New to Linux? Ubuntu Isn’t Your Only Option
New to Linux? Ubuntu Isn’t Your Only Option
Ubuntu's popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I've highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.
Imagine putting Manjaro as reliable and cutting edge over, say, Fedora.
Imagine putting Manjaro in the article instead of EndeavorOs
Small complaint but the article is decent as a whole
Agreed
Manjaro was one of my first distros when I was still learning, when I installed it, it made Wayland my default but didn't put in the required nvidia kernel parameters and I couldn't boot. I didn't even know what Wayland was to know why I couldn't boot
I mean, why not? Manjaro has recent packages and actively focuses on a user-friendly experience. Which includes things like a nice installer, good automatic support for hardware out of the box, a nice GUI for the package manager, GUI managers for drivers and kernel versions, it's based on the stable Arch branch and it comes with the LTS kernel etc.
Back a few years ago when I was looking to move my desktop away (from Ubuntu, ironically) I downloaded a bunch of distro ISOs (the usual suspects, we all know them, Pop, Mint etc.) and tried the live version to see how it goes. I picked Manjaro because it was the only one that did everything perfectly. Recognized all my peripherals, network shares, played all videos and music, printer, whatever.
(I know the usual arguments against it, btw, but it's mostly unrelated stuff or outright false.)
During my six month usage of Manjaro (my introduction to Arch-based distros), my desktop broke four times and booted me to the terminal. Almost once a month. I told myself this was the price you paid for living on the edge, using a rolling release. I switched to EndeavourOS and have not had a broken desktop in two whole years.
Manjaro's handling of AUR packages is fundamentally wrong and with their design decisions it cannot be fixed. You either give up the AUR entirely, or resign yourself to constantly breaking AUR packages and having to try and fix them.
Manjaro's handling of kernels via a GUI sounds good until you realise it's entirely manual and if you don't keep checking you will end up running an unsupported, out of date kernel with Arch packages that expect a newer one. Again, Manjaro violates Arch's golden rule of avoiding partial upgrades by holding your kernels back until you manually update them in their GUI. If you're running an Arch-based distro 99% of the time you want the latest kernel and an LTS kernel as a backup, but these are already in Arch as packages (and are thus updated in lockstep with your packages, as designed) so you don't need Manjaro's special GUI. Now if you wanted a particular kernel for some reason then sure, but Manjaro's GUI doesn't even let you pick the exact version you want anyway! All you can pick is the latest version of each major release.
If you're anything like I was at the time, you think you like Manjaro but what you actually like is Arch. Manjaro just gets in the way.
On a side note there's no stable branch of Arch
People lose their shit about Manjaro pretty frequently. It's pretty much a meme at this point.
Do you have proof of Manjaros usual arguments being unrelated or false? The things I've read over the years seem like valid criticism.
There's a huge hate bandwagon for Manjaro and I don't really understand it. I don't consider myself a linux expert and maybe that's why but I felt like Manjaro was very accessible to someone new to Linux who wanted to use Arch. You have the ability to install what you need while also having a relatively stable system. I enjoyed that it came with software that I would normally be using but I know there's a lot of diehards who want just Linux and to install things themselves, in that case they should just use plain Arch or Endeavor, but I think for others Manjaro is perfectly fine.
People love to bag on Manjaro, but I know a fair number of people who use it as their primary OS. Hell, I used it as mine for almost a year and a half; I only moved to Arch because I was super bored one weekend.
I'm not saying don't use it, I've used it in the past and they get some stuff right. The included programs are generally good choices, their customisations on the DEs differentiate Manjaro from others, the GUI app that lets you trivially install different kernels with the click of a button is great. Unfortunately it ended up causing breakages a couple of times, so I moved on.
I'm saying if I were to pick a word to describe it certainly wouldn't be "reliable", due to their whole holding back Arch packages but not AUR ones, leading to dependency conflicts.
I honestly don't know why they don't hold back AUR ones as well (or don't hold back a week, a-la EndeavourOS). That'd solve IMO the biggest issue with the distro
Plus the whole repeatedly not updating expired security certificates and telling people to just roll back their clocks to "fix" it.
