntu, and Raspbian, and God knows what else)

Oh yeah, the classic "I can't wait for DNS changes, let me temporarily add the address and IP to the hosts file, it's faster".

@gerryflap Have you ever considered a career of a QA engineer?

@Agent641

Debian

Enough said.

Debian on my production servers, Arch Linux as my daily driver, Linux Mint on the devices I manage for normies.

Fedora on my servers, fedora as my daily driver, fedora on the devices I manage for normies.

fedora for when I want to hit print and see my networked printer automatically

Debian is my daily driver and for regular people I help. Comes with a service card saying "it will work and you will like it".

I help for free. If someone does not like it, they can pay to have what they want done. But they don't get to ask for help again.

Debian is solid as fuck, perfect for work computers, but I like tinkering with bleeding edge software on the AUR in my free time.

When a huge batch of laptops at my workplace that couldn't support Windows 11 stopped receiving updates, I switched them to Mint for a drop-in-replacement that wouldn't scare them too much. Now that they're used to it Debian is probably the next step.

same

Devuan seems more pure Debian.

Debian took a turn from a bad vote, and kept the name, while being a different thing.

Systemd makes perfect sense for Debian, its a stable OS and systemd is objectively stable (its also more usable and easier, additionally its what every other distro uses and has the most support)

Debian is an OS for everyone that anyone can install

its what every other distro uses

Nope.

https://sysdfree.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/363/

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?defaultinit=Not+systemd(424 results btw).

also

systemd is objectively stable

more stable than sysvinit (or runit or openrc or other init systems)?

more usable

not in my experience.

easier

not in my experience.

I would consider easier to be an OS that just supports standard scripts and doesn't require manually adding files to make sure that it installs properly

This seems circular and spurious...

... Or maybe I'm not getting some allusion you're making...? Can you elaborate on that?

You know, the kind that insists on using Arch, despite being slightly (or more) below the skill level one should have before using it.

Honestly the skill level for Arch is kinda overblown nowadays.

You can use Archinstall and get a full desktop and a pretty hands off experience if you don't go around tweaking any lower level system stuff.

And if you're extra lazy (like me) Endeavour or Cachy makes the minimal setup even more streamlined with good default settings. But you still get the AUR and fast updates, which I assume it what the average user wants more than complete control over how their system is setup.

It had an installer back in ~2009 as well.

It was removed for a few years because no one wanted to maintain it

Yes, you are mostly correct. In some sense, it is more a cultural thing. If your Arch breaks, the expectations for your ability to deal with it yourself are a bit higher. There are good instructions and people willing to help, but the latter (both inside and outside of Arch community, I think) may tell you that you shouldn't be using Arch if you don't meet their expectations.

Anyway, another aspect of it is the fact that with my system, I am a bit of a tinkerer.

And if you're extra desperate, there's always manjaro. But I love it. My hardware somehow works out of the box with them. Having the AUR is definitely a godsend for some things. One day I'll likely contribute something to it as a tiny tribute back.

Does anyone who installed arch using archinstall actually use the 'i use arch, btw' meme?

or any of a dozen or more other arch based respins, many with their own easy installers.

It's a bucket list item to someday have a pull request merged into a branch of the Linux kernel.

I was once the first to report a bug in the kernel. I'm still pretty proud of it.

Android 16

Ohhh, Google shot in the lungs

That's right! It goes in the Linux hole.

Believe it or not, immediate execution :3

Boot computer
Steam, emacs, evolution, newsflash, and web browser auto open
Check email
Check news
Cry
Go to dropout or nebula
Log onto Wurm Online/FFXIV/Whatever
Do something obnoxious in emacs that could probably be done elsewhere
Maybe tweak a config if it needs it. Haven't needed to in a year tbh.
Shut down
Realize I forgot to update
Say I'll do it tomorrow Like I'm on Arch but it's a computer. I do computery things on it. Write my silly little stories that would traumatize a therapist. Do obscene things in video games.

I got really into customizing my system for a while, but now that it works I just leave it be, mostly. Most recent major change was my update command now spits out a list of packages, so if I need to reinstall I can just shove that into pacman

Um, the POSIX kind?

Fedora, simple, consistent, versatile, up to date.

Right?

Servers - Debian

Daily driver - Fedora

I am certainly one of the Linux users that ever lived.

The kind that pretends he understands the terminal output before entering "Y" after pasting in a decade-old user script suggestion on stack exchange.

