Good friend

I would never criticise someone’s distro. As long as it was arch built without any scripts.
- This pleb didn't even write his own kernel.
- If you don't use Linux From Scratch, why do you even bother?
  
  I actually want to try a LFS install, mostly to gain a deeper understanding of how Linux works. To anyone who's done an LFS install: good idea or waste of time?
  
  I'd rather be waterboarded
- Just did that for the first time today and the second, third and ,fourth time aswell

Ahh yes, Good Guy Greg. Just like the good old days, I'm loving the nostalgia of these vintage memes.
- bro in a world of scumbag steves it feels good to see a ggg
- Yeah, Lemmy right now reminds me a bit of that era of the internet. It's strangley nostalgic.
- I was about to post the same. Good guy Greg was cool.

Distros are like Kinks. I have my own and you have yours, I won't judge.
- Except for Manjaro with their expired certs and DDoSing AUR. Or niche remixes that don't patch stuff and don't have a warning saying that our stuff is old, don't use it if you care about that.
- Best Linux analogy I’ve read in a long time.

I will, however, warn them about Manjaro, fuck it.
- I've seen many comments about Manjaro, what's the deal with it? I used it shortly a few years ago but I didn't liked it
  
  My wife and I haven't had any issues with it, they're just easy to paint as the bad distro because it's supposed to uncomplicate Arch for your average user, but has had some certs fall through the cracks and they had kind of an asshole response to address it (thank God Gnome and Linux devs are never contentious folks), and apparently people don't read the warnings about enabling AUR in the package manager. Don't get me wrong, it's not the perfect distro, but it doesn't deserve nearly as much hate as it gets. It's not Canonical, pushing Amazon and telemetry by default 😆 besides, it's got some cool features out of the box like one of the better default dualboot grubs I've seen by default, the ability to have multiple kernels installed simultaneously from multiple streams, and while it's common anymore, was one of the early adopters of providing Nvidia drivers on install. Lots of people have strong opinions on what distro is best, and Manjaro manages to be an easy one to point fingers at.
  
  Manjaro piggybacks off of Arch and some Arch users want to be obnoxious about it.
  There's nothing wrong with the distro, itself.
  The maintainers have done some inconsequential noob-ish things with the site's website, and the in-house package manager (pamac) had a bug that took down the AUR once and Arch users that couldn't host their own website if they wanted to like to point fingers and troll.
  
  here
- What's wrong with manjaro?
  
  Mostly the admins. They've forgotten to renew their SSL certs multiple times, causing various issues, and they introduced a bug that briefly DDOSed the entire AUR.
  The distro itself seems fine. Although, I don't see why you wouldn't just use Arch with Archinstall or EndeavorOS if you really want that GUI installer. Both are much better managed imo.
  
  This is often linked. It's basically just bad management, bad tools and much worse it is holding back security updates.

Everytime I mention Linux in the outside world, people's brains freeze and then I get questions. I need a better social circle.

I know enough about Linux to be able to install most distros and use them, but I don't know enough about them to criticizes others for their choice.

I use Arch btw.
- How do you know when someone is a ~~vegan~~ Arch user?
  
  Iusearchlinux.fyi
  There's HUNDREDS of us! HUNDREDS!
- Just read the news feed, folks
  
  I thought Lemmy was another excuse to never do research on my own. Please explain so I don't have to leave Lemmy

Amogos is the best just saying🙄
- sus
- AmongOS is dead 😭😭😭

I swear that when I was a student, my department had a good mix of distros.
Most students were on Ubuntu and Mint VMs.
Students in system or HPC labs had to learn CentOS. However, my entry condition to my lab was to install FreeBSD as a guest on VMWare ESXi. Everything must be specifically partitioned and must be done in one sitting. (This happened illegally in the server room. I could not exit and hope to reenter, hence the rule.)
Enthusiasts learn Debian.
I don't know what happened to SlackWare people.
Kids these days? WSL or Mac.
- To be fair, installing MacOS on a PC is harder than most Linux distros.
- To be fair, installing MacOS on a PC is harder than most Linux distros.
  