If it happened only once, I'd chalk it up as an embarrassing albeit understandable mistake. But it's happened, what, 3 times now? It's an issue in itself, but it also brings into question what other stuff they're messing up behind the scenes due to poor processes.
"People I know" has never been a suitable equivalent to actual data, Mr Trump.
I don't think that's particularly wrong, tbh.
The key words being targeted at regular desktop users.
Obviously far from being one of the first distros, or distros with a GUI. But targeted at regular desktop users - i.e. "normies"? Absolutely.
People need to remember how crappy and janky the desktop was before Canonical spearheaded a lot of usability improvements.
If only they had continued along that path :/
Slackware is a garbage distro purely because it doesn't have a functional package manager supporting dependency resolution
targeted at regular desktop users
While Slackware and Debian are the oldest still-maintained Linux distros, I don't think either had a desktop-first approach.
Ubuntu isn't your only option
Thumbnail shows Pop!_OS which is a fork of Ubuntu.
For now. They're switching to Debian.
Edit: I think I was thinking of Linux Mint?
Edit again: I was wrong twice, it was Vanilla.
https://linuxiac.com/vanilla-os-announces-major-shift-moving-from-ubuntu-to-debian/
The problem with going for alternatives is support.
Imagine picking a random Linux flavor, then trying to figure out how to change settings, only to get either hundreds of different answers.
Depends on the alternative. E.g. Fedora and OpenSuse have very active communities and lots of help available.
You're not going to get a telephone number you can call, but the documentation maintained by Arch is far superior to that offered by Ubuntu. If support is your biggest concern, you're far better served by Arch.
That's fine for someone willing to read documentation, the average user would rather read a forum post, which Ubuntu has a shit load of posts about using and fixing it.
Lol I chuckled at that telephone number part
No one ever recommends OpenSuse....
Correct.
It is problematic in my experience. I think it comes down to Suse as a company lacking direction
Yeah exactly this. Not only lacking direction but the Upstream SUSE recently decided to move away from traditional desktop. Instead, they now offer ALP, which stands for adoptable linux platform. So OpenSuse has no real dekstop products to build of, and the community has to do much more work in order to produce a stable desktop distribution. I was a happy user for a almost 2 years, but in that time the community had discussion about many "small" things, many of which were about "principles". This made ne very uncomfortable in using it, since it felt that every moment the "community" would decide something that would significantly change everything.
openSuSE is cool. It was the first distro I installed way back around 2010 and still the one I would recommend to new people.
Tumbleweed is recommended often here.
I occasionally try out Opensuse since like 2007, but I always find the alternatives better. Why Tumbleweed over Arch, why Leap over Fedora/Debian, why suse over RHEL?
It is not bad, but slow after Arch.
There is a shill on YT called Linuxcast. (I like his content, but he is defo a Suse shill) Personally i'd rather fix some arch fuckups, then to not have the AUR. (or if I don't have the AUR, then just use Debian)
Manjaro: Reliable and Cutting-Edge Features
Rarly laughed that hard. Reliably is by defenition wrong. Manjaro delays packages a few days in their main compared to Arch this can cause issues and makes them not compatible with the AUR which one of the most advertised and enabled by default feature.
You can read more about other problems here, https://github.com/kruug/manjarno
AUR is unsupported on Manjaro. Go back to Arch if you want that without issues
I tried out Arch for a while. The AUR is a bit of a wild west and at least I found it important to vet packages before installing them. It was a hassle. The same reason I only use one package from the OBS on Tumbleweed now.
I like that they hold the updates back. Manjaro is as reliable as any other desktop Linux I've used.
Yeah, that one made me chuckle as well. But I guess the article 'had to be written' for reasons & it does actually have some overview value & nice pics ... which I guess is what new users have to go on before they actually dive in.
Anyone else notice that the first three are Ubuntu?
Corporate wants you to find the difference...
"They're the same picture" Pam from The Office
Ubuntu used to have the mission of being Linux For The Masses. Their marketing material used to include a bunch of trendy diverse young people standing on their logo. I'm pretty sure they've completely abandoned that cause in favor of trying to out-corporate RHEL. Their present-day web page has more corporate logos on it than the starting grid at a NASCAR race, and I challenge you to find the link to download "Normal Ubuntu for normal desktops."
