Disclaimer: I know there’s a lot of questions and posts like this but generally they’re aimed at noobs. I consider myself an intermediate user, and I know generally distros don’t matter much and you can have anything another distro has on any distro but I’m looking for something a little “specific” that better suits my need from the get-go, I guess we could say that yeah. Plus hey some discussion won’t hurt Lemmy.
I come here to seek your advice oh Great Council of Linux. Please hear my cause:
The problem
Right now I use NixOS and I’m mostly happy with it, I like having everything declared on a config file I can audit to remove stuff I don’t use anymore, I like the stability it provides and the rollback feature (I only sued it once but glad to have it), automatic updates that apply when I shut down my PC (I do that often) and won’t bork everything, and I like that it generally has very up to date software even on its stable branch. I also like the possibility of using nix-shell to test a program and remove it immediately afterwards even if it leads to a messy .config folder sometimes.
However, there are some pain points especially when it comes to customization. Now, the system itself is very usable and have little complains there, it’s very rare that a package I want isn’t in the repo, and when everything works it’s great, but when it doesn’t work it’s very frustrating (mainly due to the lack of documentation and troubleshooting via the unofficial discord can be a pain). Namely on my laptop I have issues with the cursor sometime going from the catppuccin theme (on plasma 5, laptop is 23.11) to default on some context menus on X11 or only shows the theme in windows if using wayland (tho I can wait to see if it’s fixed on 24.05). I never had this on my desktop gaming PC (which used 23.11 but now switched it to unstable to have plasma 6) but I have other problems there, for example the catppuccin SDDM corners theme doesn’t apply anymore for some reason. Now I’m someone who likes to customize the looks of my desktop and I want to have consistency in my theming as much as possible so these issues are very annoying to me. On top of that to resolve the latter the official git repo of the package says to use flakes, now I know many fans of NixOS will swear flakes are cool and all but I absolutely hate them: I find them confusing, I don’t like having to deal with more stuff than just my config file and home-manager and I want to have nothing to do with them I just want to use the official packages.
Now I’m sure most of these issues aren’t exactly NixOS’s fault and maybe in 24.05 they’ll all be fixed but I’m getting very annoyed both by these problems and I found it hard to solve other problems in the past as well, and I hate that searching stuff up on ecosia, the wiki, etc doesn’t work most of the time due to how different NixOS is and while the (unoffical) discord is generally useful sometimes it cannot provide the help I need, plus most of the stuff I learn troubleshooting NixOS is specific to NixOS and doesn’t translate to other linux distros. So that’s why on one side I’m considering that maybe it’s not worth waiting till the end of the month to see if 24.05 fixes my issues (I don’t plan on staying on unstable after the release of 24.05 that’s certain) or if I should stick with it instead of wasting a day reconfiguring everything (granted home-manager is cool af but a lot of stuff I use don’t use it so it’s a one-time pain).
What I look for
Generally in a distro I look for something minimal, easily customizable and where I can use the terminal a lot for installing software and stuff (I just like the progression bars and seeing all the text go weeee accross the screen it’s so cool) tho I’m fine using some GUI stuff like the KDE settings for other stuff where the alternative is a very complex set of config files (I generally prefer keeping wonky GUIs to a minimum though so I’m fine with some config files).
More specifically, I require a distro to have out of the box:
- Plasma 6: I am moving to wayland, I love KDE Plasma for its customization and a lot of the stuff I made myself uses Qt. Maybe one day I’ll try Cosmic but rn I just like plasma 6.
