What Linux Operating Systems do you like?

Timber · 25 Nov 2023 at 12:26

alexakasloth said:
@Timber perhaps a lighter distro may be better, Mint or Xubuntu?

Ty for the suggestion. My comment on Snaps was more my experience of them. Fedora has been running well on the n4020 Lenovo duet. But as mentioned before I am probably going to move this machine over to Arch w/Gnome as well to mirror the Minisforum so both PCs are Arch.

Gnome seems to work well with knowing when the keyboard is detached and being more like a tablet with auto rotate etc. (even if it isn't critical to me).

Ice Tea · 28 Nov 2023 at 08:58

I've been running without snaps but i plan on giving them another go on a vanilla install of Ubuntu to see how they are now.

Timber · 1 Dec 2023 at 20:48

Well I think my adventures in hardcore Linux are over for a bit. Arch doesn't want to play ball.

On my Lenovo Duet 3i it simply won't get past an archinstall error. Can't work out what the error is although part of me wonders if it's to do with the emmc storage.
On my week old Minisforum UM 480 XT install, which had been going well, I've had a few probs. A garbled grub screen when rebooting - goes red and black like there's a hardware fault, I can't update grub to remember the last boot and I've been locked out of the machine once with it claiming I'd had too many password errors (hadn't entered anything). Even with installing cups Arch won't see my HR printer correctly (Fedora does). And then today I went to install balena-etcher from the AUR and it proceeds to download around 30gb of files plus take forever to complete the install. In the end I did a ctrl-c interrupt as it made the PC hit temps I hadn't seen before (71C).

I do love the concept of Arch, it being community backed and the 'leanness' of it. But I think it needs more time than I really have to understand it, or more knowledge to fine tune and maintain. Fedora seems to work out of the box and is more stable on both the PCs I've tried and therefore I am back to Fedora 39 on both.

Retro6 · 9 Dec 2023 at 23:02

I've gone back to using Windows 10 unless its an older PC but then again I also dabble with DOS and experiment with FreeDOS on systems too new for anything retro but too old to run a modern Linux system.

ristac · 12 Dec 2023 at 17:29

Another I am following as considering ditching Windows

Ice Tea · 16 Dec 2023 at 10:01

ristac said:
Another I am following as considering ditching Windows

When try Linux for the first time things can seem cack-handed, don't let that put you off as with time you can configure things how you want.

Amleto · 6 Jan 2024 at 18:15

Been thinking about setting up a dual boot, distros that interest me are opensuse or nixos

Bluecube · 6 Jan 2024 at 18:20

Try them in a VM first. Dual boots are great once you’re happy with a distro but can get messy if you’re swapping and resintalling multiple distros.

warren_1979 · 10 Jan 2024 at 17:17

I've come full circle. I started with Ubuntu when it was Unity in 2013. Then I hopped over to KDE and then Mate for a while but now I have come back to Ubuntu. I think I will stay with Ubuntu for a long while as it's all I really need in a desktop. I like the simplicity and efficiency of it.

Earth[Tera].bin · 10 Jan 2024 at 17:55

Not a fan of the most recent Gnome incarnation myself, seems all over the place. KDE is usually my goto and is nice but finding it a bit dated too, which is funny because you can distros hop all you want but usually the desktop environment is the same.

In saying that I've been trying out Budgie desktop of late on Nixos, nice and light and Nixos makes it really to switch between DE/WM so I've been revisiting them all of late.

Windows feels less and less of a personal desktop these days so I'm trying to stay away from it as much as possible and tried the usual distro suspects. Also revisited Gentoo after about 12 years, and I actually still enjoy the whole installation process, but nowadays the benefits of a source based distro are hard to justify without the same hardware constraints. Same issue with Funtoo, so Arch is probably the one I'll end u with.

FreeBSD, is another favourite I enjoy tinkering with but with Proxmox on my server and preferring Linux as a desktop it doesn't get much of a look in these days.

Scott C · 11 Jan 2024 at 09:14

Earth[Tera].bin said:
Not a fan of the most recent Gnome incarnation myself, seems all over the place. KDE is usually my goto and is nice but finding it a bit dated too, which is funny because you can distros hop all you want but usually the desktop environment is the same.

In saying that I've been trying out Budgie desktop of late on Nixos, nice and light and Nixos makes it really to switch between DE/WM so I've been revisiting them all of late.

Windows feels less and less of a personal desktop these days so I'm trying to stay away from it as much as possible and tried the usual distro suspects. Also revisited Gentoo after about 12 years, and I actually still enjoy the whole installation process, but nowadays the benefits of a source based distro are hard to justify without the same hardware constraints. Same issue with Funtoo, so Arch is probably the one I'll end u with.

FreeBSD, is another favourite I enjoy tinkering with but with Proxmox on my server and preferring Linux as a desktop it doesn't get much of a look in these days.

That’s interesting as I’ve always found GNOME to be the more coherent desktop environment

Ice Tea · 11 Jan 2024 at 09:44

Gnome with dash to panel (and setting it to ungroup applications with icons set as launchers) pretty much gives you a old windows style bottom panel.

That's all i use now.

Earth[Tera].bin · 11 Jan 2024 at 10:19

Scott C said:
That’s interesting as I’ve always found GNOME to be the more coherent desktop environment

I prefer Mate over the unity shell. Just something about the Unity's UI i don't find appealing.

Ice Tea · 12 Jan 2024 at 09:15

System76's COSMIC Desktop Working Toward Its Alpha Release - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

Summer release.

thebennyboy · 14 Jan 2024 at 16:25

I've been using Nobara Linux, a gaming orientated & modified version of Fedora. Gave up on Windows 11 & so far i haven't looked back.

Buffalo2102 · 16 Jan 2024 at 22:16

Been using Endeavour OS for quite a while but it got borked from an update. I'll recover it some time but decided to give a few other distros a try. Ended up with Manjaro (KDE Plasma) which seems to have had a bit of criticism on line lately but I've found it fabulous.

Everything has worked out 'of the box', including Steam and all the Steam games I've tried. I've successfully used a number of Windows apps and games through Bottles. If you haven't tried Bottles yet I recommend it highly. Far easier to use than Wine or Lutris and works better too.

pete910 · 16 Jan 2024 at 22:43

Buffalo2102 said:
Ended up with Manjaro (KDE Plasma) which seems to have had a bit of criticism on line lately but I've found it fabulous.

Manjaro gets a bad wrap tbh, You will only have issues if you use enable the AUR repo and NOT taking notice of what you are installing! Or more importantly what dependencies it requires.

Buffalo2102 · 16 Jan 2024 at 22:47

Yea agreed. I pay really close attention to updates now and use Timeshift liberally!

Ice Tea · 26 Jan 2024 at 08:42

Well that sucks, kernel 6.6 will no longer work with Nvidia legacy.

Mr Oxide · 27 Jan 2024 at 19:03

Currently using Pop_OS as main Linux Distro. It on my Gen 3 Strix Arion. It runs decent on that USB drive.

My USB stick has many like Manjaro, Kali, Mint, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian

I may look into the gaming side on POP but likely just stick to Windows 10 Pro for that as pretty much every game is installed.