I got bored 😅. So here is my second response. But please, before reading this one, consider reading my other reply first. It's a lot shorter anyways 😅.

So fundamentally, I think we're misunderstanding one another. In your defense, I can understand it; as I'm just one of the many responders and you might simply not have been able to take the time to understand what it is that I'm trying to convey and why. In my case, I think it might be related to the XY problem; i.e. you're proposing a solution (adding Distrochooser to the sidebar) for which hope will resolve an issue that remains to be stated. For all we know, you actually try to solve something else and you perceive Distrochooser in being capable of playing a vital role in that without being aware of how else the actual problem should be tackled instead.

In this reply I will try to bridge the gap that might have made you misunderstand what I tried to say in my first comment under your original post.

IMO you’re thinking too much as an advanced user for a simple user.

I think you might be absolutely right. The thing is, though, that I have never been one of those users that post a question like "Which distro?" without providing anything beyond the most basic specifics.

Some insights from my personal Linux journey

(FWIW, this is me. And this was more of a last-ditch effort in hopes of finding something to dual boot into. By contrast, for my first distro I had spent a week of my free time digging through (video-)guides and Reddit threads until I had dismissed everything besides the distro I landed on. It seems that I did a good enough job as I'm still confidently using it. And while I've used and experimented with other distros since (mostly as a dual boot), my first distro is the only one I refer to as home. And the interesting part is that I'm fully aware that chances are very slim that a random bystander would ever have suggested me (as a newbie) the use of Fedora Atomic. So by doing the research myself, I've actually enabled myself to start with my ideal distro from the get-go. And yes; that means I've revisited my choice a couple of times by now, but every revisit just made me more confident in my choice.

The only point I agree on is the NVIDIA GPU.

I therefore assume you disagree not with the entire post (as you seem to be taking a liking to DistroSea), but instead refer to the parts in which I go over some more fundamental questions. I think you've missed what I tried to say with that and have also missed the hint^[1]^ to make more clear why I even said those things.

Alright, let's dismiss for a moment that the Distrochooser's questions themselves need a lot of work done and proceed right to a 'results-screen'. This is probably how I would fill it in on an average day*. In the very first sentence, we're confronted with the word stable without giving any useful information on what this means and why this is even mentioned here. Similarly, the word unstable is used without ensuring that the (potential) newbie actually has a proper understanding of what it stands for. According to your logic^[2]^ these things shouldn't even matter! So why does Distrochooser even bother to spend a sentence on this for every one of their entries? And that's why I actually agree with you! But if Distrochooser chooses to include it, then they at least have to be precise and elaborate on what they mean with this and why the new user should care. So, to be clear, my two bullet points weren't meant as "Distrochooser should definitely somehow include these as they're vital to their choice.", but instead it was meant as "Alright, if this format for Distrochooser is chosen (with all of its faults), then the least Distrochooser should do is provide information on what the points (and used terms/words/phrases) in the 'results-screen' actually mean for the newbie user. And if it's not addressed, then this automatically discredits Distrochooser as a reliable introduction/orientation to distros for new users.". Because as it stands, a lot of the small niche distros that happen to be derivatives of Debian/Ubuntu are regarded as somehow "stable" while something like Fedora isn't. And thus the newbie that just wants a stable system will be fooled/misled into using any of those fringe distros over Fedora. Which is just straight up BS.

I’ve never heard of nor used Garuda. As I said, feel free to contribute.

Don't worry, others already took care of that. The fact that it hasn't been implemented yet just shows that this is not a productive endeavor. On that note, I didn't even notice how Garuda's more popular sibling EndeavourOS is also absent in Distrochooser's results...

Never heard of DistroSea. It seem like a good complement to ~~DistroChooser~~ anything that narrows down choice

Fixed that for you. Especially considering the fact that Distrochooser is (perhaps) more misleading than anything else. This point is a dead horse by now (at least under this post of yours), but I will be more elaborate at a later point.

DistroWatch as useful as statista.com for suggesting your next travel destination. If you had to travel somewhere and had a list of criteria, but didn’t want to spend all day researching, would you go to a travel agent or open an encyclopedia?

The response on this depends on the XY problem, therefore I will refrain from commenting on this for now.

