Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
Fedora for fun, OpenSUSE for work.
Kinoite user here - no urge to hop. Distrobox if I need something else
Don’t get comfy, I used to be fedora, then debian, then arch. Mint + Cinnamon is my final resting place.
I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
What sort of file manager crashes were you having?
Right mouse click, it was an intermittent issue and never did get to the bottom of it as the only forum posts I could find were from 10 years ago. Yes I know I could of used the keyboard shortcuts but my muscle memory is more mouse orientated than keyboard lol
Luckily for me, I switched from Cachy to Fedora kde right before the AUR attacks started happening. Fedora honestly feels like home to me now. I customized it to have a very Gnome like workflow, and its working flawlessly for me.
Why not fedora gnome? 🤔
Isnt gnome a bit more resource intensive? also like the option of more customization if i ever wanna change the layout or aesthetic.
You can customize gnome pretty far. The code to have normal human minimize/maximize/close buttons is all still there, and the window bar is there as well. You just have to know which programs to pull from dnf that know what
registrydconf settings to adjust. I have yet to find a use case for nautilus between Dolphin (KDE) and using a terminal.
I’ve recently had some issues with Fedora (KDE). After I install any update it tells me to restart to finish installing. So I restart and it still tells me the same thing. Probably time I distrohop again.
With the usual restriction of “either upstream or Mint, otherwise you’re doing it wrong”. There are 6 options. Ubuntu is obviously out. Arch is not my cup of tea. Fedora is already ruled out. Debian/Mint aren’t as secure as Fedora/OpenSUSE. That leaves me with going back to OpenSUSE Leap.
But the proprietary media codecs on OpenSUSE come from the AUR … looks like I’m out of options.
This might not be your issue, but I remember for me there’s this button in the tray that appears after all updates are downloaded. You click it and there’s an option to restart and update. If you just go to the main menu to restart, it doesn’t always show this “restart and update” option, and just restarts without installing the updates. Though even if you make this mistake you shouldn’t need to re-download the updates. Just go to KDE Discover and check for updates again, and the button will appear in the tray again. I think.
Also maybe you’d like the Fedora atomic distros, like Bazzite or Aurora. Unlike installing the updates during reboot, they install them in a “disabled state” while the system is running. Then you reboot and it automatically boots to the new version, no need to wait for any installation. What’s neat is that it’s really hard to break. Even if you pull the power while it’s installing updates, it will just use the previous version and try installing again. No risk of corruption.
What’s the security issue with Debian and Mint? Debian is usually my goto but I don’t want to expose myself to security issues
Linux in general is not secure for desktop users. There’s basically never sandboxing, and when there is it’s usually weak, antivirus is rarely used, and developers aren’t vetted as stringently as with paid software. Apparently Fedora and OpenSUSE take these issues more seriously, and SE Linux does somewhat restrict what malicious things a piece of software can do.
It’s a pretty widely held view that Fedora and OpenSUSE are more secure than Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch for desktop users but I’m not really an expert so I’m mostly retroactively justifying what I’ve heard second-hand.
You’re mostly right, but I disagree about the bit about paid software and vetted developers. Open source like Linux is also mostly developed by programmers hired by companies, so there’s no difference there. Proprietary software has also had problems with malicious developers and there’s less transparency there.
Desktop Linux so far was meant to be a fun general purpose computing experience for geeks. Throwing extra security layers on it evidently spoils some of that fun, you can see how Linux nerds react to things like Polkit, SELinux, Wayland or Flatpak. But PCs in general suck at security, they’re based on legacy tech from an era when cybersecurity wasn’t even a concept.
There’s also https://secureblue.dev/
I got fed up with Discover’s whole reboot-to-update thing and just disabled it.
Eventually, I ended up just disabling updates through discover altogether, I’d rather just use my little bash script anyways.
With LUKS the whole “reboot to update” thing is 1000 times as inconvenient. I set it to install updates immediately, and even automatically, but the update process just isn’t going great for me in a bunch of ways.
There’s a reason Qubes ships with fedora and Debian.
Fedora is a bit lighter weight, so I leave it as the default for most of my service VMs.
But my main workstations mostly use Debian. I find it has more software options.
Debian on my severs and workstation. My laptop is also Debian, though I have a Haiku partition that has been a lot of fun to play around with. It’s way, way better than the last time I tried it.
I’m on bazzite
Back to Fedora myself.
My path so far: Manjaro -> Arch -> Mint -> Fedora -> EndeavourOS -> OpenSUSE Tumbleweed -> Bazzite -> Fedora.
All distros on the list are brilliant in their own right, they just failed on my hardware in all variety of odd ways, or were simply too limited for what I want to do. Of all of them, Fedora was the least problematic in the long run, and with the snapshot experience I gained from OpenSUSE, I think I can manage it well now.
CachyOS anyone?
For gaming, oh yes. And enable snapshots so you can rollback to a working version if the latest update shits the bed.
My partner isn’t IT-literate but loves her CachyOS since it means not having to deal with Windows
Fedora (Silverblue in particular) was the end of my distro hopping journey too. It’s just so pleasant to use and it’s comfortably up to date. I also like its tendency to push newer technologies.
