I highly recommend you look into OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It is by far my favourite rolling release distro and knocks Arch Linux out of the park.
What Linux Operating Systems do you like?
- Thread starter Retro6
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Associate
I did try OpenSUSE tumbleweed, albeit it about 5 years ago, and I found the software available in the default repos at the time severely lacking. It's also a case of when you've used something for so long it's hard to move elsewhere. I do like having a look at other distros every now and then, even OpenBSD, but that's mostly for fun rather than for using on my daily driver.
OpenBSD is fantastic as a firewall machine. pf is just so much easier (at least in my opinion). FreeBSD is interesting as well as it also supports pf but also comes with ZFS.
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Arch install isn't too bad these days but you could always try Manjaro. Really easy to install, KDE6 looks great and you have access to the AUR for apps. Fantastic for gaming too!
Soldato
I really want to get into daily driving a BSD for a few months, I love them as simple servers, love jails and love the simple software implementations.
Associate
I think OpenBSD is a good choice for daily driver. Seems to work well for most general purpose applications. FreeBSD seems more suited to a server, it can obviously be a desktop but you see a lot of reports of issues and annoyances. Plus there are others... NetBSD, DragonFly and all sorts!
Soldato
Only thing putting me off is lack of Bluetooth on OpenBSD. I use a Bluetooth mouse, would need to find a good wired one.
Associate
But when you run OpenBSD, it's all terminals, vi and tiling window managers...mice aren't needed!
The one thing I've never understood about the BSDs is why they only supply vi and not vim or neovim. As far as I am aware the licenses are compatible.But when you run OpenBSD, it's all terminals, vi and tiling window managers...mice aren't needed!
If it is for backwards compatibility then supplying vi and neovim separately would work.
Associate
I suspect a combination of, because we've always done that, minimising packages, some people want emacs or ed or nano or whatever instead. I recently installed Debian 12 and that didn't come with vim preinstalled either, so not necessarily just a BSD thing.
Soldato
But when you run OpenBSD, it's all terminals, vi and tiling window managers...mice aren't needed!
I am fully tiling window manager and vim already, but one thing I have never managed to replace the mouse with is my web browser. I know you can use vim keybindings on them, but I am very much still a mouse user for browsers.
You mean Ed right?
Soldato
I never really got to grips with vi / vim (and never really put a lot of effort into it to be fair). It always reminds me of the old DOS-based versions of WordPerfect for some reason. Nano, on the other hand, is a much simpler text editor that is unlikely to confuse those trying to switch from Windows. I know vi is supposed to be much more powerful but it's just unnecessarily confusing for a lot of people
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I keep trying it - did a full NeoVim setup and then I just get frustrated and go back to VSCode.I never really got to grips with vi / vim (and never really put a lot of effort into it to be fair). It always reminds me of the old DOS-based versions of WordPerfect for some reason. Nano, on the other hand, is a much simpler text editor that is unlikely to confuse those trying to switch from Windows. I know vi is supposed to be much more powerful but it's just unnecessarily confusing for a lot of people
Soldato
Vim or Emacs are worth learning if you can put the time into it. I'm not amazing at Vim but fairly good, some of the things I've seen people do with it is crazy, macros especially.
It takes persistence and time to get there though.
It takes persistence and time to get there though.
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If you install the Neovim extension in VSCode you get the best of both worlds.
Associate
After a lot of distro hopping I settled on Fedora (gnome).
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Thanks for sharing, some useful stuff, although mostly as your own resource I guess.
Not to provoke further hopping, but why not consider turning your notes into something like a script or an Ansible playbook so you can automate a lot of the process or in my opinion what is even better is the declarative configuration of NixOS, which has many other benefits including a great base of package support. Then you can recreate the setup easily, even across machines etc. Not sure if that’s needed but I find setting up my machine by just declaring a config is amazing. I’m still working on adding more to the mix in terms of other configs for apps etc. It feels like the future to me, not sure why it’s not more popular.
I’m using GNOME too, I find it works pretty smoothly and gets the job done.
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