Looking for a "set it and forget it" distro
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Mint. It's not sexy. But it always just works. Never had an update break anything. I've got an Nvidia card, which ppl said was notorious for not working with Linux, it just works. The installer just reached out and grabbed the appropriate drivers, so easy. Have yet to have a steam game not work.
10/10 would recommend for anyone.
Can plasma work no problem on it? I can't do any other DE but that one
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Debian. I've had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I've worked with 'set and forget' setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you'll still have options to fix it assuming you're comfortable with plain old terminal.
I was actually thinking of that. How's testing and unstable, are they good, too?
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I was actually thinking of that. How's testing and unstable, are they good, too?
They are excactly what the name implies. Testing is generally pretty good, but it's still testing. And unstable is also what the name implies. People, myself included back in the day, run both as daily drivers, but if you want rock stable distribution installing unstable revision might not be the best choise.
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i'm trying out Aeon at the moment. it's from the opensuse people.
it auto-updates, it snapshots itself so any failed update will just silently revert, and it does flatpaks or distrobox only.
if you're okay with gnome, try it.
I've read the whole documentation page. It sounds really good, but still has some issues that I might not like. I'm going to install it in a vm and see. Also, kalpa is still in alpha stage and I'm not a gnome person.
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Wow, what a wall of text. I'm sorry but I'm sure I skimmed some parts.
Look. The bulk of the replies you're going to get will be like "this is my favourite distro and here's how it works for you" not "this is the best distro for your criteria." It's important to understand the deep level of bias you're going to get.
But your cause is a noble one. I use a particular style of distro because it can be trusted to install well, back out well, do both safely, and allow validation at every stage. I think it's a good candidate, and it's already been mentioned as a really great 'set it and forget it' distro.
Good luck.
And what distro might that be?
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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.Basically every distro is based on either arch or debian (some exceptions). I've been perfectly happy with debian, even as a gamer.
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I want to use mint, but they don't have plasma. I know I can install it, but I'm not sure about the support and updates and all that.
Installing Plasma should be as simple as "apt install kde-plasma-desktop", then log out and select plasma from the login screen. I've tried other DEs but not Plasma, so I can't say for certain it will work.
You can always try distros in a VM almost completely risk free. It won't tell you everything, but it's an easy way to get first impressions without losing your main OS.
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It's currently the most simple to use and "just works" option.
I reckon that mantle should go to Fedora Silverblue over Fedora Workstation.
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You absolutely can fail. I daily drive bazzite but many things have been pretty rough:
Any coding apps that will use an external device -> you can't use flatpak. You have to use distrobox that constantly freezes your entire mouse for 3-5 seconds upon any sort of dialog, settings, saving, anything where it has to access the filesystem. Then you have to add udev rules to directories that in the documentation says not to write to, and reloading the rules doesn't work for testing, you have to fully restart with every minor change or it will seem like the change didn't work.
Luckily most device drivers seem to work in the provided arch distrobox but holy dependency hell. Things will fail to install because they need a package that exists on the host but not the container so you get an unsolvable "file exists" conflict. When installing a package, it will sometimes just try to grab an old version of a dependency specifically that will 404 out instead of just grabbing the most recent version (never happened on arch itself to me)
Setting up a plasma vault with gocryptfs was not fun figuring out how. Also ran into tons of dependency problems and the fact that fedora just abandoned it specifically. Ended up just having to stick the binary in a random folder and point to it.
Any sort of document authentication/signing -> doesn't work and will not work in the future for a long time.
You absolutely have to install rpms still for corectrl, any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc...
Some games inexplicably use <50% GPU and <40% CPU with terrible framerates and will not go any higher (or lower) no matter what, switching between low and high settings and resolution results in 0fps change.
When I have my config set and don't have to change anything, it is super super nice to never have to manually update, but anything outside of very basic usage is weaving through nonstandard undocumented territory.
Bazzite trades maintenance headaches for configuration and installation headaches. For me, that is worth it.
I'm sorry Bazzite didn't work out for you.
Your use case sounds like a better fit for Arch, since you have very specific needs like adding uncommon device drivers, gocryptfs, udev rules, etc. For anyone else, wanting to try Bazzite, I'll answer the rest of the topics:
Flatpak apps with external devices
All apps I've tried support external devices just fine, in the event the app you need doesn't support external devices out of the box, try adding USB device access through the app's permissions in the System Settings app.Distrobox Freezes & dependencies
I have an all AMD desktop PC, and an intel laptop, Distrobox runs perfectly fine. Every package will rely on dependencies inside Distrobox.