- Easy to theme and configure: particularly with catppuccin
- Proton VPN: the official apps, doesn’t matter if the distro is officially supported or not by Proton
- Steam, discord, gaming stuff & proprietary stuff directly on the repo: or at least easily enabled during the installation, without jumping through hoops
- Rollback feature: be it what NixOS has, snapshots or whatever that btrfs thing is, it’s ok if I have to set it up myself if needs be, I need to learn how, but I prefer if it’s there out of the box
- Big repo
What I’d like to have but isn’t a must have:
- Minimal amount of pre-installed packages: I want to choose myself what goes on my system and don’t want to uninstall lots of things
- Being able to leave it untouched for months without risking to brick it when I update
- Decent information and help available: if I’m leaving NixOS I’d rather not deal with poor documentation
- Immutability: I generally like the stability this provides, the atomicity of the updates, etc etc just as long as it doesn’t make theming stuff like KDE (with plugins), Grub, SDDM, etc painful.
As for what I don’t like:
- Flatpaks: I prefer using system packages in general, plus I don’t like their terminal commands and I hear they’re not exactly good at following system themes. I guess I could live with them if I have to with flatseal and maybe a better terminal way to install them though.
- Snaps: I hate snaps and in my experience worked terribly, like steam not being able to detect game libraries on other hard drives etc, graphical bugs, plus their backend is proprietary and handled by canonical, see following point.
- Corporations: I don’t want my OS to be handled by a corporation, I don’t trust them so I’d rather minimize their control over the OS.
- Custom theming: this isn’t too important since I’ll customize the theme myself regardless, I just generally try to stick to a distro’s theme if there’s one cause why not. I’m only putting this here to signal I prefer something unthemed (but possibly with a cool logo)
What am I considering?
Right now I’m considering the following options:
- Stay with NixOS: Wait for 24.05 see if that fixes my issues etc
- Bazzite + Aurora: Both are Fedora uBlue spins with KDE. I’m planning on putting Bazzite on my gaming PC since everything is already set up for that and Aurora (KDE spin of Bluefin) on my laptop (I use it for gaming on occasion but it’s more for other stuff). They look cool but I’m not too familiar with them, the gripes I have, or think I will have, are flatpaks, some pre-installed stuff like vscode (I use neovim) and also that it’s a spin of Fedora, which IMO is a bit too close to Red Hat but I can live with this given these two are different from fedora and further away from RH. Also, can I use ujust to install/uninstall things? What does it do?
- OpenSUSE: I hear good things about Tumbleweed, I also know they have an immutable version but I know very little about it. I tried it in a VM for a few minutes to check out YaST and I was positively impressed but it comes with a lot of pre-installed stuff like a graphical package manager (yes I know there’s zypper and that it’s slow, I don’t mind too much if it works and isn’t too bad) and I heard it has something similar to the AUR which I’ll need to check out as I saw the normal tumbleweed repos missed some packages I like.
- Arch: I used Arch (btw) for a long time and generally liked it, I didn’t have many issues with it and when I did it was usually my fault (tbf that’s often the same on NixOS) and I generally could fix them easily (only once did my system break after the power went out during an update requiring a reinstall), the thing I don’t like is having to update it weekly manually (I don’t trust automatic updates on non-immutable distros much) and this is fine generally but it’s a problem for my gaming PC because I have to move away from the house it’s in for months on end and telling people to turn it on weekly so I can ssh and update it remotely into it is bothersome. Also, while I like seeing the little pacmans eat the dots, after using NixOS I learned to appreciate updates that don’t require me to rtfm, that I don’t have to care about too much and don’t risk borking something in my system even if it’s a small thing. Plus I figured I could try something else knowing that worst case scenario I can always go back to the trusty old Arch. Maybe I could try Arco instead of Vanilla Arch in this case.
I’m open to suggestions for other options though, there’s trillions of distros.
What am I excluding
- Debian & co: nothing against Debian, but I used it once and found it very frustrating to use, the packages are fairly outdated (and I don’t see that as more stable than say NixOS with the rollback and everything), I had to manually install every proprietary thing, add repos here and there, etc and overall I didn’t like it. Also I don’t think it has plasma 6 yet. I don’t see much point in using any of its derivatives either.
