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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by elucubra@sopuli.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml

What do you consider to be the "Goldilocks" distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc... You get the idea.

I'm not a newb, these last few years I've lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I've used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn't install something (which I can't remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I'm on Mint right now, because lazy, but it's acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don't have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I'm a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

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[-] data1701d@startrek.website 2 points 3 months ago

Maybe Fedora?

Personally, though, I’m a Debian guy - Testing on my desktop and stable with Flatpaks and a few backports on my laptop.

[-] ParadeDuGrotesque@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 months ago

Slackware.

It. Just. Works.

[-] blackbrook@mander.xyz 1 points 3 months ago

I haven't tried slackware in some years, but doesn't it require not minding that the version of everything be way dated? OP said "up to date".

[-] ParadeDuGrotesque@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 months ago

Go to packages.slackware.com or slackbuilds.org and you will see the base system has reasonably up to date packages.

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[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 points 3 months ago

If you're lazy (which I take to mean you like low maintenance) and haven't tried a rolling release distro, you need to try Manjaro. It's downstream of Arch (like Mint vs Debian) but with a lot of QoL improvements that take the edge off.

It's"Goldilocks" for me because it's rolling and has recent packages but also very low maintenance. I was sick of 3rd-party repo incompatibilies and update issues on Ubuntu.

It's a curated take on Arch in that it sources packages from Arch but holds them back until they're in a decent shape. Recent example was the Plasma 6 which they've held back a couple of months until most bugs had been cleared, but normally they release packages on a 2 week cycle.

It works out of the box, keeps working indefinitely (5 years going for me), and they have integrated system snapshots if you use BTRFS for root, just in case (automatically takes snapshots before every update, which you can restore from Grub). Never had to use a snapshot (did it only once to see if it works).

Limitations of Manjaro compared to Arch:

  • Not as bleeding edge due to holding packages for a while.
  • You have to stick to their way of doing stuff, like their tools for graphics drivers and kernel management.
  • You have to stick to a LTS kernel or at least keep one installed as backup at all times.
  • It won't change your kernel major version for you, ever. Some people see this as a disadvantage, personally I greatly prefer it.
  • You have to stick to their stable package repo. If you use their unstable/testing repos all bets are off (which is not going to be news to someone familiar with Debian).
  • You get access to the AUR but the usual warnings apply since AUR is even wilder than Sid. Some people say they've ran into trouble installing some AUR packages on Manjaro due to missing dependencies. It's never happened to me but I can see how it could happen due to the package delay.
  • You can't say "I use Arch btw". Arch fans tend to hate Manjaro because they see its limitations and hand-holding as antithetical to Arch's goals.

Regarding that last point, there's a very vocal minority that will smear Manjaro any chance they get All I can say is, try it for yourself.

[-] steeznson@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

The Manjaro team have had well publicised mistakes in the past which I think the community were right to highlight. However to be fair to them it was like a decade ago they had the PGP one, and they seem to have become a more professional outfit since then.

[-] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 points 3 months ago

All distributions make mistakes. It's a complex job. Debian stable had a local root elevation exploit on for a while a couple of months ago and nobody batted an eye. People would have a field day if that happened to Manjaro.

It's a double standard borne out of the resentment of a vocal minority and that sucks. The Linux community wastes so much energy on these pointless feuds. (And then they wonder why there's never the year of the Linux desktop...) Linux and FOSS are not about treating user share as a zero sum game but unfortunately there are people who can only think in terms of "if you use another distro you're dumb and I must ridicule you".

It's an especially narrow-minded take with distros like Manjaro, which is different enough from Arch that its users were never going to use Arch anyway.

[-] Quazatron@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

I can confirm it works as advertised, has very low maintenance and good performance.

I use it for gaming with Steam, Heroic, Lutris and a bunch of emulators, web browsing, some light development and home lab.

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[-] Only_Exception@mstdn.plus 1 points 3 months ago

@elucubra linux mint was my goldilocks for a while. Had to get through some major driver issues before it was stable but I loved it. Very recently moved to fedora because I wanted the latest updates without being on a edge distro

[-] Clearwater@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Arch, because I use niche software and the AUR doesn't always get along with Manjaro very well (ungoogled-chromium-bin is the worst offender). Switched to arch, configured it identically to my manjaro install, and all has been well.

[-] boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net 0 points 3 months ago

I tried ChromeOS today, and while it looks awesome, has some really great UI elements and integrations, I would still say uBlue with KDE Plasma comes close to it.

I would prefer sane atomic updates though, like twice a month. Fedora is not that good in that regard, you want to update every day as you get fixes every day.

Also, OCI images are consuming tons of bandwidth currently, so ostree is still better.

[-] turbowafflz@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

For me it's either OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Arch and I can never decide which. Tumbleweed having snapper and YaST everything out of the box is amazing but sometimes I miss the AUR, and Zypper is so much slower than Pacman. I also really like Fedora Silverblue on my laptop but I don't think I could use it on my main system.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works -3 points 3 months ago

Great question. Right up there with "what's the best movie" or "which meal should I order". Maybe you want to ask which editor is the best too?

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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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