cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7066703
Like I hear a lot of people trying a lot of different distros till they find the one they stick with.
Is there a point in Distro hopping ? Like assuming im mostly content with my Mint. Have been using it for about 10 days now.
Ofc Im curious about Desktop enviroments for example. Cinnamon is nice if a bit basic. But beyond that am I missing out on some cool stuff :3
Sorry if this a babys first Linux question.
You must log in or # to comment.
No, there’s no point in distro hopping. If you install a well-supported base distribution like Fedora or Debian, they have metapackages for installing different desktop environments, and you can install those to try them out. I just installed Pop!OS’s COSMIC environment on Fedora to give it a test drive, for example. Mint probably has them, too. You don’t have to distro-hop to change desktop environments.
The only exceptions are:
- You want to try out an immutable distro like Fedora SilverBlue or Bazzite
- You want to try out a declaratively-configured distro like NixOS or Guix
An immutable distro might be a good choice for a newbie, but NixOS or Guix probably wouldn’t.
LEARN HOW TO USE THE PACKAGE MANAGER.
Based on how you wrote this post, I feel like you at least read my comment on your previous post.
The main difference between Linux Distros is the software repository. The software repository contains all of the system software packages for the Linux Distro. All of the system updates come from the Distro repository.
There are some niche distro such as Kali Linux (DO NOT USE), which have specialized repositories for specific purposes. Kali Linux repository is filled with hacking tool. Kali is not intended for daily use.
Another example of a niche distro is Devuan, which was forked from Debian to used sysvinit instead of systemd. Around 10 years ago, Debian and most distros changed to use systemd. There’s all kinds of conspiracy theories around systemd. Some people claim that systemd is against Unix development principles. I’m not recommending Devuan.
The Debian Linux repository is based around providing stable and secure software. The Arch Linux repository is based around having the latest software. Gentoo Linux repository is made on the principle of compiling software yourself.
If you pick a less used distro, it could have less developers and receive security updates less frequently. Distros with less developers will have less software in the repository.
You should use the distro which meet your needs in term of software release cycle, whether you want to compile your own software, your preference on software licenses, your preferences on what software is available in the repository. Pick the distro based on the repository, not the default DE.
The system package manager on the Debian-based systems including Ubuntu and Mint is called ‘apt’. apt is the program which installs and updates all of the system software on the distro. apt is the program which communicates to the distro repository. There are different user interfaces for apt.
INSTALL SYNAPTIC SO THAT YOU CAN EXPLORE THE REPOSITORY
Open your system terminal and type:
sudo apt install synaptictype your password and press y when it asks for install confirmation.
Then open synaptic. It should be in your programs menu.
You will a list of all of the packages that have been installed on your computer. You will see a list of all packages which can be installed from the repository. You can click on the packages to see a description of what the software does and what other packages it depended on
When I started using Linux over a decade ago, I spent a lot of time exploring the package manager. I was fixated on having as few packages as possible for a minimal system. When I saw a package that I did not think was used, I would uninstall it. This is the wrong way of doing things; the correct way would be to do a minimal install from the start. However, reading the package descriptions and knowing what different parts of your system does is helpful for knowing how Linux works.
You will see that there are many different DEs or WMs available to be installed from the apt repository. Some of them may even conflict with each other, meaning you can’t install both.
DE (Desktop Environment) is a full system interface. DM (Desktop Manager) is the name of the user log in screen. WM (Window Manager) is the software which puts borders on your windows and moves the windows, ( _ [] x ) buttons is the WM.
Some WMs are designed to work without a DE. Some nerds like to use a WM without a DE for minimalism purposes. Custom WMs is a whole rabbit hole. If you’re a turbo nerd, look for i3wm or dwm or awesomewm or something.
You can install different DEs from the repository. If you want to have the GNOME DE, you would install the ‘gnome-core’ package.
Some of the popular DEs available in the Debian repository includes GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, LXQT, MATE, Lomori (Unity fork), Cinnamon (Mint DE). There are even more in the repository which are not list on the wiki. For example, there is a phone/tablet DE versions of GNOME and KDE in the repository.
Distrohopping is useful in that it’s a great way to work out that you should just have stuck with Debian with KDE installed on top of it in the first place.
It’s also useful way to start from scratch after you mess up the OS by uninstalling core dependencies by mistake. It’s for tinkerers and those who have the time and energy to try different OS configurations.
Mostly the distro doesn’t make nearly as much difference to your experience as what desktop environment you are using. The package manager is the biggest difference. If you like a distro just stick with it. Maybe if you refresh your computer choose a different one for kicks. Or if you’re very technically inclined check out NixOS or something else weird like that.
Or if you’re very technically inclined check out NixOS or something else weird like that.
IIRC it’s more or less run by Palantir.
IIRC it’s more or less run by Palantir.