- Gentoo: I don’t want to compile everything
- Fedora itself: too close to RH, its derivates I can tolerate but I’d prefer to avoid Fedora and RH stuff if possible
That is all that comes to my mind right now. Thanks in advance.
Excluding Fedora because it’s “too close to RH” doesn’t make any sense at all. Fedora is not controlled by Red Hat, and Red Hat has no interest in a consumer desktop platform that they can’t sell. Fedora’s development is managed by FESCo, a community elected board that represents the interests of the community. They are kept intentionally separate from Red Hat’s development, and don’t tailor their development to Red Hat’s wants or needs (in fact they often do the opposite, as Fedora pushes for change in the way things are done, not stability, as can be seen by the exclusion of X11 from Fedora 40, for example). That stands in direct contradiction with RHEL’s goals. The features that are pushed by Red Hat developers would not be approved if they stood against the wants of the community, so anything Red Hat does contribute benefits the community as well. Red Hat’s entire business is in enterprise solutions, as their business model relies on them selling support for their software. There is exactly $0 in potential revenue from Red Hat trying to take over Fedora, it just doesn’t make sense. They can’t sell anything, and since Red Hat doesn’t employ all of the thousands of active contributors, such a takeover would simply result in a new fork. In fact, it would be against their interests, as Red Hat actively benefits from the developments of the community. Taking over control of the project would lose them all of the constant volunteer work put in by the community, which costs far less for them to sponsor than it would to employ a team a fraction of the size on salary. I’ve discussed this topic at length many times before, so I’ll just link to a few comments that explain the situation in more detail (including how the project is funded, managed, and separated from Red Hat).
https://lemmy.world/comment/7490965
https://lemmy.world/comment/7494803
The best fit for your criteria is Fedora. If you want uBlue spins, you’re still getting Fedora, just a more opinionated version. All of the major development of uBlue’s images comes from Fedora though, as they don’t maintain their own distro, they just repackage Fedora.
You bring on some interesting points and I will definitely read your comments. Thank you.
There’s a question that I feel I don’t adequately answer in my previous comments, but I feel as if I should address.
Does Red Hat implement their own features in Fedora, and what does that mean for the community?
The short answer is yes, there are Red Hat developers who do work on Fedora. Just as Canonical developers contribute to Debian, Red Hat contributes to Fedora. There is a very important distinction between the development of Fedora and RHEL though, and it’s the same reason no one is up in arms about Canonical contributing to Debian. The changes that Red Hat makes to Fedora still have to be approved by FESCo, so they still have to represent the interests of the community. Red Hat can feel free to pay as much as they like into the development of features, but if those features would contradict the values of the Fedora Project or go against the wishes of the community, they wouldn’t be approved in the first place. Red Hat sees Fedora as a very valuable resource that they can use to test features before they arrive in RHEL. Unlike Canonical, however, they don’t push proprietary solutions, tracking, or pro subscriptions into a consumer desktop platform. Those changes would not be representative of the wants of the community, and would not be approved by FESCo (hence the benefit of a community elected board).
There’s a related follow-up, as well:
Are there Red Hat developers in FESCo? What does that mean for Fedora?
Yes, there are a few Red Hat developers in FESCo, you can view their bios on the Fedora Project website. They were not placed there by Red Hat, however. These are still people that were elected by the community, who would not be there unless users (and other developers) trusted them to make decisions in the interest of the community. You can nominate and vote in the elections as part of the community if you wish.
The biggest factor that I often see glossed over (and perhaps the most important reason Fedora has independence) is that Red Hat doesn’t have any reason to even attempt to corrupt it. Fedora users are not an audience they stand to make money from, and if Red Hat believed there was money to be had in the consumer desktop platform, they would already be selling a product. There is mutual benefit between Red Hat and the Fedora Project, and that gets passed onto the community. Red Hat benefits from the contributions of the community, while simultaneously being able to test new features in an audience that they aren’t interested in selling to, and the Fedora Project gets money and active development back from Red Hat as a result.