Well at least you're not entering "Yes, do as I say!"

lol ... i still cant believe LTT did that.

Ah, normal computer user then.

Linux Mint runs my laptop. I do some light 3d modeling and slicing, maybe a little photo editing. I guess that makes me a pretty casual user.

Someone legit talking about being a "casual linux user" brings, in the best of ways, a tear to my eye.

Almost 3 years and the only thing that has argued with me is Mint wouldn't talk to my ancient audio interface. When I feel like recording again I'll get a compliant one.

The kind who spends more time compiling than using my system.

You know gentoo has official binhost now?

Mint. Couldn't be arsed to have anything windows like at home, because I am tormented by win11 through my job.

So yeah, mint it is. Runs my slicer, 95% of my games and emby.

I am happy

I've yet to encounter a problem with mint I haven't been able to solve with some googling and chatgpt. I love it.

Runs... 95% of my games and emby.

Nice! Last year, I would have assumed this was hyperbole!

But I just setup Steam on my new gaming rig recently, and sure enough - at least according to Steam - I have better than 95% compatibility with Linux in my Steam Library.

I'm sure having a SteamDeck for a few years affected this %, of course.

I was Gentoo for a long time. I ran LFS for fun in college. I optimized and over optimized until every bit had purpose.

Now I use mint because kids take up all your time.

What are the kinds of Linux users?

Neckbeard
Transfem

Thanks.

I'm a neckbeard type of Linux user.

There are only 10 kinds.

Newbies
Gamers
Developers
Sys admin
Daemonologists
Marxist-Linux-Stallmanists
The NSA
Д̶̲̈́͛͂͒р̵̩̳̰͂̐͝у̵̖͕͠г̷̬̬̐͛́
Femboys and other Arch users
Hannah Montana

+Those who have backups, and those who will.

You're off by 1.

Those who understand binary and those who don't?

CachyOS based on Arch (btw). I'm somewhat of a noob power user and want the newest software because shiny. I'm not afraid to fuck up the install and start from scratch all over again because I've fucked up a dozen times already.

I'm these 2 kinds:

Cute queer nerd
Stallman-like privacy and libre software enthusiast and anti-capitalist

i use openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE btw (it just works)

Slackware.

I'm the kind that likes to build up a lightweight system instead of tearing down a featured one to get things where I want them to be. I also want to look like a hacker at all times because I find it funny. I don't actually use my computer all that much right now because I'm in school so it's basically a glorified browser that also has games, though I do some small side projects and manage a couple basic servers with it. I may have programmer socks that happen to be blue white and pink for no particular reason I just think the colors look neat

I use arch btw

I also want to look like a hacker at all times because I find it funny.

https://hackertyper.net/

^ & never need a second idiot on your keyboard again.

Not that much of a computer person, just switched because the hardware requisites for cities skylines listed for Linux were lower, but with time I really got into it, I love using and ricing Linux and I'm glad I got to skip all the w11 shitfuckstorm.

Still too lazy to learn arch, currently on LMDE.

So crazy that this guy built his career on being Matt Damon adjacent.

May have started that way, but he's legit a good actor in his own right

He's unsettling in all his roles and that's a mark of a good actor. If you feel uncomfortable just because they are present in the scene, then they are doing their job.

*Matt Daemon

finger on the trigger while not actively aiming at a target? this one is definitely a "run commands as root instead of using sudo" kinda linux user

Make life easy just run: chmod -R 777 /

This kills the alpm

My favorite OS is mint because I don't care about my OS beyond it running the programs I want it to run and it staying out of my way. Similarly my favorite car make is whatever I can buy used for the cheapest and my favorite body wash is the stuff I steal from hotels.

Mint is a noob distro. I'm a linux user for nearly 30 years. I run Mint (on my desktop), because I can't be arsed fixing something that works.

shrug Whatever doesn't have Snap. Currently Bazzite gaming rig, kinda want to move it to non-immutable fedora, trying Opensuse Tumbleweed on a laptop in an interest to de-US-ify my computers (1 part paranoia, 1 part fuck IBM).

Anybody not using Arch, by the way, must wear an arm band with the logo of their distro.

Windows users, hop in the truck!

*points gun at you

RECITE THE INSTALLATION GUIDE, NOW!

All I remember is not needing swap because I have 64GB of ram. Which is nice.

