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chevy9294 @monero.town

Distro for experienced Linux user

Hi, I'm looking for a distro for my laptop. My first distro was Pop!_OS, then I switched to Fedora, then Arch for a year and 2 months ago I switched to Fedora Silverblue, because I wanted to try immutable distro that relies on containers and flatpaks to be usefull. Silverblue is great but not so much for me, its not flexible enough.

I'm thinking of switching to Arch but maybe it's time for something else. Maybe NixOS or Void, Gentoo probably not, I don't have time for compiling everything. What do you recommend?

It must support full disk encryption, secure boot with signing with YOUR OWN KEYS, systemd (because of MullvadVPN), everything else I think can work on any distro (Gnome, podman, kvm, etc.).

70 comments

  • You want immutable distros but Silverblue wasn't flexible enough? Why not try NixOS? It's really nice.

    I've been using it for two years and I love being able to make changes to my config and having those changes apply to all my computers. It's also basically unbreakable, if my computer explodes I can just reinstall NixOS with my config files and it will instantly be set up exactly how I want it.

  • The one thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more experience you have with Linux, the less you rely on preconfigured distributions. Find a stable minimal install and build up your own set of base packages, DE, configs, etc.

    Only you know your habits and needs and experience is how you narrow down the field.

    For me personally, I have found my groove in a minimal Debian install with a first run setup script or two that is repeatable and automatable so I can start with a known quantity for any applicable need I have.

  • I prefer doing useful things with my workstation vs playing with the OS itself, so mint cinnamon is my recommendation. Servers are ansible-managed alma. Professionally I'm a Linux systems architect and devops engineer.

  • There are a few options. Like many have mentioned, Nix OS is a wonderful distro with it's own quirks.

    If you are looking for something normal, consider Opensuse Tumbleweed and arch linux (or arch based distros like EndavourOS).

  • Vanilla OS 2 Orchid sounds very interesting, I think. It's in alpha now. Have a read about their package manager - it's kinda meta, allowing you to use other package managers in parallel.

  • All distros are exactly the same. Theres no such thing as a "distro for experienced users". With that said, just do a minimal install of (pretty much anything you want).

    • Different distros have different limitations and advantages but there are usually good reasons for these things. For example, Debian strives for stability, but that also means fairly old packages. Some other distro might not have a very wide selection of apps in the repos, but it might have some other areas where it excels. As long as you agree with these sorts of design decisions, it should be a good distro for you.

      You don't even have to like the default DE or any other package related decision that comes with the default image. Maybe there's a bare bones image that allows you to build your OS which ever way you like, and install only the packages you really need. in this regard, every distribution can be made more or less similar, but your decisions won't change what is or isn't in the repositories or how the devs make their decisions.

      For a lot of people, the default image is the one they'll use. In that regard, every distribution is different, but can still be made similar if you put the time and effort into it. Some people prefer to have this and that preinstalled, while other people want something else to work out of the box. With these sorts of decisions in mind, there are huge differences between distros.

70 comments