Fuck it, give me your most OVERRATED Distros

Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.

Wait they just include lines of advertisements or something in the command line??

What??

ads in the server version (CLI)

Dude, what?

I see it is in motd, but is it dynamic? I mean does it fetch new ad when needed?

Although, speaking as a fan of Mint who used it as my "daily driver" for years, I think the time has come for them to switch from Ubuntu to Debian and embrace Wayland. I know that, if I'd stayed with Mint, I've have gone to LMDE by now.

indeed. Mint became what Ubuntu used to be, afaik.

I've never really used Ubuntu or Mint. I think I've installed both in VM but that's it.

I'm gonna say "no", but just by personal preference.
I agree that, if you're skilled enough, 90% of distributions out there are completely useless once Arch and Debian are available.

I've used Arch on many different computers over the years. It's not stable, it breaks. I don't understand why it's great. Debian (minimal install) is better.

Snap is container Software. It's a program that runs software in an isolated area. Snaps is made by canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. And it's really hatred because, IIRC, it's very slow and not completely open source

Manjaro still hasn't broken once for me. I probably have more AUR packages than ones from the official repos at this point, and I've used the three branches it offers.

It's fine. I have a dozen installs of it out in the wild, with very illiterate users, and have had almost no calls from them for problems in the 5+ years that they've been using it.

Everyone likes to hate Manjaro, but frankly it's bulletproof.

Aaaaand.... commence the downvoting.

Manjaro is fine. Ran it for a year straight before I broked it.

My 2 cents is this. Don't install from AUR unless you have to. Thats how i broked my manjaro install when i was uninstalling packages to fix a bad install. So my install order to protect myself is:

Main Repo

Flatpak (if its not a system tool like an IDE)

AUR

I personally found Manjaro to be pretty nice, but i do have a lot of linux experience

Manjaro is amazing ( for a while ).

RIP

Great, just in time. Uninstall it and try a serious distro like Fedora or Opensuse TW

Honestly straight arch was more stable for me. I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn't break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn't even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated

Stable is a vague concept but Manjaro takes more time than Arch to update software versions. To me both are rock solid.

Arch is supposed to be used, it is a normal distribution. It is not hard, it is simple. That's its whole philosophy.

It is only difficult if you are new to Linux, because it doesn't hold your hands and has no opinion about a lot of things hence you must make many decisions yourself and configure everything like you need it. You have to know what you need and want.

The notion of a difficult distro for the sake of it is ridiculous. Who would ever want to use it? Arch is popular, because it is easy to use, but lets you configure the system to your desires for the most part.

10 years ago the installer dumped you out in the CLI and you had to run pacman -S kde (or whatever your desktop environment was), so that was much more of a "DIY but with good tools and the best wiki" kind of deal.

But yeah, agreed. These days it's pretty dang easy.

You are saying that the elitist reputation of Arch overblown. I agree. It is not that Arch it self is overrated though. Arch is awesome ( and not as “hard” as people make it out to be - we agree on that ).

My favourite distro right now is EndeavourOS and that is just easier to install Arch.

@polygon @valentino @turkalino it’s kinda funny. Arch is like 2 steps away from just being a normal distro. Which is why Endeavor and Steam OS work so well. Just add some functions to take care of things like mirrors or installing the AUR or whatever and it’s a perfectly noob friendly distro. People got indignant about Arch install being added but at the end of the day I’d bet that most arch users at this point have the same defaults

Well, most people installing Arch for the first time have no idea what a typical Linux install does under the hood. That makes it a worthwhile learning experience. The same commands you use during the setup you can later use to fix or change things. It basically forces you to become a somewhat proficient Linux user.

Which GPU are you using?

I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.

The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.

BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).

In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.

Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).

Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.

obligatory I use Arch btw.

Some people needs recent packages. This is the main point of Arch IMO.

Oh, I totally agree. If I was going to recommend an Arch derivative with an easier installer, Endeavor would be the one.

I still think, though, if you're looking for an "easy way to install Arch," you're gonna be happier with a different distro. Fedora or OpenSuse Tumbleweed maybe.

Python works, it's pip that doesn't work because it's trying to install stuff into an immutable distro

Mostly, I agree. Use one of the derivatives if you're not ready for Arch itself. But, Manjaro has legitimate criticisms against it. They've made mistakes in the past which makes it hard to trust them and holding back packages for "stability" will eventually break your system if you start mixing in the AUR.

ETA: Here is a different link, since the original doesn't seem to be working for me anymore.

Maybe. Mint came first, and I wonder what purposes those other ones were trying to serve. I don't know or care enough about the others. Do they differentiate enough to bother with?

I think the main issue with Arch comes if you try to use it like Debian Stable. Like, if you don't run pacman -Syu for a year, you probably won't have a bootable system the next time you try. How about six months? My guess is you'd still be stuck fixing shit. Where is the safe "X" in "as long as I update every X, I'll be fine?" Who knows. That's not a very well-defined problem.

I sort of understand the issue here. I use Arch because I'm picky about system things, and it seems to require going against the fewest strongly held platform opinions in order to get it the way I want it. In an ideal world, I'd get it set up that way and not need to touch it very much afterwards. Arch requires frequent touches. Fortunately, almost none of them require any real mental energy, and I'm willing to do the occasional bit of "real work" if needed to keep it going, but that's a trade-off that may be more painful for some than others.

I imagine it's a pacman keyring issue. I had it break on me on multiple occasions, on different machines, all after not having updated for a long-ish while.

I don't get this either. Before my current PC, my last install was 6 years old. I could count on one hand the number of times I broke that install and every single time was my own damn fault.