I think many in the community, like yourself, have forgotten what it’s like to give just enough of a fuck to change something but not to want to be too invested. A beginner isn’t going to want to understand why a system is stable or not: they just want a stable system. You don’t have to explain to them “Yeah, so the configuration is a file, you see? Only you edit that file. Then you run this command that interprets the file and build a dependency tree, downloads everything necessary, to a partition that’s temporarily mounted as read-write, symlinks to…”. Nobody cares. The average user DGAF.

Imagine if you just wanted to get a vacuum cleaner at the store with 3 criteria. Imagine you don’t give a rat’s ass about vacuum cleaner. You just want to point the thing at the ground, let it succ all the bits, but as quietly as possible, and not break down in 2 years to force you back out here. But the sales person you get harps on about the genius of the person who invented some internal component you’ve never heard of, goes on to explain why, ideologically, getting a certain brand is the only way because blablablabla. Maybe you’d buy a vacuum cleaner just to shut them up or walk out of the store.

These two paragraphs are at best you misunderstanding/misinterpreting what I said and why I said those things and that's where I'll leave it (for now).

My optimal experience would be the sales person listening to me, lining up the best candidates, and explaining, in bullet points, why they are there. Then finally, ask me if I have a favorite and to give me a test environment. If I don’t understand something, I can ask more questions.

Generally-speaking, I agree with this. But I hope you're not (even remotely) insinuating that this is even remotely close to the Distrochooser experience.

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1. Hint: "I’m honestly not even sure if the one(s) responsible for writing the parts of Distrochooser even know(s) themselves" from my first reply.
2. "A beginner isn’t going to want to understand why a system is stable or not: they just want a stable system." and "Nobody cares. The average user DGAF."

It has been my pleasure 😊!

Aight. I've changed the comment a bit 😅 since. Perhaps it's more useful for you now 😉.

I can’t believe you tried

Just in case*, I'm just the middle-man that connects this specific article by Solène to the audience on Lemmy 😅. I'm sure you're aware of this, but I just wanted to make sure.

But yes, Solène has done an excellent work with her review! Which is precisely why I felt the need that it needed some more exposure 😜.

It is a little sad that OpenBSD can’t optimize by P/E cores, I have been wanting to switch to OpenBSD but obviously Linux supports the most hardware, so I stay with Linux.

Could you elaborate on your willingness to switch to OpenBSD?

It is nice that the makers NovaCustom seem to have done a good job creating a mostly open, standards compliance x86_64 computing platform.

Definitely! I feel as if they might be somewhat underappreciated currently, but I hope their efforts to open source will receive similar mainstream reach like what we've seem for System76 etc.

Also, from what I understand, they accept Monero for their laptops.

That's very cool. I didn't even know that. Thank you for mentioning that!

Hmm..., so if I understand you correctly; using /s is lazy, so I should either not try to convey sarcasm in written text or make it more clear that it's sarcasm without saying that it's sarcasm? Perhaps a better question would be: how would you formulate that one sentence? Once again, I'm genuinely curious and I'm thankful that you took the effort to type that down.

Thank you for your reply! Much appreciated ☺️!

To clarify, they do jack shit to add major hardware support (etc).

Thanks! That's the clarification that I needed.

This seems like a disingenuous response.

My apologies if it seemed that way, that wasn't my intention.

Pop isn’t adding anything much to Linux

In absolute sense, to the kernel; sure.

it’s yet another Debian derivative by way of Ubuntu.

That's where we clearly differ. It offers (arguably) the easiest installation for Nvidia drivers (which is especially useful for new users). Furthermore, it has other neat functionality like a recovery partition; which is otherwise absent on any other Linux distro (at least that I'm aware off). I agree that these things mostly benefit the new user rather than the established one. Nonetheless, even if we're not the target audience, we shouldn't be dismissive of the work that others put into their platform.

Cosmic is cool and all, but it’s mostly just eye candy for GNOME at the end of the day.

How can it be for GNOME if it's its own Desktop Environment? Sure, it relies on GTK (like most other DEs). But it's a Rust-based DE, which is (AFAIK) unique and already commendable by itself. Again, I don't understand if you're just trying to be dismissive of other people's work or just being ignorant/misinformed.

System76 also seem to still be developing working with other people skills.