ANYONE CAUGHT FAILING TO INSTALL THEIR BOOTLOADER BEFORE REBOOTING WILL BE TERMINATED ON SITE!

arch users just get a tattoo on their face

That does sound like us.

I use Termux on android just to have some console experience.

I’m a NixOS and Sway person, with all my configs and theming set up reproducibly. I have so much confidence to experiment and tweak to my heart’s content when I can roll everything back at any time, or stand up a new system in minutes with the exact same configuration. I’m also mostly CLI based, nvim, ncspot, all of that fun stuff

Why is nobody saying opensuse... I'm afraid

's where I started, in 2003.

SuSe.

Very cushy.

Big love to YaST.

Distro: Void Linux
Filesystem: Btrfs
Display Server: Xorg
Desktop Manager: kde plasma

Hog: cranked

Pants: shidded

Thighs: high

Kernel: panicked

Luggable gaming rig: CachyOS
Surface Go 2: Mint
Old laptop strapped to the underside of the gaming table: Debian
NUC home server: Ubuntu Server
Steam Deck: SteamOS

Non-linux:

Gaming tower: Windows
Previous gaming tower repurposed as NAS: TrueNAS

That's crazy talk right there. After decades of who knows how many Linux distros, SunOS/Solaris, HPUX, AIX (and a splash of FreeBSD), the proper answer is this:

Mint
Already correct! >Mint
Mint
Mint - hardened if external
I'll allow it

Non-Linux

por que!? OOF... this should be Mint or really any Linux is better
I'll allow it, though I find OMV to be better for various reasons

Not gatekeeping - just having a bit of fun. You do you, but I found it crazy supporting so many distros after all these years. At some point you go for "works great out of the box with minimal tinkering" that covers like 99% of use cases and frees up your time. That being said I'm sure I have a system or two around here still running Ubuntu or Debian or whatever that I just can't be arsed to change.

I do like the dedication to Mint! To be honest it's generally my default pick if I need to slap Linux onto something. I actually tried putting it on the gaming table machine but for reasons I didn't feel like digging into it just did not cooperate, and Debian did.

CachyOS on the luggable gaming machine is mostly just because I hadn't used it before and wanted to give it a spin. So far so good.

As for the Windows machine, it's a gaming rig and at the time it was built, pre-steam deck, Linux wasn't quite yet in as good a position for that as it is now. I just can't be bothered to switch it mid-stream as it were. It's almost certainly going to be the last Windows machine I ever own though.

Totally get using others if something isn't working. I've been known to (gasp) throw on another distro to get past a problem until a new kernel release or bug fix comes in, but it's the rarity now. I gotta be honest that I'm surprised it was Debian which solved a corner case for your gaming table. Maybe it was a monitor issue or weird (old) hardware?

Good call on the final pass with Windows. With Steam, you really can't miss on hardly any game these days unless it's bloated with DRM, but who am I to speak - I have XBox that can actively spy on me for those DRMed games... Carry on.

Old hardware is certainly possible. I salvaged it from my parents who were going to throw it out. It's got an A10-8700P and is limping along with a single 4GB DIMM. The thing doesn't even have a second memory slot.

4GB? An embarassment of riches in today's market!

I'm the type to mess around with pipewire, break stuff, fix it, learn nothing from that and fuck it up again. I've got it doing what I want it to, and yet I wanna tinker around and probably mess it up again because I can't seem to really understand the docs or configuration files.

I'm the type to have two OS (Nobara, Ubuntu) on separate disks, then decide to rip the guts out of the second one (Ubuntu) and just use the disk for data storage (without reformatting) but keep forgetting to also delete the boot partition that no longer works anyway (because none of the system directories exist anymore) but occasionally UEFI randomly decides to boot it first and ends up with a fucked up and hopelessly confused GRUB.

I'm the type to put the second disk in fstab, then unplug it and wonder why boot is having issues loading the filesystem.

This is my primary system, so I'm just barely holding back from messing with the system itself, because I know I'll fuck up something and I'd rather still have a working system to either troubleshoot from or at least decide I'll postpone the unfucking and play Satisfactory instead to mess up my factory there.

I'll probably format my third disk again (currently Bazzite, which I never really fully set up to try at length) and try something new on there. Still haven't figured out how to make my GRUB add entries for other disk, but also, I really don't wanna touch my primary boot config.

