this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Since i see so much linux talk on lemmy i got curious and watched a video about the common distros. How true is the information in this video? The person hardly describes why debian and arch are just better than every other distro. At least i'm definitely now curious about Mint or something for gaming.

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[–] CaptainJack42@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It's just clickbait like most of his videos, I never really liked Chriss' videos, the tip of the iceberg was when he told people to disable kernel mitigation for a presumable performance boost (I tested it with disconnected network, it was like 2% on my machine), which is just plain dumb.

Use whatever distro you like, just know that you don't have to distrohop for some program (DE or WM or whatever). I personally use endeavour, simply because I've used arch (and derivatives) for a while now and endeavour is just arch with sensible defaults and a lot of the configuration one would do anyway already done.

[–] Papercrane@feddit.de 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

yeah i guess this one didnt scream clickbait as much as the other videos of his. I got some in my feed afterwards and quickly realised that this guy doesnt shy away from using clickbait titles.

What is DE or WM? Is it actually that easy to change distro? Dont you have to basically install everything again from scratch? I read somewhere that you can seperate your directories on your SSD so that you can just change the kernel but i dont know how easy or true that is

[–] CaptainJack42@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

DE is desktop environment (like gnome, kde, xfce,...) And WM is window manager (like i3, sway, xmonad,...) Which is just a slim version of a de, they usually don't include things like guis for settings, file managers, ... and you just pick what you like and use that. The window manager is responsible for placing the windows in your workspace and most standalone wms are tiling, so they use your monitor space efficiently instead of putting floating windows all over the place. Basically the DE (or WM) is what you interact with most on your PC and a lot of beginners distrohop just to use a different DE when in reality you can just install the other de on your existing system, log out and select the new DE in your login screen.

The biggest differences between distros nowadays are their release cycles and their package managers (and the tepos they're using, like Ubuntu and Debian both use apt, but have separate repos)

And no you can't really change distro without reinstalling, you can change kernels tho, every distro will update their kernels from time to time and it's just a matter of install the new package and reboot into the new kernel.

With separate directories you probably mean partitions, which I'd also say it's advisable to have your /home partition separated from your / partition. That way if you ever have to reinstall or want to change distro you can just install into the root partition and afterwards add your old/home partition to /etc/fstab and keep all you're user data and configuration

[–] Papercrane@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

interesting, so every DE has a WM or are can only one of them at a time be used? And if you use a WM you have to install guis, file managers yourself? I think the only thing i would want is a DE/WM that has tabs for folders. I think its a neat feature to have

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The basic GUI experience in X is provided by the window manager. It controls how your windows are placed ( eg. Tiling vs Stacking / Floating ), how they are decorated ( eg. Max / Min / Close buttons ), and how they behave ( eg. Click to focus ). In X, the window manager runs as an application on the X server. You can only use one at a time.

In Wayland, the “window manager” is the display-server too and is called a compositor. For smaller projects, there are compositor libraries that provide similar capabilities to what the X server did so that these projects can concentrate on the “window manager” part. You can think of a Wayland compositor as equivalent to an X window manager ).

A Desktop Environment comes with a window manager ( or compositor ) and adds other tools that run alongside ( or on top of ) the window manager to provide a full user experience. This may include panels ( eg. think Windows start button, icon bar, and status tray ), docks ( like MacOS ), global menus, notification applets, and the desktop surface itself ( eg. are there icons or other features on the desktop ). A DE usually comes with a standard set of basic applications like a file manager, image viewer, document viewer, media player, and the like.

If you start with a basic window manager then yes you have to add all this other stuff yourself. Of course you may not want some of it and so can have a much lighter experience. You can also just choose tools that you like. Of course, they may not match visually or work perfectly together.

If you use a DE, the experience is curated for you and everything is more likely to work well out of the box. That said, nothing stops you from swapping out whatever components you want. You can even use a different window manager than the DE default.