I just swapped over yesterday to Fedora from Ubuntu. It’s been a good experience so far! Except for installing nvidia drivers, still working on that
Why do distros make that so difficult?
# pacman -S nvidia # systemctl rebootGood to go. 🚀
Aaand now you have malware, courtesy of AUR. Enjoy :)
Pacman doesn’t fetch from the AUR.
Fedora doesn’t ship proprietary NVIDIA drivers in its official repos and doesn’t include 3rd party repos with proprietary software either. This is for licensing and I guess philosophical reasons. Arch has a different approach. That’s why.
Can’t you access those with RPM Fusion or something? Whenever I’m able to switch back to Linux I’d really want to start daily driving Fedora
Shouldn’t be difficult. Add the rpmfusion repo and install drivers (with akmods that handles everything when the driver / kernel updates). Instructions on the rpmfusion web site. After that, setup dnf-automatic and you’re done.
Debian for everything.
Debian for everything I need to not fall over, CachyOS for computers I want to fiddle with.
If you like to fiddle, I might suggest Arch. 😁 Hit me up if you want help with getting started!
Arch is great if you like downloading malicious software lol
CachyOS is Arch with a few tweaks, some of which are hard to do by yourself.
Fair enough. I thought it was one of those distros that you couldn’t change much once installed. My bad, if incorrect.
You probably think of Bazzite. Same gaming focus, but on immutable base, also very popular :)
No I was thinking of CachyOS, I just incorrectly thought it was immutable. 😊
Yeah, I tried pure Arch first, fucked up by not installing the right drivers for my old Nvidia card, and was never able to really get it running properly. So I gave up and tried CachyOS instead, on the basis that it’d probably get the drivers right for me. And it did.
I’d come with a word of caution then - while CachyOS automatically and conveniently installs with correct defaults, it is still a direct Arch derivative. Going forward, it will be just as easy to screw the system up and not know where to go next.
With that said, I strongly advise to learn to revert any change you can make to your system. The simplest way (assuming CachyOS installed root filesystem as btrfs) is to learn your way around snapper early on. Check tutorials on how to do it right on CachyOS.
With Snapper set up well, you can essentially undo any change. And this will be essential as you learn Arch (which CachyOS still really is).
Yes ! I don’t get why debian always seems to be forgotten distro outside of its server use. I have been running it for 2 years now (homelab, laptop and desktop).
debian always seems to be forgotten outside of its server use
Nah, not even for servers. SLSA and ISO27002. Validation in the other distros is better, and that’s night-and-day for server sector.
I worked Unix in 99-06 and there’s a reason their Linux offering wasn’t debian: that validation hole.
I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it’s installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.
First one is that it doesn’t have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren’t for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven’t been updated since Debian Buster days!
A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.
Honestly I think this is good. Debian should focus on making a strong base. Let downstream distros customize that UX.
Personally I recommend Mint DE
Beyond none of its branches actually satisfying my preferences, I feel like the way it handles major version upgrades is way too involved. I suppose it makes sense; it’s paying back the accumulated debt of a couple years worth of bliss…
Having said that, my experience on Fedora Atomic is (almost) equally blissful without requiring any of that whenever a major version update strikes.
Don’t get me wrong; I definitely do believe Debian has its uses on desktop Linux. But I can’t shake off the feeling that they’re definitely more niche compared to say Fedora.
The upgrade issue is exactly why I don’t like Debian-based distros for my desktop
Debian is nice & boring, but I have had issues with how old its kernel and software versions are. 6.12 isn’t too bad for Trixie, but previously it was really terrible. When I was running Bookworm, I ran into plenty of situations where software I was compiling or getting from outside the repos (for niche software), wasn’t backwards compatible to the library versions Debian provided.
No hate for Debian, but it just doesn’t work for a lot of people. However, these days I would go for Debian over Ubuntu 10 times out of 10.
That is a release engineering issue on the developers side in my opinion though no less real. Developers targeting Linux should target the current version of big LTS releases like debian and Redhat enterprise if they are serious about compatibility beyond “works on my system”
For the vast majority of computer users I’d says debian is fine since most users hardly step out of the browser these days.
Staying compatible with LTS releases should absolutely be the goal, but that takes work from both sides.
If Debian is applying backported patches to old software (I think the oldest version I saw was 6 years out of support) that generates a nightmare to support for package maintainers. If there are features which are not supported since the version is so old, but there are backported security patches which change the API, the developers would essentially have to maintain a specific version for each LTS distro’s specific set of patches, and the number of versions you have to maintain and the length of time you need to maintain them for quickly becomes impossible to manage.
Stable is nice, but you can have stability without being criminally outdated, as Trixie shows. The ideal is to have a stable and up to date distribution.
And yes, most users would be fine due to just being in the browser, but thats true of literally any OS or distro, not specific to this.
I’ve stuck with Debian on my server and EndeavourOS (Arch, btw) on my PC. Both have been rock solid.