I can't stop messing with things I don't properly understand, get impatient with trying to understand the Docu and just fly blind, with predictable results. I tell myself half the joy is in fixing it, because the second it works, I forget it all and get to figure it out again next time.

I'm the "incorrigible amateur" type.

I am still a chronic distro hopper.

I was a rabid distro-hopper, going through several large spools of CD & DVD, before switching to USB pendrives, for countless more distro-hopppings and distro-surfings.... until 2012, when I found Bedrock Linux (at its second alpha release). Didn't need to try to find the one distro any more, able to mix several.

Thanks! I’ll check it out on my next hop.

POV how it feels to ask for help with your Linux on a Linux community

I installed arch thinking it would be hard but worth it, and then I found out it's easier than I thought and now I'm having a bit of an existential crisis that I'm finding the "hard" distro to be easy.

there is only one "hard" distro and thats linux from scratch. Maybe nixOS due to lack of info and needing some time to get into the mindset of how nix does things.

Yep.

Many touted as hard, merely require a little reading and patience and following instructions.

Gentoo, GuixSD, CRUX, OpenBSD, KISS/Carbs, Joborun, DecibelLinux, Dragora, etc, aint so hard.

Exherbo though... Many times I've tried make it my daily driver, and failed.

LFS... It's hard getting through the tedium.

Ya, I think the information around arch's difficulty is still rubber banding slowly. It hasn't caught up with the times tbh. I run into some issues infrequently but like so did I on Windows. It's also almost always proportional to how much I mess with the system. My mom could run Arch today if she wanted to.

Arch Linux with the CachyOS repos.

I'd say a tinkerer, somewhat of a control freak, and i like the novelty of trying more obscure things. I really liked NixOS, but i didn't like the systemd part of it. Wanted to stick to Runit-only so went back to Void, but at this point i decided to try GNU Guix. Who knows, i might end up liking Shepherd better than Runit. I think Guix has to be the most obscure distro that i've played with so far. Luckily the documentation is great, cause the community is small so it might be tougher to find help from the community sometimes.

Nix

The future is now old man

Gentoo, OpenRC, BSPWM, Nvim, Librewolf, Ortholinear Keyboard.

I run whatever works for me. Been through most of the big variations (Debian, arch, rhel, suse), and a lot of flavours. Every once in a while I run into some issue. Sometimes I manage to fix it, and sometimes I end up reinstalling or distrohopping

Casual AF. I'm here to get shit done, not take any shit from my OS, not pay permanent rents to run my computers*, and do things my way. Protecting my privacy, fulfilling the promise of general purpose computing, and lack of DRM are just icing on the cake.

*Totally happy to donate on the regular to the open source apps I use!

EndeavourOS is home for me. 💜

I’ve been everywhere from a piecemeal Arch setup with a minimal desktop all the way to a Mint pleb. I’ve pretty much settled on EndeavourOS. It’s really impressed me with its dummy simple setup and OOB experience. Not to mention very few issues getting games to run even with an nVidia card.

sudo pacman -Syu

[No patch notes were read, zero idea what that update will do]

Are there options to choose from?

a few

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svgand more.

https://distrochooser.de/& https://distrowatch.com/search.phpcan help choose.

I appreciate the effort, but I meant for the question “what kind of Linux user are you?”

Ah. Heh. Same as gist as my reply to the OP.

Spent so long reading the other replies about kinds of distros the linux users use, that possibility escaped my attention.

EndeavourOS cause I wanted to instantly hop arch from windows but am also lazy 🦥

I just want shit to work. I want to use it as my daily driver so I can get work done, not waste time to get things working. I don't want my installation to become obsolete. I want a nice desktop. I want a lot of nerdy console stuff, but good UI as well, so I can choose the best of both worlds for each use case, so I can work efficiently. I want to play the occasional game.

At the moment, EndeavourOS ticks all those boxes for me. I am aware other distros do as well, CachyOS looks nice. But I'm only gonna switch if it's really worth the effort.

I want a distro that's hard to understand, hard to make work, hard to update and gives me superpowers like being able to move box to box by taking a file or two with me.

on the contrary it is easier to understand. you can just read what's going on in a system.

I grew up on Ubuntu (started on 4.10), moved to Kubuntu soon after and that was my daily until KDE 4.0 broke everything. I tried GNOME and XFCE but nothing really clicked for me. I got a job, I hated coming home to more sysadmin shenanigans and I moved to Windows.

