Looking for a "set it and forget it" distro
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Hi all,
Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives. Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It's a solid distro until it's not. I'd go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I'm kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues. It's like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they're always major. Most of the time I'd just reinstall, and I hate that. It's so much work for me. I set things the way I like them and then they're ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that's how much I don't want to be fixing my system. I'm tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it's probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it. It's the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there. So, what do y'all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup "distrobox" on it if I wanted the AUR. I've never tried this "distrobox" thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games). So, I don't know what to do. I need y'all's suggestions, please. I'll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don't care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it. I'm planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don't know. I currently can't upgrade my system, as I wouldn't be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in. I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I'll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please <3. Thank you so much in advance.I have Fedora on my work laptop and vanilla Arch on my tinkering laptop.
I think instead of thinking about "set it and forget it", you might want to think about "if shit happens, how fast can I fix it?". That is because stuff break or there are bugs . If you use a very old and LTS distro, you might be comfortable but there might be bugs that do not get fixed until much later. Eg: Debian's kernel used to be able to suspend-then-hibernate, then they jump to one that cannot. So if you want that feature back, you need to wait.... until Debian catches up with mainline's fixes.
So if you only use your computer for web, email, movie. Then any distro will work.
Now, imo there are 2 types of problems in Linux:
- Boot/GRUB/partition problems: this can happen if you're dual boot, or a config goes wrong. To fix, usually you need to boot a live cd.
Pop OS would be #1 choice just because it has a "Recovery Partition" with live environment. You can reinstall the entire OS while you're on the plane, without wifi or any USB.
Arch would be #2 here, just because the arch iso is so good. It is minimal and has all the tools you need to fix stuff: partitions, wifi..etc. Plus, it boots in tty so it is faster for fixing.
- Problems with library mismatch: for this you want one with good snapshots built in. So OpenSUSE or if you know how to configure btrfs, maybe Fedora. I would still go Pop OS here, so you can configure btrfs AND get the recovery from point 1) above. Linux Mint would be #2 choice because they have timeshift built in.
So the TLDR for you is: pick Pop OS for the recovery partition. Also, use btrfs. Lastly, configure your disk nicely, i.e. dont do any crazy LVM encryption, just use standard layout so when comes the time to fix, it is easier.
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I installed aurora and distrobox got me a bit confused, so it is now on the back burner until I read more about it.
You probably won't need distrobox much unless you're a dev. Most packages will be available as a flatpak or in homebrew. You could also consider using Nix, which will most likely have every package you'd want.
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First to answer your main question if I were you I would try NixOS, because it's declarative so it's essentially impossible to break, i.e. if it breaks for whatever reason a fresh reinstall will get you back to exactly where you were.
That being said, I know it's anecdotal but I have been using Arch for (holy crap) 15 years, and I've never experienced an update breaking my system. I find that most of the time people complain about Arch breaking with an update they're either not using Arch (but Manjaro, Endeavor, etc) and rely heavily on AUR which one should specifically not do, much less on Arch derivatives. The AUR is great, but there's a reason those packages are not on the main repos, don't use any system critical stuff from them and you should be golden. Also try to figure out why stuff broke when it did, you'll learn a lot about what you're doing wrong on your setup because most people would have just updated without any issues. Otherwise it really doesn't matter which distro you choose, mangling a distro with manual installations to the point where an upgrade breaks them can be done on most of them, and going for a fully immutable one will be very annoying if you're so interested in poking at the system.
I agree with Nixos as well. Setting it up properly for the first time can take some time but after that it's very much "forget it".
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hmm i’ll look into that
also i read everything, and you should go with bazzite i thinkBazzite download was showing 1.5 hours and kept failing to download
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You probably won't need distrobox much unless you're a dev. Most packages will be available as a flatpak or in homebrew. You could also consider using Nix, which will most likely have every package you'd want.
I wanted to build "ntfs-automount" from source and I wasn't able to do it on distrobox
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Bazzite download was showing 1.5 hours and kept failing to download
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Lmfao. Exactly
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I'm leaning towards an immutable, but to be fully honest, they're a very, very new thing to me and understand nothing about them. Like when you give an idiot a grenade. That's me with an immutable distros. Lol
I need to learn more about them and how things work, because they do sound like what I'm looking for.with bazzite it's just regular fedora essentially except substitute the normal rpm commands for rpm-ostree and you're essentially golden
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with bazzite it's just regular fedora essentially except substitute the normal rpm commands for rpm-ostree and you're essentially golden
So, when you install things with rpm-ostree, will whatever I install stick, or will it be overridden whenever the system updates?
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Been using Linux almost 30 years, went from Redhat to everything else, and now I'm back on Redhat to stay. Fedora for a nice, boring, up to date, and bulletproof OS.
Definitely agree. The KDE spin used to have some quirks and bugs, but have been running it on my laptop as a daily driver for nearly six months with no real issues and it is rock solid reliable. Fedora also has a ton of community and commercial support so pretty much any Linux app will work fine on there.