  MacOS on an FX-8350 (pre-OpenCore), with nvidia graphics was legitimately one of the most difficult and unpleasant projects I have ever undertaken in all my years of stupid projects, worse than the time I managed to fuck up fstab so badly I turned 6 drives into 6,000+ drives.
- Is Slackware even still around?
  I'm in the WSL camp at home, and Red Hat at work
  
  Yes, it's being mantained pretty actively
  
  Slackware 15 came out like late last year/early this year. I want to try it tbh (religious reasons), only really used Fedora so far.

i'm about to take my first peek into linux on mint. i'm not completely put off learning some new things but being able to do that in a desktop that is familar makes everything a lot easier to pick up on. who knows, if it all goes smoothly maybe next week i'll be running arch (i won't)
- Mint is honestly the best one to go for really especially since everything just works there almost.
  
  just works "almost" is pretty funny but i know what you mean. i wasn't having much trouble with it testing it with a virtual machine. the nice thing is a lot of the applications i use on windows are already free software that im realizing are a lot of the go to's for people running linux, so really a lot should "just work"
  
  Yeah, was my first that didn't crash during install, really enjoyed it
- Using Mint right now, started off with Kubuntu but decided to stick with the Gnome desktop environment for a bit, at least until KDE works out some of its kinks lol. I will say, KDE worked better with my drawing tablet than Gnome so...
- Getting the damn thing to install was a total nightmare for me .
  The instructions on their site had nothing step by step, -still no idea how to work checksums- so I had to figure out how to get an ISO onto a flash drive (turns out it needs additional software), how to get it onto the hdd without bios access (thanks Windows 10), then fight through tpm errors.
  Hell, even having to torrent the file in the first place was a pain since the machine I was installing on didn't want to download the ISO.
  Took me all morning, but could've been worse in my mental fog, I guess
- Arch is easy enough to install. If you ever get tired of overhead, ala all the apps on the OS which you never use, just start from scratch. It's not hard to install the base, desktop envo + a browser and start from there. The cleanest desktop you can imagine and probably the resulting OS too
  
  arch is interesting to me and i'm not too worried about the install, the rolling releases and stability of the system are what i think would snag me in using it. though the minute regular updates are probably more an issue for people who delve into the system more to get the absolute most out of it. it'll be more stable, works out of the box-type distros for me while i get a grasp of things like the file system and using the terminal. but i do think the setups people post of their riced out installs look pretty cool ngl
- If you want a EAVEN more windows like distro I will recomend nobara. The official version is a windows 7 styled gnome and it is based on fedora.
  
  i havent really looked into that, been mostly researching debian based distros specifically ubuntu and it's bunch since a lot of recommendations go to it. nobara looks interesting for the big gaming spin it has though i'm still iffy on being at home with linux for games, but from the outside looking in things like proton seem to be doing a lot of good in that space recently.
- I used mint for a long time, the only reason I switched is that my Nvidia card was preventing mint to boot/install on my new laptop. I didn't want to spent hours on it tried a few distros until one worked (Manjaro). I like Manjaro now, but might have to try mint again (laptop is a few years old so it will probably work now).

I use Hannah Montana Linux btw
- Bro, I spent so many hours a few years ago getting a hannah montana stick up to date so I could prank a co-worker... I was second shift and watched the first shifters roll in. I know this is a joke but man I learned a lot that night.
  
  Best of both worlds

First time installing Linux? What the fuck is this Ubuntu shit, that distro sucks. You really should try out Gentoo as your first distro.
Can't believe I fell for that as a kid. Wasn't even my first distro, but Gentoo for beginners is just hilarious
- Gentoo is the final boss of Linux installs. (Linux From Scratch is the raid boss)
  I installed it last year. After watching it compile for half an hour, I decided that a source-based distro was something I have no interest in daily-driving.

they are just waiting for you to discover Arch ;)
- Arch is the cross-fit of the Linux world.
  
  This is the best analogy I've seen for Arch.
  
  Please explain
  
  Or vegans etc etc

I don't criticize, I just give fair warnings. I want people to enjoy Linux like I do, not call me every other week because something is "broken"

Arch linux is the gateway drug that leads to NixOS
- How is Nixos? Are there clear advantages over a traditional Linux distro?
  