Finally after I heard that the Steam Deck and Proton working great, and after years of Windows doing bullshit constantly, I came back to Linux. This time Linux Mint because I've been told it's easy to use and has lots of support. I had trouble with the initial setup (Nvidia drivers not working with Safe Boot enabled, it took me two weeks to figure it out) but since then everything has been super smooth.

Anyway don't shoot me, I have kids, they love GCompris and SuperTux!

I rice'd Gnome and now dont mess with my computer (I got a job :sadge:)

I'm a boring stable enough guy, which is why I like the distro on my laptop. Also, somewhat of an aesthetics person, so same goes for my KDE set up on that laptop.

Also the type to not like Cinnamon for the lack of customization compared to KDE.

I have no idea what I'm doing, but also not enough fear to be careful. Running Bazzite is for my own good.

WSL

Bazzite on my gaming PC, CachyOS on another.

Both systems are amazing! Bazzite, in particular, lets you easily install apps from almost any distribution using Distrobox. Want to install an app that's only available in the Arch AUR? No problem!

Nobara because I play games

I might try that one. I'm currently on pop os

PikaOS. I have surfed around enough to know this is made for me. It's Debian Unstable based and carries optimized builds in their own repo via a package manager that also wraps around apx, and their own tool for firmware, switching the scheduling and well, enough said

I tried Ubuntu, Mint, CachyOS, PopOS, Manjaro, Bazzite and Nobara. I stuck with Nobara.

All of the above. Since you know all commands on apt, dnf or pacman ~~the sky~~ nix is the limit.

"All of the above" = BedrockLinux ?

... "Since you know all commands"

Okay, tbh, never heard about it.

It's not for everyone.

Takes a fair bit of reading to understand.

Makes file paths longer.

Likely requires already knowing several distros.

Yeah, reading the introduction-page actually, and got the joke now. Meta-Linux, building a system with components from all. Interesting but to much hassle. If I need something from a different distro there are tools like distrobox.

If I need something from a different distro there are tools like distrobox.

Yeah. I've never really bothered with distrobox, having already been using bedrock since 2012.

Interesting but to much hassle.

In many ways, bedrock makes things less hassle.

It's quite a joy being able to "install" ("fetch") many distros with one command.
Easiest way I know to install gentoo. sudo brl fetch gentoo. And can take ones time configuring it, already being in the comfort of whatever other strata already hijacked and fetched. Much less hassle than the rigmarole of a proper stage3 install following the handbook. It's sorta like you get to choose your favourite installer of whichever distro, as a way to install gentoo. (On this computer, for a change I tried MXLinux to hijack, and fetched gentoo (and artix and void). On the computer to my left, I installed AntiX, and fetched gentoo (and artix and void)).
If something goes catastrophically wrong with one strata, there are others to fall back on. Very robust. Spares a lot of hassle. Gives a lot of leeway to go meddling with things. :)
Various fixed release distros, can be upgraded by fetching (or importing) the new, aside the old, sparing further potential hassles of in-place dist-upgrades, and certainly less hassle than complete make backup, wipe, reboot, reinstall, reboot, restore backup.
No need to wrestle packaging difficulties of one distro, when something's available from another, and it all "just works" together with the other distros (like the website gives several examples of).
And many more examples.

But yeah, in some ways it's adding hassles too. Gains and losses.

I use Arch in my main home server that I use for AI, and Debian Armbian in my Radxa SoC (NFS). Laptop is also Arch.

Ubuntu on WSL2

I'd love to go full Nobara, if all my peripherials worked properly.

Proxmox on my server Fedora on my workstation and Arch on my Surface 4 Pro.

Mein Moms Laptop Linux Mint My old laptop, Linux Mint. Some old laptop for testing, Linux Mint.

The kind to question all the weird noises from upstairs

I use Alpine Linux with Sway as my daily driver for browsing, writing scripts and to slowly customize my own work environment.

I have a Linux Mint DE partition that launchs directly to Steam for gaming. Tried Bazzite but the installer failed to find my SSD.

I also have a small partition that has an image of the LMDE .iso. It saves me from needing to grab a USB drive for when I inevitably fuck up the first two partitions and need a live USB environment to fix things.

I keep all my backups, music, work and sensitive data in a separate partition that's encrypted so I can easily get back to work after any fuck ups. I've had of practice fixing my own fuck ups over the past year.

gentoo kind, with sprinkles of slackware and devuan

Try a dash of voidlinux too.