[–] Papercrane@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago

Thanks alot for the more than enough explanation :)

[–] hornedfiend@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

While I admit most of my arch reinstalls are mostly the same,I feel that archinstall script is genuinely good now with most defaults I need. The rest I can just add it in the installer extra packages or chroot post install (which is offered as a choice at the end).

I just could never bring myself to use distros that are technically the same distro with calamares slapped in top and whatnot. I mean 'pacman -S {packages}' is straightforward enough for me.

[–] Presi300@lemmy.world 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Imo, Chris Titus should just stop making Linux content... His windows content is genuinely useful, yet his Linux content boils down to "arch and debian good, ye old packages good, Wayland not ready, snaps/flatpaks/everything else sucks, Gnome bad, gnome bad (again), fedora bad... He's the literal definition of a gatekeeper.

[–] interceder270@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Weird, I agree with most of those points.

[–] Presi300@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago
[–] spencer@lemmy.ca 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

While I find that I agree with his takes like, 55% of the time, I do agree that Debian and Arch are basically the S-tier distros. So many of the other ones are basically just opinionated Debian or Arch, and while those can be useful when you’re getting started, I’ve found that for the long haul you’re better off just figuring out how to configure the base distribution with the elements of the opinionated ones that you like rather than use those distros themselves. Also, RIP CentOS. I would have put that in a high tier before the RHELmageddon (not top tier mind you, but it had a well defined use case and was great for that purpose).

[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've been using Arch for years and can't pull myself away because everything just works. Whats the difference between arch and whatever the derivatives are? I don't even know what distros to arch are the Ubuntu / mint to debian

[–] F04118F@feddit.nl 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

EndeavourOS is easy-mode Arch. You get a liveboot with XFCE and a graphical installer with quite some choices, from a wide selection of desktop environments and window managers to the init system and filesystem. You get pacman and yay, with the AUR preconfigured.

Manjaro is the easiest way to break Arch. It has its own repos which are just Arch but 2 weeks behind. This causes problems when (not saying if) you add the AUR, which is not 2 weeks behind but in sync with Arch main repos. Thus causing breakages due to migrations not happening at the same time.

Garuda is not as widely used as Endeavour and Manjaro, but from those who've used it, I've only heard good things.

I am using EndeavourOS Sway Community Edition. Was nice to have a starting point for my first pure WM and my first Arch install. The Sway Community Edition is looking for maintainers but I am a bit disappointed by some things in upstream Sway and am not sure I want to stick with it long-term yet. Might try Hyprland at some point.

[–] Papercrane@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ah ok i gues si can understand it makes sense that if you really wanna learn linux you gotta be ready to get your hands dirty aka figuring out how to configure the distribution. Maybe its just very overwhelming because a beginner doesnt even know what you can / can't configure. But probably everything

[–] spencer@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah basically all a "distribution" is is a selection of software and configurations, and they distribute (hence the name) that software and configurations as a bundle. It definitely can be daunting to learn all of this at once as a newcomer, but on the other side of that coin I've seen many people begin their Linux journey on a "beginner friendly" distribution who come to see that distro's configs as default and need to unlearn/relearn many habits as they progress through their journey. I think, too, that often people who are immersed in the Linux world don't have a great perspective on what is/isn't confusing for a new user and often end up obfuscating things with other things that are just as complicated, if not more.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
  • when this was originally posted, it got a lot of flack because Linux users were unhappy Chris Titus dares to use both Linux AND Windows
  • as @bbbhitz pointed out, “Pointless” was probably a poor choice of words, but Chris’ definition for that tier was basically “distros that install a couple stock packages and give it a new name”
  • as for the Devil tier
    • RedHat for closing their source
    • CentOS Stream because it’s not CentOS
    • Fedora guilt by association (they are actually a separate entity from their founder RedHat)
    • Ubuntu because snaps
  • for Debian and Arch, not only are they good distros on their own, but they’ve each also become parents (and grandparents) to a huge number of offshoots
  • for gaming
    • for beginners, Linux Mint is a really popular place to start just in general
    • for the more experienced, options like Nobara or customizing SteamOS
[–] andruid@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Fedora is a separate entity with RedHat employment as a prerequisite for some of the key leadership roles. It's ran and designed to feed into RedHat.