  Learn a dynamic lazy functional programming language first and then start building a flake without much help or documentation because that's what you should be doing and the default installation doesn't use that mechanism. The docs you find will assume you understand category theory already.
  About few years later you are a god and there is no way you're going to use anything else ever again.
  Source: been a user for the past four years.
  
  Nix hype has been high the last several months for some reason despite it being around for awhile. I think DevOps guys are just now discovering it or something.
  Disclosure: I haven't used it. I've just watched a few videos and have been following the hype. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
  My understanding is that it is similar to the idempotency that Terraform brings but on a OS, packages and code level.
  Basically you define (in a file) everything you want on the OS from packages to settings to custom repos and it installs everything so even if something goes sideways and say your server gets hacked, you just start over not from scratch or hopefully a clean fallback image but with everything you need installed out of the gate on a fresh install.
  Can also be super useful for ensuring your whole team is using the same setup. No more reading a manual for this one obscure firewall that some random guy setup. Your firewall (or whatever else) was installed and configured out of the box, plus it is the same org wide.
- How ya liking it?
  
  I replied in another comment about some of it’s features. I love it, its really hard to break even compared to my previous Arch install using auto snapshots on btrfs.

It's mostly all Debian based, so it matters little.

Ubuntu 🤮 if I wanted to be tracked by Amazon, I would have a registered address.

That's damn right, however, Debian is the only right choice.
- I agree with you on principle but I'm typing this from Crunchbang++. On servers I go with Debian every time though.
  
  All of my homies use Debian for servers, can’t do much wrong with the stability of it, although newer packages are sometimes difficult to get around but not an issue directly.

Ain't nothin wrong with Ubuntu (is Ubuntu still around?)
- It was once great, back in the glory days. Gnome 2 and Compiz, baby! It's still OK too, but not my preferred choice.
  
  Out of interest, what's your preferred choice nowadays? I've always preferred to stick with Debian-derived distros so I don't need to learn a different package manager (silly, I know).
  I guess I like the comfort/predictably of Ubuntu - I know what to expect, and how to fix it if things go wrong. But maybe I shouldn't be limiting myself.
  
  Eh I love GNOME 3, especially after like 3.22 or so. It’s not very customizable, and that’s kinda the point. With KDE I spent far too long fussing with settings instead of getting shit done.
- There are some things wrong with Ubuntu and Canonical, but if it solves your problems, you're doing it right.
- yeah but they seem hell-bent on forcing their stupid snap store down everyone's throats. Flatpaks work just fine, imo, snaps are unnecessary

Is Ubuntu still the go-to for home use?
Looking to use for things like web, office, Plex server, streaming, etc
- I like mint, never really have to think about it. My ageing workstation is on 24/7 (arrgh) and Plex works just fine. Firefox is fine, google docs or libre office are fine. Things just work.
  The one problem I do have is it goes mad and needs a reboot if the monitors go to sleep while one of them is orientated to portrait. So I just switched off sleep and turn them off manually.
  
  My Mom has been running Mint for over a decade now and I rarely have to remote in and help her with anything. If it passes the works for my Mom test, I think it should work for most people.
- I'd say unless you're an advanced user looking for something specific, it's between Ununtu and Red Hat, and even then I'd argue that Red Hat is more for business and Ubuntu is great for home / casual use, but they're both excellent!
- I still use it in wsl and for my media server, there probably better out there but it's good enough
- Still think Debian is better but Ubuntu seems to be the most.popular fs

bsd from scratch btw
- Which isn't a Linux. And here I am criticising someone's choice of Unix/Linux system...
  
  im kidding lol. bsd is bloat. i rewrote templeos in rust for my daily driver

Eventually, they'll start criticising your choice of DE or text editor.
- VIM FOREVER

What is this thing about Manjaro in this Comments here?
- Manjaro is not arch though it likes to pretend it is and includes the aur. Because of this sometimes aur packages will break manjaro since they expect packages which arch uses that aren't on manjaro yet. Pamac, their software center, has broken the aur via essentially ddosing it multiple times. Also, despite the fact I have no idea what I'm doing ive never had my ssl certificate expire, Manjaro has several times. I'm sure there's more but that's the things I know about.
  I don't actually care if you use it, I just think the devs are not quite with it all the time so I won't use it. But I use arch anyway so that wouldn't make sense anyway.