I had Manjaro on a laptop that didn't get updated for about a year. Broken on update because I didn't check Arch news first to see if manual intervention was needed. Was still faster to fix than a backup-reinstall.

Countless other installs of Arch or derivatives on various PCs and laptops without issue.

There can definitely be more of a learning curve but once you're set, I find it much easier to maintain than other distros. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I got it the day it came out so it was the wild west. I think to get it to work on Arch I figured out you needed to compile the new llvm or something, and I just gave up at that point. Fedora Silverblue on the rawhide branch had everything for it, and as soon as 37 was caught up I just re-based on that branch and have been good ever since. Ubuntu did have some other issue I don't remember, not a new enough kernel maybe.

I love System 76 but I hate modified GNOME anything. That's why I always use Fedora. When Cosmic DE comes out I'll give it a shot.

That is most likely an Arch-thing rather than a Manjaro-thing.

I think one of the issues with nixos learning materials is that they eschew talking about how to write your own packages. but to really understand anything, you have to get your head around writing and modifying packages. in nix, a package is just a build step that can do I/O during particular phases and produces an output to the nix store, so they're an essential building block for anything that isn't utterly trivial.

the other major stumbling block is working out how modules (the things that let you write config for the system) can actually be composed. adding a new module to imports gives you new config params you can set so you can organize your system config in terms of modules and packages to make things work the way you like.

Nix Pills are the canonical learning material for packages. I don't know of any good learning material for modules - I learned by working on nixpkgs and another involved project that made extensive use of modules.

lastly, nix config files are written in the nix language and it's a bit idiosyncratic. it almost looks and feels like Haskell but it's slightly different in important ways. there's no way around learning it if you have multiple systems and want to share config between them.

Between zero-to-nix.com and nixos.wiki, I think there are enough docs to get started with it quickly.

I agree that the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. If I may ask, do you remember which things caused the mental gymnastics?

Ah but then you are talking about servers? That would be a different story! The machine that I use for development (laptop) should always work (I would trust nixos with this) and if I want to spin up a container (docker run) or install an application (apt install)or change my vpn client configuration it is currently effortless and I'm not sure nixos can do that.

Actually using nixos for some of my private servers would be a nice use case...

“It’s Linux with extra work!” isn’t a convincing argument for musl based distros.

I ran FreeBSD as my desktop for a long time, and I’m quite fond of it. However, most new software is written for GNU/Linux, and I got tired of fighting against it. (I still run FreeBSD on my personal servers.)

I ran Alpine for a while, and as much as I wanted to like it, software had to be ported to it. It’s the same problem the BSDs have. Software has to be ported to them, and if that’s the case, there’s not much of a point in running Linux for me.

It’s cool people are trying an alternate libc with the Linux kernel. Alpine seems to have made some good progress on porting software, and musl has progressed from what I’ve heard.

That life isn’t for me. If I wanted that, I know where to get it.

Runit still uses shell scripts to start the services, like most alternate init systems, and I’d rather not write shell scripts for services.

There are other niceties with systemd, like timers are an upgrade over cron, as well as some very idiotic decisions, especially for the server side. Overall it’s a nice init for desktops.

It’s everything after the install I don’t have time for. The install is the easy part. 😆

There are distros which are semi-rolling (Fedora) or rolling (Tumbleweed) which make it easy to maintain the install without lots of configuration.

Of course, there's always the special cheat code called archinstall that you can invoke immediately after login if you have a wired connection. Honestly, installing GNU/Linux isn't hard, maintaining it is. Installing Gentoo is following a handbook, maintaining gentoo requires rigorous application logic and configuring.

Arch is a wiki with an association distro

Are you saying that Arch is the new Ubuntu?

They're overrated today because they were good at some time in the past and people have to catch up. As for why they're not that good right now:

Elementary OS had at some point in time perhaps the most polished and accessible user interface out of any distro out there. This was mostly due to how much time and effort they had put into their in-house Pantheon desktop environment. And if they would have continued their efforts, then it would have continued to flourish. Unfortunately it failed at keeping their momentum, this is most likely related to internal disputes. I say this because over the years a lot of important members from their team have departed. Right now; it's just a shadow of what it once used to be and the likes of GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon have far surpassed their Pantheon.

While Elementary OS is just plain bad at this point, by contrast Manjaro is actually not that bad. Arguably, it does a lot of good things; Btrfs+Timeshift being one of the big ones. However, freezing packages in a rolling release doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, it's just very unprofessional to let the SSL certificates expire. Mind you; it didn't happen just once or twice, but four times?!?! Today, if one wants a stable rolling release that holds their hands, they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed. If they want to use Arch, then they should just use Arch; archinstall exists. And if one is not able to install Arch using archinstall, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them. Finally, if they seek any kind of hand-holding, then there's a plethora of derivative distros of Arch that are as good, if not better than Manjaro. So just to make myself very clear; Manjaro is not bad, it's just overrated; people gravitate too much towards it based on old videos/articles and what not, but it doesn't deserve that gravitation in its current state.

Gentoo? LFS?

I didn't mean distro hopping. I mean people actually staying on Linux after trying it and not going back to another os.

Ubuntu, ootb works, but snap all over, and ubuntu pro ads everywhere.. I can't even reinstall the company laptop into Fedora because of their policy... In the end I wrote a piece interface cli to make me felt at home using dnf masking apt, flatpak masking snap, and any dnf or flatpak behavior, works on snap or apt.. it's nightmare, but at least help me coup with using ubuntu... cope.. COPE...

I like a pretty much stock with tweaks KDE, personally. Nice and simple, utilitarian, but not necessarily minimal.

I've never really cared for the MacOS visual style though.