What Linux Operating Systems do you like?

Throrik said:
been playing around with Alpine with musl etc
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As much as i love Alpine it seems to be a pain like Arch linux that there always seems to something that needs to be installed or configured for even the most simple things.

Samba , ntfs‑3g for example that you just take for granted on full glibc desktops like Ubuntu, and if you can't find a Musl work around and have to use flatpaks for glibc then the bloat and flatpak latency sort of makes musl pointless.

Yet saying that, there is something sort addictive about Alpine linux. :)
 
Retro6 said:
I'm also looking for a desktop OS that can run Zello which is an Android app that will be on 24/7 that will be running an internet linked radio repeater. I've tried things like Android x86 but not reliable.
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Is this a private channel as i thought Zello died years ago?
 
Throrik said:
Kali overall is a bit of an odd choice - it's very much designed to be a pentest/ceh distro - not that you can't frankenstein any distro into anything. I also highly disagree with Linux being mostly aimed at newer hardware, maybe if you want to run DEs which are badly optimised, have more animations than a Pixar movie and are so incredibly bloated that they have a role in the Nutty Professor movie. My Debian still boots <150MiB of memory. Also been playing around with Alpine with musl etc, that's well under <100MiB. But again not necessarily aimed at desktop usage.

I'll probably always recommend Debian Stable for Linux because it's just stable, but depends completely on if you're running bleeding edge hardware, as it does cater for stability and not cutting edge. I've never had any problems but my hardware is all getting a bit long in the tooth anyway.
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I do like Kali because it offers some useful tools, but a Debian stable light weight basic minimal desktop environment with essentials & driver support without the unnecessary bloat & eye candy would be most ideal.
 
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Ice Tea said:
As much as i love Alpine it seems to be a pain like Arch linux that there always seems to something that needs to be installed or configured for even the most simple things.

Samba , ntfs‑3g for example that you just take for granted on full glibc desktops like Ubuntu, and if you can't find a Musl work around and have to use flatpaks for glibc then the bloat and flatpak latency sort of makes musl pointless.

Yet saying that, there is something sort addictive about Alpine linux. :)
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The sad reality of my life is that I use basically nothing with a hard requirement on glibc haha. I'm not hardcore anti-systemd or anything, but having all the tools easily available to run another init system is also nice. I just like niche alternatives. Alpine, OpenBSD I think I'll have to do some Slackware or GNU Hurd soon.
 
Throrik said:
The sad reality of my life is that I use basically nothing with a hard requirement on glibc haha. I'm not hardcore anti-systemd or anything, but having all the tools easily available to run another init system is also nice. I just like niche alternatives. Alpine, OpenBSD I think I'll have to do some Slackware or GNU Hurd soon.
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Sounds like you do some interesting things. I've been looking into OpenBSD for OpenSMTPD (I know it is available on other platforms but feel it would be easier to use on OpenBSD. Also firewalls etc.
 
Throrik said:
The sad reality of my life is that I use basically nothing with a hard requirement on glibc haha. I'm not hardcore anti-systemd or anything, but having all the tools easily available to run another init system is also nice. I just like niche alternatives. Alpine, OpenBSD I think I'll have to do some Slackware or GNU Hurd soon.
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The funny thing is even if you do have a requirement of glibc, the best way I found to get a minimal working glibc environment is to install fedora-toolbox via distrobox on alpine. Sounds dumb, but that has a lower memory footprint than anything else I could get working (and that was important as this was fully in RAM). None of the small distros based on glibc would boot on my hardware (slitaz and tinycore come to mind as the most promising of those), and the minimal live images of "normal" distros far exceeded the alpine+distrobox footprint. If anyone has suggestions I'm open to them. Didn't try LFS because I don't have an entire weekend to waste.
 
I like the ideas of Distros like TinyCore Plus where you start off with the basics and just add your own things to build your own distro. I liked some of the older ones like DSL which is no longer about and that was under 50MB. I would like to recreate a RISC OS style Acorn distro and possibly a Plum OS for laughs but fully functional and useful with my own custom menus/task bars etc etc.
 
I've been dual booting Ubuntu with Windows for years, and it's been fine. Not great, but much better than Windows. I was planning to upgrade to the new LTS next week, with a clean install, so figured I may as well wipe my old install a bit early and play with some other distros.

Now running CachyOS with COSMIC, and it's crazy how good it is. It's so snappy, things work as I expect them to after a bit of setup, and I love the tiling. Think I'll be running this for a while. It's a 6 year old laptop (Ryzen 4700U) and it absolutely flies.
 
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I last tried Slackware in 2008 on an old Pentium 4 machine and it was about 30MB in file size. I ran it from the CD ROM I don't think it had an install feature it was just a live Linux desktop environment. The old version of Puppy Linux was quite good which was just over 70MB in file size. I do recall there was also a TV Linux where you can turn an old computer into an internet TV/Media player it may have been a version of Gentoo Linux.
 
I've got a Panasonic ToughBook CF-19 Dual Core 2 processor, 4GB RAM 256 SSD Windows 10... these laptops wasn't built for performance so they have always been a bit clunky and slow and considering the old specifications even Windows 10 will struggle slightly.

I'm gonna try out some Linux Distros on this but I'm going to install it to an external USB SSD rather than the internal SSD. I will go for light weight small Distros for best results. I think there is already XUbuntu already installed on the external USB SSD but its many years old and outdated.

I might give Tiny Core another bash.
 
I'm going to give Debian a shot once Windows 10 end of support is finished later this year. I will try Debian 12 "Bookworm" and Debian 13 "Trixie" I've downloaded the ISO images for both. They look nice and basic and file size was under 800MB on both. I'm assuming these are the Desktop environment versions...

Edit: So I understand now its a net install which is fine, it uses Gnome 48 which looks a bit intense, I just want the very basic of desktop environment so its not eating up unnecessary system resources, I could really do without the eye candy so I may need help to customize it all once installed.
 
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Retro6 said:
I'm going to give Debian a shot once Windows 10 end of support is finished later this year. I will try Debian 12 "Bookworm" and Debian 13 "Trixie" I've downloaded the ISO images for both. They look nice and basic and file size was under 800MB on both. I'm assuming these are the Desktop environment versions...

Edit: So I understand now its a net install which is fine, it uses Gnome 48 which looks a bit intense, I just want the very basic of desktop environment so its not eating up unnecessary system resources, I could really do without the eye candy so I may need help to customize it all once installed.
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If you use the text installer you should be able to pick from a variety of DEs such as XFCE or other lighter-weight desktops. I haven't used that specific installer on Debian for a while, so not sure which options are available, I just do an advanced shell install and install packages myself. I'd recommend ignoring 12 and going straight to 13 though, the good thing about Debian is it's super stable.
 
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