I'm gonna plug MX Linux once again: It's Debian, it has a fleshed-out settings control panel, I've found it every bit as convenient as Ubuntu, and the devs are explicitly antifascist
If it's your personal PC I'd suggest Manjaro, it's way less of a hassle than Arch (including nice GUI control panels and such) but you still get bleeding edge versions of pretty much everything, including security fixes.
I negative recommend Manjaro. Through the years I've seen them make so many foibles, mistakes, goofs, and slips that it just seems like a mistake to trust Manjaro people with a well functioning computer. If one seeks an easier Arch experience I recommend https://endeavouros.com/ or just use Arch and its archinstall installer directly (it's no longer necessary to manually install Arch).
This handy document summarizes it better than I can, since I don't keep track of their numerous fuckups like how many times Manjaro has allowed their SSL certs to lapse. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
Edit: I should also say I no longer have skin in the Arch/Manjaro game as I no longer use either one.
Yeah, Manjaro is up there with freebsd in terms of bad fucking decisions.
See the article shared by neo for specifics, but it's mainly an issue with them not doing decent code review, allowing things to break, and just poorly managing the project which leads to massive security vulnerabilities and bugs downstream if you aren't careful.
I'm planning to move my last install from Manjaro to Fedora. I originally moved from Arch to Manjaro because I wanted to cut the tedium of installation and have something more stable while still having fresh packages.
I found that Manjaro releases aren't even that fast, and their "more stable repositories" are just a clunky layer between the Arch repos with less eyes than I'd like on them. I've also encountered too many other clunky and obnoxious things from them to say their usability improvements are competetive with more mainstream distros. My little tray update informer just died once because the developer shut the server down and that was it. Apparently they were hosting it themselves and not the project? I also forgot to explicitly use their CLI scripts to update my kernel several times, and has had the graphics drivers (which are compiled for specific kernels) get dropped from the repository, which blocks updates until I manually remove my GPU drivers and drop into a shell to update everything - that was a real fun one the first time.
The laptop embezzlement debacle was also really something. Their homepage is also filled with sponsored boutique computers. I don't see a distro raising money as an intrinsically horrible thing, but they're really in-your-face about it considering their financial track record.
Fedora isn't perfect - it is controlled by a giant corporation that has way too much sway over the Linux ecosystem, and they practically use the userbase as testers for emerging technologies they eventually want to put into their paid distribution. I get what I want out of it, though. Pretty fresh packages with a lot of eyes on them, and new technologies out of the box: Wayland, Pipewire, and Btrfs are defaults, and not alternatives like in an Arch install guide.
it is controlled by a giant corporation that has way too much sway over the Linux ecosystem, and they practically use the userbase as testers for emerging technologies they eventually want to put into their paid distribution.
Red Hat: the giant corporation that has too much influence over the linux ecosystem and uses the userbase as testers except the technology they're pushing is actually good !!!!!! :fishe:
Didn't really know about any of that stuff, I guess I'll just suffer through installing Arch next time then. I had a really good experience with Manjaro so far tho.
Also GPU drivers were always a huge pain in any distro as far as I recall.
Rolling releases are cool but I don't miss that manual installation at all. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with what Manjaro is trying to do - their maintainers are just bad. There's other Arch derivatives and bleeding edge distros out there for sure. I just don't have any experience with them.
Also GPU drivers were always a huge pain in any distro as far as I recall.
:torvalds-nvidia: User error honestly, but I've never had another distro that didn't just upgrade the kernel at some point in the normal cycle. I kept forgetting about their kernel selection script and it wasn't really the driver's fault.
Oh that's weird. I started using MX at least a couple of years back, and at that time it came with the non-free drivers for my old netbook. Since then I've mainly used up-to-date backups of that instance for new installs
What the fuck?
I'm gonna plug MX Linux once again: It's Debian, it has a fleshed-out settings control panel, I've found it every bit as convenient as Ubuntu, and the devs are explicitly antifascist
If it's your personal PC I'd suggest Manjaro, it's way less of a hassle than Arch (including nice GUI control panels and such) but you still get bleeding edge versions of pretty much everything, including security fixes.