Now I’d also like to clarify, because I could understand confusion as to what I meant when I said Red Hat doesn’t control the Fedora Project. Red Hat is allowed to make contributions to Fedora, so long as they meet the same approval criteria as any other merge request from any other person/entity. Red Hat, however, is not able to control how money is spent, or where the priorities of community developers are focused (the direction of the project). So they are free to make contributions to Fedora that benefit everyone (so long as their changes are approved), but not free to test RHEL specific features that don’t have a place in Fedora, for example. In fact, since Red Hat wants to keep their source code away from anyone that doesn’t pay them a subscription, they actually have a vested interest in keeping those RHEL specific features separate from Fedora, as to not make them easily accessible to potential competitors. This is how they’re addressing the competition posed by Rocky/Alma/Oracle Linux.
I mean, after reading all your comments my position on Fedora has moderated, but in a comment you said they are financially dependent on RH. Now sure, right now RH doesn’t stand to gain from taking/screwing over Fedora and right now they don’t seem to want to but who’s to say one day they won’t try to? I don’t trust corporations for many reasons so having a distro that, while independent in the development decisions, is financially dependent on a corporation doesn’t sit too right for me. Sure maybe they will never do it but hey I’d rather avoid the off-chance it happens if there’s alternatives.
I will check it out in a VM alongside the others though.
The only reason that the Fedora Project exists is for community development. There is simply nothing Red Hat could ever stand to gain from changing that model, as they’d lose the entirety of what they are paying for by sponsoring the project. In order to do anything, they’d first need to dissolve FESCo, which would make HUGE waves across the internet. You and anyone else in the community would see news and posts about it immediately. Once that happens, the project dies. Community members are not going to contribute to a project that betrays their trust, after all. So in trying to change anything, the only thing Red Hat would be doing is moving a project that they are paying a relatively small amount of money for (relative to the number of contributors) from community developed to Red Hat developed. That means that they have to personally invest money into maintaining and employing contributors themselves, completely defeating the point of Fedora existing in the first place. If they wanted to privately fund development, why wouldn’t they instead do it in RHEL, or CentOS Stream?
Let’s analyze Red Hat’s current gains from Fedora one by one:
- Fedora is a place for Red Hat to test new features before they move to RHEL.
This requires an active userbase, and by privatizing or taking over the project, that userbase would rapidly diminish. Red Hat cannot increase this benefit by any means, other than by leaving the project be as is.
- Fedora is community developed, so Red Hat can benefit from commits made by the community (people they don’t pay).
Privatizing or taking over the Fedora Project would immediately end that community development. There’s nothing in this respect that Red Hat could possibly intend to gain from such an action.
- Red Hat’s image appears better by sponsoring a community developed project.
It should go without saying that their image would only be damaged if they tried to modify their current relationship.
These are the things that Red Hat is paying for by sponsoring the Fedora Project. A hostile takeover would have exactly zero potential gain and very high potential losses in each of these categories; thus it doesn’t make sense in the slightest.
Now let’s analyze some new potential gains that Red Hat could get by a hostile takeover:
- Monetizing Fedora.
This is Linux we’re talking about, attempting to sell a consumer Linux distro for money will not fly, and no one will buy it. After all, even when enterprises by RHEL licenses, they aren’t paying for the software itself. What they’re really paying for is the support package and direct hotline to Red Hat for any technical difficulties. Red Hat makes its money by offering support services, something that does not have any realistic market for the general populace, especially considering the userbase we’re talking about are Linux users.
- That’s really it.
There’s just nothing else Red Hat would even stand to gain from any hostile takeover. The only potential motive is money, and Fedora is not a product that will ever generate them revenue. Consumers don’t want to purchase licenses, and enterprises don’t want consumer desktop distros with 6 month release cycles.