Not technically true, the anduril employees and VC vultures are in the steering council, but the thing is that the SC itself is organized horribly and doesn’t do anything useful, so their influence is actually just being losers and not having any good ideas.
The NixOS foundation is also a skeleton crew of like, half a dozen people (being incredibly generous it’s probably just 2 people) who you will never know and don’t interact with. They also have no moderators because the community is mostly made up of cis-men who enjoy anti-woke crusades.
Really, the political economy of NixOS is GitHub Actions and AWS S3 buckets and the legion of unpaid, burnt out volunteers. NixOS has no real funding model or compensation.
Oh okay, that makes sense that Anduril hitlerites dont have that much control in practi-
They also have no moderators because the community is not mostly made up of cis-men who enjoy anti-woke crusades.
lmao, “open source” (free software minus any political consciousness) was a mistake.
The moderator purge started because they thought one of the moderators was too woke (EU liberalism is too woke) and then tried to sneakily replace them with a hitlerite techbro. It was a battle between liberals in the US and liberals in the EU after electoralism reproduced the same crisis.
All the moderators mass resigned when they realized what was happening. Of course, the NixOS “community” doesnt feel phased because it was already a Nazi bar.
Would not say that necessarily. Their employees do have a fair amount of influence in the community, despite vocal protests. Also it might be Anduril I don’t remember which evil Tolkien-themed weapons company it is.
Oh my god, you’re right, it might be Anduril.
Their employees do have a fair amount of influence in the community, despite vocal protests.
It’s pretty clear that there’s financial and political forces at play here that mean that this will never be fixed, though. Likely (hopefully) it will split at some point and a fork will take all the non-Hitlerite users and developers.
nixos was built by functional programming academics and trans people and some undue influence because some early hitlerite at a hip VC-funded shop sold his boss on paying him to be a maintainer won’t change that. nix isn’t a complementary good to the war machine the way red hat was to data center hosting, it’s a novel package manager, DSL and OS that’s like catnip for brogrammers.
we’ve got https://lix.systems/ which is probably the birth of that fork, but also eventually a bean counter at the death factory will look at what they’re paying the nerds to do and fire that whole team
It’s more nuanced than that. The inventor of Nix, Eelco dolstra, is actually a terrible person who went all in on his terribly designed “flakes” project subsystem which he built directly into the language. Flakes are
represented in code form (literally just thin wrappers built into the Nix language that you can emulate in like an evening and this shit WENT ON FOR 5+ FUCKING YEARS)This, imo, started the stagnation of the community as Dolstra was trying to sell flakes to as many enterprises as he could and disengaged from the actual community. Eventually he got short-circuited by the Lix people who forced the CppNix team to actually implement useful things and not features for Dolstra’s shitty VC funded company. NixOS is not Nix which is not Nixpkgs. Eventually, anduril realized it could just hire Nix people they liked who would give them undue influence over the project due to the advantage of actually being paid. The “leadership” decided to do a Europe and tackle this with electoralism (which then elected all the shitty people who caused the problem).
In that process, a lot of people got burnt out and lost faith in the project. A recent Nix community survey listed the majority of the community identifying as men and if you go on the NixOS discourse instance you get slammed with hitler particles and VC companies advertising ai slop or their new hiring bid (or people help begging on stuff that was caused by the stagnation of flakes).
Lix and Floral (a potential working group for a fork of nixpkgs) are the only things keeping me on this project.
if you go on the NixOS discourse instance you get slammed with hitler particles
had the same experience on their matrix in like 2017 so I’m not surprised, but the VC piece is new. ty for the context, I don’t have a flakes opinion but good to know about the creator
Eventually, anduril realized it could just hire Nix people they liked who would give them undue influence over the project due to the advantage of actually being paid.
my point about the bean counters is still relevant. there is nothing in the nix ecosystem that provides a complementary good to weapons manufacturing, so eventually whatever nerd at anduril who’s obsessed with nix will be cowed by capital. this isn’t an AWS/RHEL situation
It really does feel like any nix nerd who works at these companies are just obsessed with the project. The pattern is that they all believe that nix is going to revolutionize everything and so whatever horror they help with is actually a net positive. It’ll all go away once those people leave so thats why they buy into crapware like flakes.
but the VC piece is new
The company is called Determinate Systems and they’ve made it not so subtle that they’re trying to rugpull people onto their nix implementation with flakes to boost their product. Their nix stuff is even proprietary, like legit nonfee.
Flakes were actually a relatively new thing surprisingly. They got shipped as part of a huge nix “overhaul” that subsequently was one of the worst releases in the projects history.
Theres so much drama in a package manager you wouldn’t believe it.