While this particular case is new to me, I can't say I'm surprised. FWIW, even Linux Torvalds himself needed to put effort in self-improving themselves in this department. Therefore, I don't quite understand why you felt the need to bring this up. FWIW, I never said or implied that System76 is some holy organization that can't do anything wrong. You made a vague statement with "The support that these vendors put in for Linux is miniscule" and I only intended to point out some of their continued contributions to 'Linux'. I could have named any other Linux-first vendor, but System76 seemed to be the most renowned and that's why I went with that one.

Tuxedo still haven’t as far as I’m aware released ITE829x Linux drivers (in an upstreamable form) for example; I had to reverse engineer the damned chip.

That's unfortunate. And I think that this short paragraph is the summary of your grievances with these Linux-first vendors. And if that's the case, then it's at least worth mentioning that I'm absolutely oblivious of the challenges that you might have faced in this regard.

This sentiment made me very curious into how much laptop vendors contribute to the Linux kernel in general^[1]^. Unfortunately, there was not a lot that I could find. Perhaps I'm just very bad at looking into that kinda thing. Therefore, if you're aware of a (half-)decent way to somehow see how much effort is done by different laptop vendors in order to support hardware on Linux, then please feel free to notify me of that 😊.

Clevo hardware lacks a lot of the polish that you just quietly get from a major manufacturer.

I'd have to take your word on it as you're clearly more experienced in this regard. But would you be so kind to give an example of two comparable laptops at comparable price-points; one from Clevo and another from a major manufacturer, in which the lack of polish is clearly visible? Like, if I as an average consumer look at the review on the Schenker XMG Focus 16 found on Notebookcheck.net and compare that to the reviews of the laptops it's compared to in its verdict, then I don't notice anything significant. Note that I've mostly just skimped the reviews*.

Sorry, the 3060ti was conflating my desktop; it’s literally a 2060 which is far worse in terms of termals and power.

No problem. Thank you for clarifying!

I have this laptop. I look at the Linux offerings from these manufacturers. I contribute to them.

Thank you for your continued contributions 😊!

I’m not saying that it’s all bad

This wasn't clear in your first reply.

and you seem to be taking this as something of a personal attack.

My apologies if it came across like that, I certainly didn't intend that*. To perhaps better illustrate how I read your first reply, allow me to paste it down below:

My inner thoughts while reading your first reply

Please don’t

Alright, they're not in favor of it, which is totally fine. Let's see what they bring up.

tuxedo/system76/metabox/etc are all rebadged Clevo ODM designs.

False. (I pointed this out in my earlier reply.)

The support that these vendors put in for Linux is miniscule

Vague statement at best. But if support isn't specified as hardware support, then it's another false statement.

and the hardware is “fine” at best.

Another vague statement; but at least their alternative should be better, right?

I for one love my desktop 3700x and 3060ti mobile stuffed into a laptop chassis.

First time hearing this. Internet search didn't give me any pointers. All of their statements so far haven't been written with care, perhaps they've been smoking something. But I'll give them the benefit of doubt and ask them how this works.

No compromises were made on this hardware.

Alright, so they've somehow managed something incredible (if at all). I'm sure they'll tell us what this is and how this is not Clevo. (In retrospect, what did you actually mean with this statement?)

Conversely, Dell and Lenovo laptops tend to have very good Linux support and can be had relatively cheaply, especially if you get something that isn’t bleeding edge.

Okay, I guess that's to be expected. But I don't recall a great experience looking into their catalogue the last time. *checks*; yup, still lackluster at best (pointed to this in my earlier reply).

(Back to normal mode) So, to sum it up: I didn't like your alternatives and stated why. As to your criticism towards Linux-first vendors; 1 false statement, 1 vague statement, 1 false/vague statement. Furthermore, there was a vague description of a device which initially seemed custom at best, but in retrospect seems to be a Clevo after all 😅.

---

It’s fine to like these companies. I want them to succeed, but Clevo as an ODM tend to produce products that lack the polish of a comparable (say) Dell, and don’t achieve the same volume of sales as a major manufacturer to achieve lower costs through increased volume (etc) - the cost savings have to come from somewhere and often that’s the firmware, material design, and design quality.

