Oddbean

I’m going to make a concerted effort to move from Mac to Linux. I ran Debian way back in the day, so I’m comfortable with the tricky bits. Much has changed since. Should I go Fedora, Ubuntu, or embrace hard mode with Arch? #asknostr

I run pop daily. Ubuntu has the most hardware support out of the box. If I was going back to more straight Ubuntu, I'd rock mint again. I have no idea why you would want to make it harder on yourself.

If you're into doing sys admin type stuff, Fedora leans that direction. Debian is a great branch for "general all around computing" purposes. Arch is probably for people that are tired of using traditional distros. 😜 Last year I installed MX Linux (Debian based), and love it. It took a few days of tweaking after install, but that's because you can control most aspects of the UI.

IMO for easy to use distros Ubuntu has been surpassed by some of it's derivatives (Pop!, Mint). I daily drive Mint myself and it's extremely low maintenance. Another tip, if you're going "hard mode" with Arch you can use EndeavourOS - It has a live CD with a GUI install, so it's way easier to set up, But then post-install it's essentially the same as another Arch installation.

I am nothing of an expert but I have done a great deal of distro hopping and have come to learn that at the end of the day they really aren't all that different. I think a lot of it comes down to familiarity and how much you like to tinker. My personal experience with Fedora was not a great one because SELinux gave me grief, but I am fully willing to admit it is likely user error because I am a dumb dumb. Rather than trying to understand it or learn it or fix it, I bailed. I used Arch for many years. Reports of instability and difficulty are wildly exaggerated. It is my preferred Linux experience for command line only situations like personal servers especially. The AUR is a very powerful resource. I purchased a System76 machine last year, and have been daily driving PopOS ever since. It just works. I have never been a huge fan of Gnome, especially the Ubuntu brand of it, but I don't know. I just used Pop and haven't looked back. All that being said, Pop is working on their own DE built from the ground up, so it remains to be seen if Pop will continue to be good, but it looks promising. At the end of the day, it is Linux. If you don't like your DE use a different one. Don't let anyone tell you how to live your life.

No love for NixOS? :( I really like it, the ability to tweak and define actually working towards a repeatable build and being able to rollback if things go poorly. Great system IMHO and worth a look.

I've read up on NixOS. I *really* like the concept: elegant, bulletproof, and deterministic. However, I'm not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze for me. I don't plan to blow away my laptop and rebuild often, and I'll only be using this one machine. Maybe I can be convinced, still. 😉

Arch can be great if you configure it correctly and do some maintenance here and there. I've been running Arch for over 2 years just fine. But if you do not want to tinker that much, maybe try out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for a rolling release. Or the new pop os alpha with their cosmic DE if you are feeling adventurous, it is pretty good already. I wouldn't recommend Debian on the desktop, the packages are just too old for most of the things you want.

I am an advocate for NixOS, the most stable by a large margin, any package that you can think of. The learning curve is steep but it gives you fully reproducible system and it is fully delcrative, so your entire PC could be rebuilt from a github repo. It is docker on steroids as an operating system. If you need help let me know!

It’s definitely alluring for all the reasons you note, but it seems like a very steep grade to get from zero to a useful, utilitarian machine. Are there any configurators, bootstrap scripts, or the like?

I’ve encountered firmware/driver integration issues with various distros, except for Ubuntu. Given my focus on efficiency and minimizing downtime, Ubuntu remains my go-to choice, at least on my X1 ThinkPad. Time spent on troubleshooting is time lost from more critical development tasks. When you’ve mastered your craft, any distro should suffice, but you choose the tools that let you stay at the top of your game. Trying to look smart might cost you money.

of those i'd go for ubuntu, it uses the same package management as debian that you're used to, and great as a desktop distro (for servers stock debian is fine, but ubuntu tends to ship newer software and driver versions which is good for desktop use)

Ubuntu or PopOS. Software support for Debian based distros is just 50x better. I love Fedora and ran it for several years, but eventually gave up on it because I couldn’t get enough software I needed to work on it.