How much did The Masses pay for what they were using?
Debian? First time i installed it wanted to use CD for packages instead of online. Don’t know why. Second time it didn’t have wireless drivers as these were non free.
It’s a great distro but not for newbies.
Fedora all the way!
Non-free-firmware is now handled automatically during installation as of the most recent Debian release, just FYI. For reference, see the note at the top of this wiki page: https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware
Debian is in many ways the "deep end". A big part of its development philosophy is prioritizing their weirdly rigid definition of Free Software and making it hard to install anything that doesn't fit that. I'm not saying it's not a good distro, but IDK if it's beginner friendly.
Debian is in many ways the “deep end”.
The first time I tried Debian was when I was new to Linux, on a laptop with both the Ethernet and Wi-Fi unsupported. On top of which, it had an nVidia GPU. It was hard.
Now I know much more about Linux and checked the Motherboard for Linux support before buying it. Debian works pretty well.
So, it's beginner friendly as long as someone helps you out with the installation after checking up on all the stuff you will need to run.
Normal users want that potential for getting their hands dirty to be zero at best
Exactly this. To normal people the computer in their house is merely a tool; just another appliance that needs to work every time without any fuss.
Fedora is also apparently newbie friendly. IME, RHEL is not, but their free developer license is good if you want to learn working with it. Some employers use RHEL exclusively, so it’s not a complete waste.
Debian is good until you need to install a PPA :\
out of the loop since I've moved to debian and been using flatpak for the last few years, what software are you installing via PPA that isn't generally available via flatpak?
"PPA" is Ubuntu's branding for third party repositories. So, of course you will have a hard time adding a Ubuntu-specific third-party repository to anything that isn't the Ubuntu version it's made for...
Debian of course supports third party repos, just like Ubuntu. On Debian they just aren't called "PPA".
For more information on how to add third party repos to Debian (or Ubuntu, if you don't use Canonical's weird tooling), check out the Debian Wiki page on UseThirdParty or SourcesList. There's also an (incomplete) list of third party repositories on the wiki: Unofficial. And just like with PPAs, anyone can host a Debian repo.
To add to that, there's so much "support" out there for Debian and by proxy Ubuntu. You can Google any error and you'll find the fix. That's what draws new people to them. Even my self even though I'm not new to the Linux ecosystem. Ubuntu makes a perfectly good and stable server operating system.
One time the installer got stuck on my hardware. Never again. Debian deserves a lot of credit but personally I will not go near an OS unless I am certain in advance that the initial installation will go without a hitch.
Well as a psychopath, I always recommend beginners start with Gentoo. Guaranteed they won't go back to Mac or Windows. /s
By starting the switch to Gentoo, they either learn Linux well enough to never want to go back, or they fubar their system so bad that they can't go back.
Back in early 2000s I ran Gentoo as daily driver for a year, while almost a Linux noob, but eager to learn. Installation instructions were long, but excellent.
It was fun, and worked well, but in the end the long compilation times got the better of me. Now I heard they are including binary packages, so the itch is coming back.
Right now running opensuse tumbleweed, which works fine, sometimes too smoothly.
Right? I've been on Tumbleweed a few years - never actually expected it rolling so effortlessly.
It would of been funnier if you left out the /s
I wish howtogeek would change back to their old ms paint logo.
So Ubuntu, Ubuntu and unstable arch… here let me have a go:
I agree with the Fedora recommendation. Just a all round great experience.
“New to Linux? Where the most daunting thing about switching to it is how many choices you have in configuration? Well, good news! You have more choices than you think!”
My personal recommendations for beginner distros:
-OpenSUSE
-Fedora
-EndeavourOS
-KDE Neon
-ElementaryOS
-Zorin OS
-Linux Mint
Or you could just install ordinary Debian, since it's stable and well-supported. Kind of a GOAT among distros, alongside Slackware.
imho Debian is far from beginner friendly. They will end up with a laptop without WiFi.
I don't use it personally, but I think there's a good case for Linux Mint (Debian Edition)
Well many search engine results recommended ubuntu for newbie.
