I’m wondering if a distro like the one I’m looking for even exists:
- simple as in KISS and vanilla. This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much, as well as OpenSUSE, where systems administration relies on GUI tools too much and the package manager is even more complex.
- fixed release (excludes everything Arch-based)
So from the major distros, only Fedora is left as an option, where I really don’t know enough about it. Is it possible to do a minimal install of it? Is it built around a GUI app store? Does it rely on Flatpak like Ubuntu does with Snap?
Or are there other distros out there that I’m not aware of? Basically everything from the past 5 years I have no experience with. I’ve heard good things about NixOS, but it sounds weird as a daily driver.
What on God’s green flat earth are these requirements??
What about apt do you find too complex? I guess what are you defining as 'complex"?
I’m terms of package management you’ll be hard pressed to find anything that requires less work that apt, yum, zypper or their various GUIs.
Debian is the most vanilla distro you can get and you are excluding it out of the gate because of apt. So it would be helpful for all of us to understand your complexity issues with apt (and zypper).
It was my first distro and I miss it a lot. Simplicity and stability are main selling points
Preach!
What about apt do you find too complex? I guess what’s re you defining as 'complex"?
The fact that it has recommended and suggested dependencies, meta-packages and virtual packages, that installing a package ad then removing it again often leaves your system in a different state than before, that it has 7 different default front-ends for different tasks, …
Debian is the most vanilla distro you can get
Debian packages often deviate significantly from upstream.
This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much
This isn’t even remotely true.
Also going with Debian + GNOME Software + Flatpak isn’t a bad ideia at all. Unlike Snaps, Flatpaks are fast you won’t notice delays and waste 10GB of RAM for each application you want to use. And at the end of the day you get rock solid Debian + the latest and greatest software as Flatpaks without “deviation from upstream” and you also keep a clean system.
You’ve picked pretty stupid criteria, but if you’re adamant on it, as another commenter said Slackware is probably one of the best options.
Fedora dances with Flatpak quite a bit, but you could double check if RHEL does (since that’s what Fedora is based on).
Again, while Slackware (and possibly RHEL) fit your criteria, your criteria seems pretty silly, and you’re likely to walk into bigger (and harder to solve) problems on more obscure platforms.
Slackware. It’ll take a bit of getting used to but it meets your criteria.
I have the same recommendation, try slack out it really feets.
But I think it will be like Genie fullfiling your wishes - you don’t really know what you are looking for, but it might really suit you.
How is apt too complex? And which is simple then?
It has recommended and suggested dependencies, meta-packages and virtual packages, installing a package and then removing it again often leaves your system in a different state than before, it has 7 different default front-ends that can break your system if you switch which one you use, …
Pacman and Slackpkg are examples of simple package managers.
Pacman has all of those as well.
If apt is too complex for you, I don’t know what to tell you…
I feel like you’re confusing “hard to use” with “complex”.
Apt is extremely complex under the hood, which shows when you try to build a package for it, or install a package with many dependencies then remove it again, leaving traces behind, or when you break your system by using different front-ends (apt, apt-get, aptitude, synaptic) which are all included in the default installation, but handle dependencies differently.Most modern package managers have that level of complexity tho… That dependency tracking can take a lot of computation.
Maybe a notable exception would be Slackware package manager, but you won’t find what you’d expect from modern package manager (e.g. dependency resolving, autoremove package).
I find building packages with Gentoo to be much simpler than with Debian. Probably this is due to the fact that Gentoo users would regularly build their packages, unlike Debian.
I also learned Debian automatically generate dependency list by scanning the binaries of each package to see what dynamic libs it links. Bet that does add to the complexity by much.
Slackware is obvious choice, exactly what you are looking for.
It was my first distro and I miss it a lot. Simplicity and stability are main selling points.
After a hiatus in Mac and windows land, I came back into Linux a with similar wishlist.
It’s quite a diversion, but I actually went with FreeBSD. Now it’s not Linux but with the separation of base system and packages, you get a stable base that is released at a pretty fixed consistent schedule.
For packages you can pick from quarterly or weekly update schedule, so you can have a stable base OS with bleeding edge software. The binary package manager is easy to use, but if you want more control you can opt for building from source as well.
The init system is BSD based so all main config goes into a single rc.conf file, very easy to understand and work with.
Most mainstream applications such as Firefox, postgresql, nginx etc are just a
pkg installaway and it natively supports zfs (even as root fs) which was one of the reasons I got really interested in it 10 years ago.Of course, there is software, especially some younger projects that don’t support FreeBSD. So while there are thousands of packages available, some Linux only applications won’t work.
Personally, I would pick FreeBSD any time that the software I require supports it. I only run Linux (settled on pop is for now) if the software I need requires it.
Thank you for one of the few helpful answers in this thread.
I haven’t used it myself, and admittedly am entirely unfamiliar, but a buddy put popos on something recently and was talking about how smooth and simple it was. Might be worth a gander.
PopOS is Debian based, which has apt as a package manager (OP no likey likey).
Slackware is the solution then clearly.
On OpenSuse, sudo zypper install package-name
Not too complex if you ask me.
complexity =/= ease of use
You complained about reliance on GUI tools, so you’re going to have to explain how that isn’t easy to use if folk are to help you. What is the issue with that for you?
Most stuff on opensuse, you can also do on command line. Having a GUI to help people who like a GUI doesn’t mean people who like command line aren’t facilitated.
Have you tried macos? Seriously though, in Debian you just type ‘sudo apt install program,’ that is about as simple as it gets. Also opensuse allows you to not install yast with like 2 clicks in the installer, and all the GUI tools are just wrappers for terminal tools that they also include. I am not saying this to be insulting, but I honestly don’t think you know enough about Linux to know what you are looking for. If you do want to try Linux, just try a beginner distro like mint.
Edit: upon reading some comments, I see that you mean apt is complicated under the hood, not difficult to use. You could try gentoo if you don’t mind long installs. It compiles from source so that is about as simple as package management gets.
Seriously though, in Debian you just type ‘sudo apt install program,’ that is about as simple as it gets.
I know apt is easy to use, but it definitely isn’t SIMPLE.
It has apt, apt-get, aptitude, synaptic and an app store as frontends, and some of them handle dependencies differently or work differently in scripts, so you need to know which to use and avoid mixing them. It has recommended and suggested dependencies. It has meta-packages, virtual packages, package groups, different repo branches seperated into categories. It has blacklisting, apt-pinning, holding back packages. You can set how aggressively it should resolve dependencies and it allows mixing releases.
I know I can do the most basic stuff with “apt update” etc. but try creating a package with dependencies for it and then maintain it across releases.Good point with the various frontends, but please refer to my edit.
Debian apt repositories is too complex?!?
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I am 100% serious when I say pick one off of this list: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
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“Hard to use” isn’t an issue for me. I simply dislike rolling release distros.
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Yeah, NixOS has both stable and rolling release channels so you can choose which you want to use, and you can even use unstable packages while on the stable channel. And you can just not update for a couple months and it’ll be fine.