Agreed. I probably couldn't have said it better. But, this doesn't mean that Dell or Lenovo (or any other major manufacturer for that matter) themselves actually accomplish in making good products. Theoretically, they should be able to produce either better (and/)or cheaper devices. However, the fact of the matter is that this simply isn't the case (or at least not substantially/significantly). The Thinkpads sold today are just an excuse compared to the Thinkpads that were sold in the past. Similarly, Dell's XPS series shook the market in the past, but now they've stuck on a bad implementation of what Apple^[2]^ deemed unworthy (talking about touch instead real keys for function keys (etc)).

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure pretty soon (probs with Meteor Lake already) Dell's and Lenovo's Linux offerings (so talking strictly about a subset of their offerings, refer to my earlier reply for the links) will at least be considerable CPU-wise. But until then, if anyone is serious about using their laptop as a proper workstation with somewhat decent battery life^[3]^, then it's simply not worth to bother with Dell (like at all) or Lenovo (unless they're willing to pay a hefty price for it).

So just to be absolutely clear. I don't categorically dismiss Dell, Lenovo or any other major manufacturer for that matter. But for OP's requirements; currently, they seem to be (at best) very expensive.

These products are fine, don’t pretend that they’re perfect though, you’re doing them a disservice.

Alright, so I suppose this is a reaction to the following statements of mine:

"Another bold claim; one which only holds true if merely Apple’s finest go beyond “fine”."

"At which point, the “fine” hardware from the Linux-first vendor not only starts to be attractive but highly desirable by comparison."

I'm sure earlier paragraphs should have been sufficient to explain my thoughts on this. But just in case; they're not perfect. But -IMO- for OP's requirements, they're at the very least worth considering.

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1. I, perhaps naively, think that contributions to the Linux kernel are most representative for hardware support. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
2. Suffice to say, Apple actually had put thought into their design. Contrary to Dell's excuse of an implementation.
3. Reminder; OP explicitly wanted this.

Np fam. In retrospect, I agree with you that I should have done a better job at making it as clear as possible ☺️.

My two cents; install uBlue's Microsoft Surface Images. Here you can find the (WIP) documentation on how it differs from other uBlue images. I'm sure the following lines should pique your interest:

• "Replaces the stock Fedora kernel with the Surface kernel
• Adds the correct kernel modules"

For installation, either refer to the dedicated page on installation (from ISO) or follow instructions on how to rebase (from an existing Fedora Atomic installation).

My personal take on what uBlue is, would be that it's how Fedora would love to ship their Atomic variants if they could ship everything without worrying about those things they can't (like hardware acceleration, codecs etc). Furthermore, uBlue even has device-specific images; which is just fantastic if you happen to own such a device.

Last, but definitely not least; it's the best platform in which the transition to Ostree Native Container has been realized. As such, this allows some very unique ways to maintain a distro. For example; if something broke (for whatever reason) on vanilla Fedora Atomic, then... well, you (the uBlue-user) wouldn't even have noticed it. Because that breakage simply never hit your device. Instead, uBlue's maintainers noticed the issue -> somehow applied changes to the image so that the image doesn't ship the issue (by either not shipping the breakage inducing update of the specific package or by shipping the workaround/fix with the image) -> the very next time you update your system (which happens automatically in the background by default) you just go on with your life as if nothing had happened in the first place 😅. So, in a sense, your system is managed such that breaking changes/updates don't hit you; while they do hit non-uBlue users.

And I haven't even touched upon how uBlue enhances tinkering or how it allows one to manage (a fleet of) self-customized images etc.

In case you're still not sure if you'd like to use a derivative rather than the original, then it's at least worth noting that uBlue is mentioned in Fedora's documentation.

Honestly, that's very encouraging! Thank you so much for providing me with very valuable insights and information! Have a good one! Cheers!

Thank you so much for your insights! Much appreciated!

Some packages haven’t been changed in 10 years, some are changed daily. It’s bleeding edge everything, and things don’t actually break that much. Lisp makes for (obviously IMO) beautiful, simple code, so most packages are a pleasure to fix, extend, or automate.

I want to have a better idea for much time is spend on 'management'; fix, extend and/or automate etc.

Great choice! But as others already have noted; if it will be used for virtualization only, then perhaps distros like Proxmox should suit you better.