I remembered the first time i used linux (15 years ago), i choose ubuntu because google recommended it & it has very nice UI compared to other linux that time
Ubuntu was the first distribution trying to release a consistent OS, rather than throwing every Linux software possible and letting the user choose.
Also they provided graphical tools for everything, in a user friendly way and consistent with the rest of the Desktop.
But nowadays most mainstream distributions propose that anyway.
Ubuntu was pretty good, until 2010 or so. People who still recommend it probably haven't used it in the last 10 years.
Recommending Pop_OS! to newbies
That might just be the quickest way to make someone hate Linux forever. The glitchiest, most troublesome install I've ever tried to do. In the end, after two days of work just to get the damn live image to boot, the only reason I kept going was probably sunken cost falacy.
Funny. The one time I installed it, I just stuck it on a usb, booted from it, started the installer, next, next, done.
I really didn't have much of a different experience between installing pop os Vs Ubuntu.
I guess some weird hardware thing that Pop OS doesn't provide for?
Yeah, maybe. My experience has been a multitude of hangs and flash drive rewrites. At first, I thought my flash drive might be bad, so I tried another and quickly determined that the other one was actually bad before going back to the first. Eventually, I ended up just unplugging everything out of desperation and for some reason that worked.
I'm actually still working on this as I type this, currently waiting on partition changes because, while I read that 500MiB is recommended for Pop's boot partition, the installer has told me that it's too small...
Since I'm still dealing with this, and given the issues I had booting the live disk, there's a good chance this won't even be useable in the end. I've used Ubuntu before, and it boots fine, but fuck if I want to deal with snap.
Edit: Went up to 750MB (yeah, MB not MiB here, easier to think about later). Still says it's too small. Sure wish I had some detailed documentation to work with here, instead of just "use Clean Install" in the official docs and a single Reddit comment saying "500MiB is good." That would the bee's damned knees.
Edit 2: Works fine once installed. The live disk just would not boot with anything else plugged in for some reason.
To any Linux curious users,
I consider myself to be an intermediate Linux user. I have hosted applications and services on Linux servers in the cloud and use it as my primary operating system. I recommend Linux Mint. If you have an nvidia GPU, then I recommend PopOS as they have a version that has nvidia drivers pre-installed.
When I first started with Linux, I thought that Mint was less capable than other distros as it was the most user friendly. But I learned that you can do anything you want with any Linux distro. It is just that Mint is the least likely to give you trouble with random things.
With that all being said, you will have far fewer issues with Linux than you will with Windows.
Additionally, you can get legit troubleshooting steps for linux that actually work. With Windows it seems that there are 100 ways to possibly fix an issue and they feel like patching a sinking boat.
i've been pushing mint for years because it truly is just that good. everything just works. easy to learn. lots of easy customization available by default for even beginner tinkering. there is no headache or issues with drivers, patches, or software, ever.
but unfortunately (most recent versions) have become more prone to heavy slow downs and the new store in the latest update is utter trash.
I think that's something that people should emphasize to Windows & MacOS/iOS users more, the problems are impossible for you to truly resolve, and the next update could make your program that fixes said problems obsolete, or makes it impossible to control what network traffic your computer sends entirely in order to torrent Windows Updates to other users. Linux has presented me with problems which can be solved in a variety of ways and really helpful troubleshooting resources that have a side benefit of introducing you to cute online groups of people who tend towards anti-corporate politics/incoherent left libertarian at a minimum
First year of Linux for me was Mint, loved it, have since switched to popOS which I will admit has been less stable than mint with the DE very infrequently locking up, it does self recover. Only REISUB'd Mint twice and I don't actually think I've had to on Pop yet, some recent nvidia driver made it angry but rolled back without issue
Not the first time trying Linux, but the first time in the last 10 years since I tried it and I'm digging Mint. Still has problems with my Logitech steering wheel and Logitech mouse, but overall not bad.
I just had a flashback to 1999 and compiling a custom kernel to get my damn Logitech mouse to work.
Manjaro? nah, don't
nice color scheme tho
I can't say I can fully complain about Ubuntu when Mint came about because of it. Also because I have no other choice than to use a Ubuntu server distro for one of my classes.