I negative recommend Manjaro. Through the years I've seen them make so many foibles, mistakes, goofs, and slips that it just seems like a mistake to trust Manjaro people with a well functioning computer. If one seeks an easier Arch experience I recommend https://endeavouros.com/ or just use Arch and its
archinstallinstaller directly (it's no longer necessary to manually install Arch).I’ve been running Manjaro on multiple computers for years without any issues. What mistakes/goofs?
Didn’t realize Arch finally has a normal installer now though. Will check that out next time I need a new OS.
This handy document summarizes it better than I can, since I don't keep track of their numerous fuckups like how many times Manjaro has allowed their SSL certs to lapse. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
Edit: I should also say I no longer have skin in the Arch/Manjaro game as I no longer use either one.
Yeah, Manjaro is up there with freebsd in terms of bad fucking decisions.
See the article shared by neo for specifics, but it's mainly an issue with them not doing decent code review, allowing things to break, and just poorly managing the project which leads to massive security vulnerabilities and bugs downstream if you aren't careful.
manjaro is bad tho
I'm planning to move my last install from Manjaro to Fedora. I originally moved from Arch to Manjaro because I wanted to cut the tedium of installation and have something more stable while still having fresh packages.
I found that Manjaro releases aren't even that fast, and their "more stable repositories" are just a clunky layer between the Arch repos with less eyes than I'd like on them. I've also encountered too many other clunky and obnoxious things from them to say their usability improvements are competetive with more mainstream distros. My little tray update informer just died once because the developer shut the server down and that was it. Apparently they were hosting it themselves and not the project? I also forgot to explicitly use their CLI scripts to update my kernel several times, and has had the graphics drivers (which are compiled for specific kernels) get dropped from the repository, which blocks updates until I manually remove my GPU drivers and drop into a shell to update everything - that was a real fun one the first time.
The laptop embezzlement debacle was also really something. Their homepage is also filled with sponsored boutique computers. I don't see a distro raising money as an intrinsically horrible thing, but they're really in-your-face about it considering their financial track record.
Fedora isn't perfect - it is controlled by a giant corporation that has way too much sway over the Linux ecosystem, and they practically use the userbase as testers for emerging technologies they eventually want to put into their paid distribution. I get what I want out of it, though. Pretty fresh packages with a lot of eyes on them, and new technologies out of the box: Wayland, Pipewire, and Btrfs are defaults, and not alternatives like in an Arch install guide.
You just described Canonical :peltier-laugh:
Yeah but at least red hat is pushing flatpaks instead of snaps :disgost:
Red Hat: the giant corporation that has too much influence over the linux ecosystem and uses the userbase as testers except the technology they're pushing is actually good !!!!!! :fishe:
honestly, I'm all for it.
Didn't really know about any of that stuff, I guess I'll just suffer through installing Arch next time then. I had a really good experience with Manjaro so far tho.
Also GPU drivers were always a huge pain in any distro as far as I recall.
Rolling releases are cool but I don't miss that manual installation at all. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with what Manjaro is trying to do - their maintainers are just bad. There's other Arch derivatives and bleeding edge distros out there for sure. I just don't have any experience with them.
:torvalds-nvidia: User error honestly, but I've never had another distro that didn't just upgrade the kernel at some point in the normal cycle. I kept forgetting about their kernel selection script and it wasn't really the driver's fault.
not practically, that is 100% literally what fedora is for
Garuda > Manjaro
but don't pick the dragonized DE, pick a normal one.
What does it do better than Manjaro? I'm kinda wary of really niche distros.
I think it's more like a rebranded fork of Manjaro, but that's basically all I know.
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also make sure you find that rare debian with extra unfree drivers ISO so things like "connect to internet" work
Lol luckily I think that's all MX offers
last I tried I couldn't get network or not-smallest-resolution to work from a non-vm MX linux ISO.
Oh that's weird. I started using MX at least a couple of years back, and at that time it came with the non-free drivers for my old netbook. Since then I've mainly used up-to-date backups of that instance for new installs