What Linux Operating Systems do you like?

Soldato
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Been looking at Nabora in a VM seems ok, only distro I have found that does fractional scaling out of the box, just I find everytime I swap to Linux I get frustrated with it not doing things out of the box I think it should be able to.

Might dig out a spare SSD and give it another go
 
Associate
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After hopping around distros a bit, I’ve settled on Fedora 40 (Gnome).
Getting everything working nicely with my nvidia card has been a bit of a challenge, but it’s playing nicer now that the latest 555 beta driver has explicit sync support.
 
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Associate
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I keep seeing 555 and explicit sync support, what is it and why is it important?
It's a relatively significant improvement to how screens are rendered, especially for Wayland.

It varies across hardware configs (using an Nvidia card) but everyone should see performance improvements as it's a more optimised protocol, and should see more consistency across apps - gaming was a big issue on Wayland for some.
 
Soldato
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It's a relatively significant improvement to how screens are rendered, especially for Wayland.

It varies across hardware configs (using an Nvidia card) but everyone should see performance improvements as it's a more optimised protocol, and should see more consistency across apps - gaming was a big issue on Wayland for some.
Ah ok thankyou, is Wayland like KDE and Gnome?
 
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Ah ok thankyou, is Wayland like KDE and Gnome?
KDE and GNOME are desktop environments, whereas X11 and Wayland are compositors/display protocols.

Wayland is meant to replace X11 as the newer/better display protocol and window manager. It's basically how stuff gets displayed on your screen and how your system manages multiple screens, switching between screens, etc.

A lot of people still use X11 because of things like explicit sync missing for Nvidia systems, which slows adoption and impacts app developers.
 
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Soldato
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Been back on the distro hopping of late, in no particular order - Archlinux, Gentoo, NixOS, Fedora, Artix,Opensuse,PopOS, Kubuntu etc etc. Settled on Gentoo for a while, up and running in 30 mins - compiling these days is not the ballache it was 10 years ago. The only issue I had was with grub and UEFI, I had to add the argument '--removable' to the grub-install command in order to get the kernel detected.

Then I moved onto NixOS and had a little play around, nice and clean idea but it looks quite a heavy bit of reading/learning where as I had quite a bit of history with Gentoo. So flakes and all that stuff seems a bit daunting. So after trying out a few others I'm currently on Fedora, although I'm not a big fan of Gnome and miss the traditional window management. Maybe try another DE/WM with Fedora before hoping back on the distro trail.
 
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When you consider how the Debian community originally reacted to systemd this is an amazing change.

I mean, they're only potentially adding it in as an option for expert mode at the moment, and it may not even get that far. It's nice to have alternatives, even if people don't like systemd, I'm all for multiple choices. Debian has always been about supporting multiple options. Just read the thread on the Debian mailing list, and no controversy in the slightest as of yet.
 
Soldato
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It might just be me, but I find Ubuntu to be a really easy go to desktop replacement. If you're a bit newb, there is nearly always an article online to work out how to do something.

Second that. Also Linux Mint if you want a Windows like layout for familiarity.

I'm pretty much set, I think, but as I won't be touching W11 I'll need to pop a distro on my OH's laptop within the next year and I'm thinking Mint will be the way to go.

Dabbled with several distros over the years but Ubuntu and Mint have always seemed the best contenders to switch a Windows user over from.

I'm going to wait until the next release (July-ish time I think?) and start getting her used to Mint.

Seem sensible?
 
Associate
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I think that the choice of desktop environment has more to do with it than the distro itself. I find KDE on most distributions is easy to use when coming from Windows. Gnome is a bit trickier to get used to though.

Having said that, they can all be made to look and act more like windows, if that's what you want and are prepared to put in the time. It's part of the fun, right?
 
Soldato
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To be fair, Linux and pointless kind of go hand in hand with all of the distros and choices nowadays :D

Exactly, admittedly i've not used either Devuan or MX Linux for a few years but i always felt that MX Linux was doing a better job of running Debian with sysVinit.
 
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Whenever I have a new laptop or computer to install linux on, I'm drawn towards the ease of install of Debian, but then I use it and realise I should install Arch instead! The ease of installing software on Arch post install makes it so much more useful to me than the hour or so I save by taking the easy Debian install. So many packages available with arch and then there's the user repo where people setup install scripts (which you can read yourself if you're worried) and easily install so many more items.
 
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