The funny part about that is our instructor had us install a GUI and didn't choose gnome because he doesn't like it. He said it's a pain to use, which I don't have an opinion on either way since I've only ever used it for a combined total of less than a year.
Fuck, now I wanna distro hop
No need to unless you can't achieve the same from your current choice
Pop!_OS is lovely and the people behind it helpful. Works so well on my System76 laptop (obviously).
Is Garuda Linux really that good for gamers?
It's Arch Linux with preinstalled stuff right from the install. I won't recommend it, you still would need a good amount of knowleadge first to drive an Arch based system.
Imagine a Windows modification with some gaming tools preinstalled and scripts for one-click install things that usuallu take five clicks. Great, but only to speed up things you do often.
Thanks for the heads up. I lost interest with "good amount of knowledge" (which I have almost none)
It ships with some gaming stuff, uses zen kernel, has some performance mods (I guess), and a theme as ugly as sin. But you can make any distro do what it does. I'm sure it's in the same territory as Nobara.
I think DE is more important than distro to new folks
Garuda gets a mention, as a gamer I can highly recommend Garuda, a lot of work has gone into it and it looks great too... especially if you like neon. 🥰
Only last year I've switched from Windows to Linux and I choose Garuda because I wanted to learn Arch from the beginning. Boy am I happy how well it worked out of the box. The most annoying issue was to get the xbox gamepad dongle to work but aside from the it's so good.
I'm not a fan of all the gamer aesthetics, but Garuda works so well out of the box.
I tend to recommend Linux Mint (cinnamon) for newbies to start with so they can get over their initial shock, and then Garuda when they're more comfortable and want something exciting/better gaming performance
ZorinOS was my first. I highly recommend it to people who want a GUI and a good looking distro.
openSUSE Tumbleweed if you want super up to date with GUI.
Fedora sucks imo. I know many people love it, but I always had issues with it and had to look stuff up online, which I never had to do with other distros.
EndeavourOS ended my distro hopping. I just don't need anything. It's perfect for me.
What are good dual boot friendly options? I still game too much to ditch windows and dual booted Ubuntu but meh Ubuntu lol
Mint sets up the entire dual boot and partitioning during the install. You just choose how much space for Mint. Very easy and intuitive.
Linux Mint is a popular alternative.
But all options can be dual booted as far as I know!
Some don't play nice with dual booting. I'm honestly not familiar with the "why" but a couple of distros I looked at (one was one of the gaming forward ones, forget which) are outright like "don't dual boot this and if you do don't come crying to us.
I'm guessing they struggle seeing other file system types but I have no idea.
I mean anything but the atomic distros will dual boot just fine. GRUB is GRUB. I have the most experience with Debian-based distros, but they all dual-boot just fine.
Ubuntu is not even good in my opinion. At least not as a normie Distro.
Yes they have lots of docs online but "it is good because people think it is good" is not a good argument.
If you dont like GNOME I guess you will have a harder life anyways, as Distros with KDE are just a really hard task. Like anything stable is not a good idea, I at least reported 30 bugs that will never get backported fixes.
The fact that appimages are broken on Ubuntu is like the only thing that I completely understand and dont care about. Appimages needs to get their stuff together.
I hope many projects will convert from Appimage to Flatpak
I hope many projects will convert from Appimage to Flatpak
They seem like different projects with different goals. Appimages are portable executables.
Flatpak, to me, is something you install on a system and run with a flatpak runtime that is installed on your PC. I think its a fantastic way to sandbox programs with differing dependencies, but you still install programs and run them on your PC.
Appimage, on the other hand, is a wholly-contained executable. It is less efficient than flatpak in every way if you are installing apps on a system, but it is more portable. I can throw a handful of appimages on a USB stick and carry them from machine to machine (or mount an ISO in the case of VMs). I can plug in my "troubleshooting and development" stick to an otherwise barebones server at my datacenter, fix an issue with a comfortable set of useful apps, then unplug and leave the machine untouched.
Appimage is not a replacement for flatpak, but it has its own purpose. Snap is more similar to flatpak, but inferior in every single way. If we must get rid of one, can we phase that one out?