Red Hat funds Fedora because it is of great benefit to them to keep it alive, and continue its development by the community. Changing their relationship with the Fedora Project would not only lose the exact benefits they are receiving, but also cost them money, as they will no longer have thousands of community members volunteering their work, and they would have to hire contributors to fill that gap. Additionally, why even bother speculating? It isn’t difficult to move distros nowadays, so if anything ever were to change, you can jump ship on any day of the week to another distro. We seem to live in a world where logic is challenged by a thousand “but what if?” statements that have no basis in reality. It’s quite a pointless endeavor, honestly. What if the distro you choose gets bought out by Google, or Microsoft? What if the distro you choose is secretly funding antisemitism with donation money? What if the distro you choose suddenly dies? These are all absurd questions to speculate on, all to no real end. They each have the very simple solution of “just install a different distro if that happens”. But what if a company tries to exploit a distro for money? There’s no point in even speculating that because there isn’t even any money to be made from consumer desktop distros. The money to be made from Linux is not in the consumer desktop platform, it is in the realm of businesses (enterprise software, embedded systems). There are far too many free options out there owned by nonprofits to ever consider marketing a consumer Linux distro like that. Even with stuff like Ubuntu Pro, you aren’t paying for a license to the distro; you’re paying for extra support.
Why are we treating Red Hat like the most evil company in the world, anyway? As far as tech companies go, they’re pretty damn ethically sound. They’re not nearly as bad as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, IBM, or any number of other tech companies that release proprietary software with no access to source code, massively violate their users privacy, exploit consumers in harmful ad campaigns, etc. Google, one of the most unethical companies in the world owns Android, but we still have AOSP, which is the foundation for custom ROMs like GrapheneOS and LineageOS. If they believed that trying to shut down AOSP would make them money, they would have tried it years ago. Of course, doing so wouldn’t even be legal, as it would be violating GPL.
I’m just not seeing what exactly you’re imagining Red Hat could take away from Fedora for their own gain. Nothing they could do that would have a negative effect on users would result in a gain for Red Hat, as they’d be losing everything they gain from the Fedora Project. In order to make any changes to the development of Fedora, they either have to pay developers to make those changes, or convince community members to do it for them (which is not going to happen if these changes are negative), and that’s assuming that they manage to dissolve FESCo to get these malicious changes approved.
You don’t want to rely on a project that’s funded by corporations? Where do you think the funding for the Linux Foundation comes from? Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM fund the Linux Foundation, so any OS that uses the Linux kernel will be financially dependent on corporations. That’s something you’re never going to be able to avoid.
I don’t understand why this has been blown so far out of proportion. What’s the point in excluding a very good distro that suits your needs perfectly over a fear that some day, somehow, in the indeterminate future, that there would be some new financial incentive created out of thin air that would cause Red Hat to try to take over Fedora? What guarantees that same situation or one similar wouldn’t happen to any other distro you could choose? And to that end, why would Red Hat take over Fedora instead of creating a new fork that they could sell so they can still get all those benefits of community development? I don’t see how any financial incentive created by Fedora wouldn’t be possible to gain downstream.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, you convinced me to try Fedora on a VM. And obviously there’s worse than RH, tho it is owned by IBM. All I’m saying is that since the fedora team is financially dependent on RH that is worrying to me. So is the Linux Foundation being dependent on corpos don’t get me wrong tho at least in this case it’smore than 1 corporation. I have nothing against people who don’t mind and still use fedora mind you, I just try to avoid/minimize corporations for what is reasonably possible.
Also just to be clear: I don’t think there’s an obvious incentive for RH to pull the plug on Fedora either, but I don’t trust them to not do something that is apparently stupid to us. For example, I thought Canonical adding ads and doing questionable stuff would be damaging to them too yet I see they’re doing it/trying to despite it being clearly a bad idea given who the main customers for Ubuntu are.