Finally somewhere I can start a CentOS stream community!
- RHEL is throwing shade lately...

I won't judge you until you should know better.

How cheap can i build a linux pc if i dont want to game on it? Just browsing, maybe play some videos from youtube every now and then. Mostly browsing and using excel etc for work, no gaming at all.
- A potato would probably be enough. But exel is a little complicated. Either you use it in a browser or switch to libre/onlyoffice
- an old think pad might be a very good choice for about 150-200 dollars you can get a more then capable laptop for quite a lot of stuff
- https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/
  This one might be a good starting point: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4295?src=raspberrypi

Cesar/Leo if you are out there thank you for enduring my stubbornness in learning Linux on Slackware. I bet you were patient every time I had issues and you didn't force me to switch distros. Thank you.

And doesnt tell you to "just google it"
- Ah "just google it" also excellent for making a hostile work environment too.

Open Suse Tumbleweed is the way to go. Fight me.
- I will not fight you as I also use Tubleweed. Fantastic distro.
- It's a way to go at least for rolling release. However, tw is looking less and less interesting than it used to 5 years ago now that all these shiny new immutable distros are coming out.
  
  What do you mean by immutable? Do you mean point release? Why would anyone use a point release distro for the desktop is beyond me.

That's pretty much me. I've introduced a few of my friends to Linux. I recommend Ubuntu because it generally has the most documentation, support, largest userbase, etc but they are of course free to pick whatever distro they want. I use Ubuntu LTS myself, it works well enough. In terms of software, I like static linked builds and AppImages since they work on pretty much any distro.

- I got started there too. Then I moved to Mandriva, OpenSUSE, Mint, with Ubuntu sprinkled throughout.

I use ArseLinux btw

Am I the only one around here that uses MX Linux?
- MX Linux is awesome! I do a bit of development on it here and there. The project owners are cool!

Can install that on this can of garbage beer and this AMD chip?

Except openSUSE. Fuck that, it breaks with the smallest thing and is just odd. But this was like 5y ago on Tumbleweed, so maybe it’s changed.
- No way! Opensuse has always been perfect for me, I do usually use leap though.
  
  I believe you, given how many people love it. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I love its KDE for some reason (and the boot animation beats other distros easily).
- Coming from Arch deviates and Fedora, i feel like they have really nice tools to repair anything going wrong. Maybe it was a big problem 5 years ago, but it looks like they worked hard on it and now they are ahead of anyone else in terms of getting on the right path again after breaking something.
  Having Yast as a system administration GUI is also nice, as i don't have to google my way through countless configuration files all over the system figuring out what goes wrong.
  
  Yeah last time I used it I broke it in 20 minutes lol. But then I used btrfs to get it back. Fun times.
- Changed a lot really
- I used tumbleweed for about an year with no problems. The installer was a bit different and not much user friendly but it had a lot of options that i wanted.
  I don't know how it was 5 years ago, but these days I think it's doing pretty good. I'd consider it over fedora if I need a rolling release distro.

First distro was Mandrake, yeaaars ago. Second was Gentoo. Third was back to Windows. Wish I'd gotten more into it. Definitely don't have the time for it now though.

I told them to use Ubuntu LTS and they did. Why would I criticize?

More like unicorn

The arch wizard who introduced me to ubuntu

ZipSlack FTW

Slackware or gtfo.
- I don't know why these days. Doesn't seem to have much advantages...

And that dude didn't show up years later trying to sell me something on TV! Looking at you Bad Luck Brian.

Yeah but fuck Ubuntu though.

There's no wrong distro.
There is a wrong DE tho.
https://media.tenor.com/0UZgl-4-q9IAAAAd/james-mcavoy-filth.gif

pfffff typical Ubuntu kind of guy 🙄

Y’all should call your friends out on this sort of stuff but jabbing at each other is a useless practice that only serves to ruin trust, add frustrations and is just a generally douchey behavior to encourage. Nobody likes being harassed for their choices, esp. when they’re subjective
- Do y'all Linux people have a lot of friends?
  
  lol. I laugh to cover the pain.
  
  Yep, they call me all the time to help them fix/setup their printers
  
  Why would my choice in operating system have anything to do with how many friends I have lol. Weirdo comment

+rep