I love Fedora, heck I like RHEL too, but they have gone from my top recommendation for enterprise solutions to me having to research whether their offering is even FOSS and constant concern that a EULA will put us in legal jeopardy for treating our FOSS product choices like FOSS.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

Red Hat created Fedora specifically to be the “community” distro. There used to just be Red Hat which tried to be both free and paid. Now they have Fedora and RHEL.

Red Hat releases all their own software as GPL. They are one of the few players releasing new and important GPL software. As you state, they employ and pay people to spend most of their time building an emphatically free and community based distro. I cannot think of a company that does more for Open Source.

[–] Papercrane@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

as a noob, why are snaps so bad? Thanks for the bullet points btw, it cleared a bunch of stuff up :)

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)
  • Linux Experiment released a whole video this morning comparing packaging formats
  • the main issue with snaps is (generally) not the snaps themselves or the snap daemon, it’s that the Snap Store itself is closed source
    • a combination of rampant enshittification of online platforms, losing faith in Canonical’s direction, and lack of transparency into ranking/promotion/filtering of apps in the Snap Store (there’s already been a few claims that they’ve replaced an already installed native app with a snap package 🤷 )
[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 1 points 2 years ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

comparing packaging formats

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] Blaiz0r@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In time, I've come to realise that people that complain about snaps are not worth listening to.

99% of the complainers of snaps don't understand their full use case, they are an invaluable resource for servers and embedded systems, snaps support features that flatpak never will do.

[–] Silejonu@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

The thing is Snaps are pushed on the desktop, and the server world already uses containers like Docker, so there isn't much Snap does that's truly unique and useful.

[–] pruneaue@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 years ago

In my opinion what hes saying is true, but has to be taken with a grain of salt. The choice of the word "pointless" is a little harsh but i understand what he means. They are only derivatives that dont accomplish anything that the distro they forked cant accomplish, ergo they are useless because you could make Ubuntu on debian.
As for why debian and arch are the best, they are the two most well established community maintained distros. That means they have the most people working on them, the most support out there on the internet when you encounter issues, they tend to be the most stable, AND they have no corporate backing which can be seen as "evil" by some people (like Chris in this video).

[–] PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 years ago

Downvoted for clickbait title. Do better.

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 5 points 2 years ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=KyADkmRVe0U&t=1484s

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] Kristof12@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] Papercrane@feddit.de 2 points 2 years ago

literally never saw this posted here so @cerement@slrpnk.net is right

[–] anothermember@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 years ago

Seems to have an irrational hang up around Red Hat based on all the hearsay going around.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 years ago

Was hardcore CentOS for years before the flucksterfuck.

[–] Mambert@beehaw.org 0 points 2 years ago

One important thing you need to know about distros: they're all the same under the hood.

You can have any desktop you want on any distro. But some customizations are redone in some distros. In terms of programs you want to run, they pretty much all work on any distro. If a distro is "better for gaming" it usually just means the programs are pre-installed.

People talk about arch and Debian as the best because they have the least customizations, allowing you to install and customize as you wish.

Linux users are mostly tinkerers, they like their customizations their way. I'm in that boat. The less I have to remove to get my customization working, the better. Just give me a black screen and a white blinking cursor, I know how to do the rest from there.

[–] GustavoM@lemmy.world -4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

All distros are GNU/Linux at heart -- theres no such thing as a "better" distro.

[–] optissima@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago

Idk I've built a "distro" and let me tell you... there are a lot of better ones out there.

[–] cerement@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 years ago

Alpine Linux