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I wanted to build "ntfs-automount" from source and I wasn't able to do it on distrobox
I see, there are probably issues with the facts that it needs to create udev rules. Is there something you need that can't be accomplished with systemd.mount or editing /etc/fstab?
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So, when you install things with rpm-ostree, will whatever I install stick, or will it be overridden whenever the system updates?
It'll stick, but you're really meant to use flathub/flatpak to install things wherever possible, rpm-ostree is kindof a backup method.
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It'll stick, but you're really meant to use flathub/flatpak to install things wherever possible, rpm-ostree is kindof a backup method.
I get that, but sometimes I need dependcies or packages that I can't get as flatpaks. Like today, I wanted to install a driver (or whatever it is) that's called "ntfs-automount" and it needs to be built from source with
sudo make installAnd that I couldn't do on an immutable distro. And it is not available anywhere except the AUR and GitHub.
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I get that, but sometimes I need dependcies or packages that I can't get as flatpaks. Like today, I wanted to install a driver (or whatever it is) that's called "ntfs-automount" and it needs to be built from source with
sudo make installAnd that I couldn't do on an immutable distro. And it is not available anywhere except the AUR and GitHub.
if you can make an rpm you can install it with rpm-ostree like any other fedora based distro. Immutability doesn't prevent this.
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I'm in complete agreement with this post. Debian is pretty meticulous with their releases and Ubuntu LTS has a predictable release cadence if that's more important than "when it's ready"
Also, whether you see it as a plus or minus, windows wsl defaults to Ubuntu. So, msoft also seems to be somewhat invested in them long term.
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Hi all,
Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives. Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It's a solid distro until it's not. I'd go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I'm kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues. It's like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they're always major. Most of the time I'd just reinstall, and I hate that. It's so much work for me. I set things the way I like them and then they're ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that's how much I don't want to be fixing my system. I'm tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it's probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it. It's the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there. So, what do y'all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup "distrobox" on it if I wanted the AUR. I've never tried this "distrobox" thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games). So, I don't know what to do. I need y'all's suggestions, please. I'll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don't care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it. I'm planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don't know. I currently can't upgrade my system, as I wouldn't be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in. I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I'll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please <3. Thank you so much in advance.I've had the same issues with Endeavour, sometimes you get buggy software and need to roll back. I do a full system backup once a week and update once or twice a day (I like updating frequently as it makes it obvious which package broke your system). When I get a bad package I just restore from backup but exclude /home. Then from there I install packages one at a time until I find that bad one and then just ignore it for a while. It really hasn't been too bad. I don't think you'll find anything like the AUR if you start distrohopping. Debian is the king of set it and forget it, but it might be a shock to go back older packages of everything.
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I've had the same issues with Endeavour, sometimes you get buggy software and need to roll back. I do a full system backup once a week and update once or twice a day (I like updating frequently as it makes it obvious which package broke your system). When I get a bad package I just restore from backup but exclude /home. Then from there I install packages one at a time until I find that bad one and then just ignore it for a while. It really hasn't been too bad. I don't think you'll find anything like the AUR if you start distrohopping. Debian is the king of set it and forget it, but it might be a shock to go back older packages of everything.
Sounds so annoying to do honestly
I've just installed Nobara and will give it a whirl for a while and see how it goes. -
if you can make an rpm you can install it with rpm-ostree like any other fedora based distro. Immutability doesn't prevent this.
Awesome and good to know. I'm actually experimenting with distros to see where this takes me. I'm currently running Nobara with snapshots set up in grub. It also has other kernels entries in grub after big updates so you can roll back if things break.
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Awesome and good to know. I'm actually experimenting with distros to see where this takes me. I'm currently running Nobara with snapshots set up in grub. It also has other kernels entries in grub after big updates so you can roll back if things break.
Yeah, nobara and bazzite extremely similar, and snapshots are a decent workaround to not having immutability, but immutability is still a significant upgrade.
Although, i'm pretty sure what you're seeing only rolls back the kernel, not all of your modifications, so, you may still be screwed if you mess up. Is this worth worrying about? Probably not. But I see no reason not to just go with bazzite and have slightly more peace of mind in that .01% of situations.
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Hi all,
Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives. Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It's a solid distro until it's not. I'd go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I'm kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues. It's like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they're always major. Most of the time I'd just reinstall, and I hate that. It's so much work for me. I set things the way I like them and then they're ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that's how much I don't want to be fixing my system. I'm tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it's probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it. It's the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there. So, what do y'all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup "distrobox" on it if I wanted the AUR. I've never tried this "distrobox" thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games). So, I don't know what to do. I need y'all's suggestions, please. I'll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don't care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it. I'm planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don't know. I currently can't upgrade my system, as I wouldn't be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in. I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I'll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please <3. Thank you so much in advance.Debian. Solid as a mountain.