Stick with NixOS. A declarative config will save your ass down the line if it hasn’t already. If you have any interest in programming or IT in the future, the skills you learned will prove invaluable & once you get the hang of it, making modifications & patches will start to feel a lot safer as you can keep pulling updates while your patches still apply. Nix is still going to be one of your better options if you want to avoid the snap/flakpak space (I do not blame you). As for corporate control, something will either fix the Nix foundation from the core or a community-controlled fork will usurp it with probably almost no changes for an existing Nix install just like these things have always sorted themselves out with time (or join the Lix or Aux spheres if you want to actively fix the situation now instead of waiting if it really bothers you).
If you need help, ask in the official Matrix room or Discourse—I can only imagine the spam & bad takes from those residing in a proprietary, data-siphoning Discord chatroom.
I don’t intend to be a developer. I do code a few things sometimes but that’s not the life path I’m oriented towards. That said you bring some good points. I am starting to believe NixOS may not be suitable for my uses sometimes, tho I did fix the SDDM issue, even though it involved changing my configuration in a way I didn’t find intuitive. I’m still evaluating what to do. Maybe is 24.05 proves to fix my issues and stays out of my way I’ll stay.
I should try matrix tbf yeah, just didn’t like having to use yet another platform that’s why I went to what I already have to use.
Swap your channel to unstable, and see how you like it. From what i’m reading, you’ve already pretty much found what you want
I’m already on unstable
I’m pretty sure you don’t need to update Arch that often?
You don’t. If you just do pacman -syu after half a year you’re gonna have issues, but the additional steps required aren’t more than for any other distro’s version upgrade.
The only use case where Arch updates break stuff regularly is if you run third party apps which require specific versions of packages as dependencies.
If you want to try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed without all these weird defaults: Try Gecko Linux.
Thanks for letting me know this exists
the thing I don’t like [about Arch] is having to update it weekly manually
You really, really don’t. You can update Arch twice a year if you want.
You only have to read all the news items between your last update and now, and follow what they say about manual intervention. And there’s a couple more steps than just pacman -Syu (like updating your mirrorlist, and cleaning up .pacsave and .pacnew files)But your “requirements”, taken together are spread over a lot of distros. There’s none that fits them all, and it sounds like you read a lot of stuff on the internet which sounded cool to you.
Also, you exclude the best-fitting one, Fedora, cause it’s too close to Red Hat, whatever that means. It’s a free (in both senses) and community-maintained distro.
I don’t even understand how that would impact you in any way, it’s not like they put in ads or trackers or you give them money.My advice is to take a step back: Ask yourself “Which tasks do I actually want to be able to do with my computer”?
My guess is, all of the established distros can fit your use case.And if your actual wish is to have an interesting toy, just install multiple different distros in VMs.
Yeah the thing is I’m not the most rtfm or read the patch notes type guy. When I used Arch I just went balls-to-the-wall yolo but updated weekly. Updating less frequently seems like more of an hassle.
I don’t trust corporations in general, mainly I don’t want Red Hat (or any other corpo) to suddenly destroy my distro or do something I don’t agree with. I still remember the whole debacle some months ago. If it wasn’t for that I’d definitely give Fedora a shot but the fact they’re sponsored by RH (and their upstream) makes me question how independent they are from RH and how at risk they are from being taken over by RH.
As for use-case I think any distro can in some way fulfill my computing necessities and has most if not all the programs I need available in some way afaik, it’s mostly a matter of technicalities and other stuff that is fairly important to me personally but maybe not too relevant for most
While the normal Debian has outdated packages as you said, I’m using Debian-testing (rolling release), and it works great for me. It has newer packages, and it’s surprisingly stable. In my experience, more stable than Arch, and it has a larger repo than Tumbleweed.
my issues with debian are beyond just the outdated packages, I know of debian testing and sid I just don’t like some approaches debian has which are not for me. nothign against Debian tho it’s just not for me
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I was on nixos for 2 years and i had short comings. So last weekend installed opensuse tumbleweed And its been pretty good