I mean, in theory you could also put flatpaks onto a usb stick and symlink the directories. But nobody really does that.
But really, I think this could be a cool GTK app.
You would copy selected apps to the stick and include a program, maybe even with a GUI, that can then symlink those apps to the system you are currently using.
Just be careful about trying to run your AppImages on a distro with for example only FUSEv3, because there are system dependencies.
why are distros with KDE a really hard task? users who want customizations will have a horrible time with gnome
That are two unrelated or even contradictory scentences.
Gnome is waaay more reduced, so it has less bugs. It will work way better on stable Distros.
Also because of some things (KDE 4.0?) GNOME became the default Desktop, and Distros orient at its release cycles.
KDE has so many bugs and fixes that I think calling 5.27 "stable" is misleading.
Weird as my AppImages work fine on Ubuntu 22.04LTS
alpine is great if you don't plan to use a gui and just want to set up command line stuff. not all new linux users are looking for a desktop replacement. some just want a server for file sharing or running plex, etc.
I use OpenBSD, and Alpine is the only Linux distro I can recommend :)
It is somewhat like FreeBSD (not having X by default), and they are both not friendly to newbies when compare to OpenBSD.
People should start with a free and sane default and gather knowledge, not start with a beautiful desktop environment (integrated graphical environment) and use browser and libreoffice and proprietary software on their device.
As a noobie to Linux I have a question: I decided to try ubuntu (haven't yet) because of what I think is called the Gnome Desktop Environment, which from what I understand is what gives it all of those sleek animations and tab switcher and stuff. Am I correct about this? Or do all distros have this? I care a lot about aesthetics and stuff like that—the main reason I'm interested in Linux, other than learning about something new, is the idea of being able to fully customize the look and feel
You will be able to get GNOME as the default desktop environment in many distributions and then install what extensions you want to change both appearance and function: https://extensions.gnome.org/
You can use a bunch of extensions to get the taskbar + app menu that Windows and KDE use:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ , https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3628/arcmenu/ and https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/
Or make GNOME look more like macOS if thats your thing:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4994/dash2dock-lite/
Many users swear by GNOME's default work flow though, so might wanna give it a shot before changing it.
Thanks a lot
Installation of Debian 12, Desktop Environment choices
Most distros will have it, you could install it on any distro with effort
Example of effort https://itsfoss.com/install-gnome-linux-mint/
https://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/ Other distros with it
I use Endeavour and on install I just chose Gnome
You can stick with Ubuntu, it’s not really a big deal. Everyone will say what they use is best because eventually you will find what is best for you
Thanks! Mint was my other choice, so knowing I can use that on either frees me up a little bit
Linux is flawed. everything use systemd.
The only clean living is BSD, in my opinion OpenBSD is the easiest. NetBSD prior to 10.x does not have SSL certificates preinstalled. FreeBSD needs you to manually install X. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have a menu based installation, while OpenBSD is question-based, and their disklabel tool have automatic partitioning.
Nice meme
Anyone used BSD?
From an engineering perspective, I prefer Debian distros. Apt is the greatest package manager ever built. For a production server, I'd choose Debian or maybe Ubuntu if I needed to pay someone for support.
But for a desktop, Ubuntu kinda sucks. These days, I think I'd recommend Fedora to Linux noobs.
And for my toys at home, I run Arch btw.
Heard. Debian in the streets, Arch in the sheets!
What about Ubuntu derivatives for desktop? My go to recommendations are Pop! OS and Linux Mint (which I use).
Linux Mint Debian Edition is my standard recommendation for desktop for those newer folks.
Straight up Debian for everything else. Debian is my desktop. And all of my servers (aside from some things I'm testing for work or something where I need to test against RHEL or something).
And Proxmox for VMs.
Pop! Os user going on a year now and I can't recommend it enough, at least as a first distro.
the de matters more for new users honestly, so I usually recommend: gnome: ubuntu
kde: kde neon
cinnamon: mint
cosmic: pop
and just let them choose what they want
What's your rationale for making that claim?
See the other thread.
TL;DR: Useful abstractions and a hell of a dependency solver.