I love learning the fact there are multiple evil companies named after Tolkiens fantasy words.
meme of guy missing the point of media
“Ah the problem is that a ‘bad guy’ had the ring - if I had endless power - well - that’d just be sick 😎”
This one?My god. I forget there’s an emote for everything
There’s also this version
Look at the chart https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
Most things are just Debian reskins (oversimplification I know) so there isn’t much of a point in trying them all.
Honestly, just stick to what you like. I’ve been using Linux for years now and didn’t really distrohop. I started with Manjaro, shortly after went to Solus, after a long time then went Nobara and now I’m on Bazzite for more than year, but it was mostly because of issues I found along the way until I got to the one where I basically have none right now.
It’s cool to do if you’re into trying it or if you want to try other DEs, but it would probably be best to test it on a virtual machine or on your browser.
But I do think atomic distros are generally better and should be more recommended.
I hesitate to say this because I’ve messed up installs in the past doing this but you can install multiple Desktop Environments on Mint(or other distros) and swap them out at the login screen.
For the rest of what Linux is, really just figure out what package manager you like and stick to that family of distros. If you like APT, then cool. If you check out PACMAN and ARU on Arch and like that, cool. If you have space for some VMs, do some installs and check some distros out, then if you find what you like, go with that.
Distro hopping can be tiring but also helps with understanding what you need in an OS. But it is way easier to distro hop with VMs.
im not a distro hopper per se but i’ll tell you what is my process. i install a new distro and begin to try it out, doing my own stuff and try out its features. usually it works great right out of the box and im happy with it. as time passes and i begin to try different usecases, there are bound to be stuff i find annoying or irritating to do, no distro is perfect at everything. alongside that there’s some sort of “cruft” that progressively grows in every installation as you use it, unused dependencies apps or configs causing weird behaviour, the general bloat creeping in, just trash accumulating. right about then i’ll think about doing a new clean install, and instead of installing the same distro i install a new one out of curiosity.
that’s basically it. if you’re happy with your distro there is literally no point in distro hopping. if something is irritating you, you’re curious and you need to do a new install anyway, then why not change your distro? it’s kind of fun setting up stuff for the first time and you’ll learn stuff about software too.
It’s best to pick up something like Arch or Fedora and just add functionality as per your needs.
I mean if you’re curious, spin up a VM and have a poke around. Why not? It can be useful to see how other distros do things. Power users might distro hop a bit trying to find one they “vibe” with in terms of update cycle, atomic and/or immutable, pre-packaged software and drivers, package manager, init scheme, glibc vs. musl, or any one of a bazillion other nerdy things. Some distros follow particular design philosophies, for example being intentionally packaged to be more barebones to run on lower-end hardware.
The differences in day-to-day usage now are a lot less than they used to be, and a lot of it is functionally irrelevant for a desktop user. Things like flatpak and appimage mean more or less anything that runs on Linux can run on any distro. If you start moving outside of that and your distro’s repos you might find some of the above stuff becomes relevant. Regarding desktop environments, some distros may only focus on making sure everything works cleanly and looks good in one or two, so installing a different one, though technically available, might not look and/or work the best. Available themes and colour schemes might be different (although you should be able to install those with varying degrees of ease), along with any distro-specific management software (OpenSUSE’s YaST, for example, if that’s still a thing).
If you’re happy where you’re at, stick with it. Especially if you’re new to Linux. By the time you run up against any potential limitations you’ll have a much better idea of what you want out of a distro and you’ll be in a better position to judge. Personally I’ve been thru Slackware, OpenSuSE, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Arch (btw), Alpine, Ubuntu and a couple of the BSDs (not in that order). I’ve settled on Bazzite now because it does everything I realistically need to do on a daily basis with near-zero fuss. For weird shit there’s always VMs or distrobox.
Different distros have slightly different uses so the main purpose is to find the one that works best for you if the one that you installed is giving friction. Other times I do it cos im bored and want to play with something different. For me i started with Fedora and hopped to basically ever major distro over the last 10 years and came back to Fedora.
Distro hopping is not a mandate. The point is to discover the way some distros work, how you interact with them, how to tinker.
If your first (or current) distro meets your needs, you’re golden.
For reference I went Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch (btw). Now I run Debian at work and Arch at home. Feel like I need nothing else.
Is there a point in Distro hopping ?
There’s honestly little point especially if you’re just hopping between distros that use the same package manager/come from the same distro family, but everyone who starts out on Linux does it, so you might as well. In my first year using Linux, I basically went:
Laptop: Ubuntu -> Linux Mint Cinnamon DE -> Lubuntu -> Crunchbang (defunct distro with Bunsenlabs as its successor)
Desktop: Linux Mint Cinnamon DE -> Linux Mint xfce DE
on top of various distro I tried out in VMs but never installed like ElementaryOS.
If you don’t want the hassle of setting up Ventoy, use this: https://distrosea.com/ You’re basically remoting in to various VMs of distros someone has set up.