Encryption
Bazzite supports LUKS full disk encryption.
corectrl
Use LACT, you can install it through the Bazzite Portal (that's Bazzite 1st run app, you can run it anytime though)
RPMs are needed for any external devices, like drawing tablets, etc..
Any external devices would be a great overstatement. I have the standard PC Peripherals, then I have: xbox 360 controllers, xbox series X controllers, Thrustmaster Wheel, Logitech x56 Flight Stick, none of them require any RPM and just work out of the box, unlike on Windows. For drawing tablets, there are tons that are supported right out of the box without any additional driver, for example Wacom.
For any developers out there wanting to customize Bazzite to fit your use particular use case, you can even easily fork the distro and build your own and still get auto-updates, with any additional device drivers, RPMs, and whatever else you want to fulfill your edge use case. Follow this link here.
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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.Ive been a long term windows user. Almost 80% of my life. Tried macos and linux but always went to windows. Last year, i decided to move away from big tech in general. Ive moved away from most of it except windows, which is windows 10 LTSC. I tried ubuntu, kubuntu, fedora gnome, fedora kde, kde neon, arch (failed hard), arctix, endeavour and lastly i settled with linux mint cinnamon. A couple of tweak and a few hours. It feels like home. Goodbye windows, you will not be missed. I do dualboot windows 10 whenever i need to use program that only support windows.
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I reckon that mantle should go to Fedora Silverblue over Fedora Workstation.
Personally found an immutable distro to be too restrictive at the moment when it comes to installing non flatpak software. If all your apps are flatpaks then everything just works and its great and super stable however some apps I just couldn't get working with distrobox. Switch to fedora workstation from ublue aurora and have loved it. Been super stable and everything just works
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Debian. I've had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I've worked with 'set and forget' setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you'll still have options to fix it assuming you're comfortable with plain old terminal.
I can't speak for the desktop side, but for my server it's been running without interruption for years. About once per week I do something stupid and use all available memory, but it hasn't crashed once. It just runs a bit slow until I free up some RAM, then Docker comes back to life once I free up some disk space. I definitely recommend it for anyone who wants a server OS that just works.
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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 been wanting to try out NixOS for this very reason lately (although I don't break my system often). If everything works for me there, I'll switch to it.
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I've been wanting to try out NixOS for this very reason lately (although I don't break my system often). If everything works for me there, I'll switch to it.
Yep, this is the answer. Set it, forget it, accidentally have your hard drive destroyed irrecoverably, and re-set everything up to the exact working state you were used to in under 15min.
It's a fair bit of initial setup and learning, but afterwards, the word "stable" takes on a new meaning.
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I was actually thinking of that. How's testing and unstable, are they good, too?
They are the opposite of "set it and forget it".
Probably the most maintenance-heavy distros out there.
They're like Arch, if the Arch maintainers didn't care about keeping the system working. -
They are the opposite of "set it and forget it".
Probably the most maintenance-heavy distros out there.
They're like Arch, if the Arch maintainers didn't care about keeping the system working.Damn. Lol. Ok then, will let that go
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I've been wanting to try out NixOS for this very reason lately (although I don't break my system often). If everything works for me there, I'll switch to it.
I've thought about nix, but it looks like it has a somewhat steep learning curve, and I honestly don't even have the time for that
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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.A few paragraphs would do wonders for the legibility of your post.
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Ive been a long term windows user. Almost 80% of my life. Tried macos and linux but always went to windows. Last year, i decided to move away from big tech in general. Ive moved away from most of it except windows, which is windows 10 LTSC. I tried ubuntu, kubuntu, fedora gnome, fedora kde, kde neon, arch (failed hard), arctix, endeavour and lastly i settled with linux mint cinnamon. A couple of tweak and a few hours. It feels like home. Goodbye windows, you will not be missed. I do dualboot windows 10 whenever i need to use program that only support windows.
I'm now debating between mint and kalpa suse. I went KDE and mint doesn't have it
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Installing Plasma should be as simple as "apt install kde-plasma-desktop", then log out and select plasma from the login screen. I've tried other DEs but not Plasma, so I can't say for certain it will work.
You can always try distros in a VM almost completely risk free. It won't tell you everything, but it's an easy way to get first impressions without losing your main OS.
This sucks. I'm going to look into one of those immutable distros and use distrobox