I was fighting rpm hell on redhat for the 3rd or 4th time using red hat linux 5 to 6 or perhaps 6 to 7. When i first installed debian potato on my daily driver. We had 20 ish servers, but the constant hunt for the right combo of rpm's made me distro jump my own machine. A while later i was floored when i could apt-get full-upgrade to the next debian version without rpm hell and almost everything just worked. Never installed another redhat machine and have been using debian + kde ever since. And 99,3% of all servers i maintain are now debian. A few odd ubuntu machines for $$reasons.
Is rpm hell gone for good nowadays?
Bit of a noob but what’s the practical differences between Apt and the others. I use Fedora and the only difference I notice is that instead of typing apt update and apt upgrade, I just type dnf update.
Practical difference: Both dnf and apt are slow as hell. Pacman is flying compared to them.
In terms of practical differences to normal people, there aren't many, and it pretty much comes down to the syntax of using them and the speed at which they work.
Personally I like the syntax of using dnf, even if it is kinda slow, especially compared to the likes of pacman.
Urgh, no, it's not. Everything about it is super crusty if you go beyond simply installing packages and adding others' PPAs IMO.
I could probably list more but I haven't had to touch apt in a while, thankfully. But it is probably the #1 reason I avoid anything Debian-based. #2 is probably their Frankenstein sysvinit/systemd setup.
I do have to say that apt remove vs purge is pretty cool though.
What do you like about it?
That's a problem of the package, not the package manager.
Generally this fits with Debian's philosophy. But regardless I think it's out-of-scope for why Apt is good. You could make a distro with Apt and not have your packages do this.
I'm not talking about
aptthe CLI tool, but the actual package manager. The plainapttool is only designed to be a convenience wrapper for common workflows implemented in other tools.As you correctly pointed out, Apt has the distinction between packages installed as a dependency ("auto installed") versus packages installed directly ("manually installed"). This is precisely one of the reasons why I consider Apt the best package manager. (Yes, I know other package managers can do this, not all though.)
If you want to install a package as manual, then later mark it as auto, you can do that with
apt-mark.Are you maintaining a PPA for others?
Frankly, I've never run into this problem.
dh_makehelps you create a package that adheres to Debian policy, and there is good reason for Debian to have those policies. But if you're just packaging something yourself, you don't have to use it. It's just a template for new packages.At the end of the day, all you really need to create a deb is to create two files
debian/controlanddebian/rules. These are the equivalent to a PKGBUILD. The control file specifies all of the dependency metadata, and therulesfile contains the install script.The difference in packaging philosophy is that PKGBUILDs are external and they download the upstream sources. On the other hand, in Debian, they rehost the upstream package and add the
debiandirectory. This means that building Debian packages is mostly hermetic: you don't need access to the network.Mostly that it makes super useful distinctions between concepts. But there are other goodies.
I also do appreciate that Debian pre-configures packages to work together with the same set of conventions out of the box. But again, that's a property of the packages, not of Apt.
Arch on my PCs and Debian on my servers and VMs.
Fedora’s near daily update and restart cycle is so annoying esp when you have an encrypted hard drive. I know it’s part of the deal and I’m lazy, but all I’m using it for is a Jellyfin client.
What do you mean restart cycle? You only have to restart if you want to load the new kernel (there's technically a way to avoid even that). If you don't feel like installing a better tool for the job like Debian, just update less, most of your packages will still be newer than most distros. Also not sure why you would encrypt if its just jellyfin client.
Same. Albeit I'm on manjaro which suffers from the same issue. Distro hopping on an encrypted drive with no separate home partition is a huge pain in the butt
Last time I used latest Ubuntu:
I was a longtime Debian/apt diehard but I'm coming down on the same side of late. My homelab runs Proxmox (Debian based) with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS containers for more up-to-date packages, but my attempt to use KDE Neon (Ubuntu-based) for my desktop PC was a disaster. I've switched to Nobara (Fedora-based), and other than having to switch from Wayland back X11 because Wayland on NVidia breaks a bunch of things I need for work it's been relatively smooth sailing.
Yep. From an engineering perspective I prefer Debian distros. Ubuntu is a Debian distro. I said I would consider using Ubuntu in prod, and this is the reason.