Hello Beautiful community!
I am a student/jr-level IT-guy who has used linux as a daily driver for 2 years now.
I chose Fedora because of it’s similarities to RHEL and RHEL-clone. It was also easy to set up with UEFI and LUKS/LVM, which I somewhat struggled to do on arch. Having wayland, GDM and XDG preconfigured also made starting configuration a lot easier.
When I used arch-based EOS, I usually took the “easy route” when configuring. Instead of using systemd, I just launched stuff on i3-config. Instead of compiling stuff myself I just installed it with aur. Instead of using LUKS or LVM I just had some encrypted directories.
Maybe it was because I was much more experienced when I started with fedora, or maybe it helped to have an already usable system when starting. Either way I feel I learned more using fedora than EOS, even if I heavily modified EOS as well.
However as I am now considering switching, I’d love to hear what experiences people have had with their distributions. Especially Nixos and Debian users, as those are what I’m considering myself.
How much configuration did it take to make the system usable? Are there some limitations with the repositories, distribution or OS in general? And importantly: have you learned something useful while working on your own system?
Did some distribution make you feel you were missing out on something important with your last distribution?
Have you had bad learning experiences with some distro? Have you switched away from distro for the same reason you installed it?
Would you suggest your distro for someone learning linux-admin skills? If you could go back, what distribution would you have used to 1) learning linux the first time 2) working in a jr-level position, still learning basic system administration, 3) when learning to code?
Thank you for your time and comments. I hope this post is general enough to be a worthwhile discussion.
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But you gotta try a few before you can like one. And for that, asking others for their experience is the best you can do!
I do agree with your last line though. Don’t force yourself to use a distro just for the sake of learning it.
That’s the thing: I don’t really have a preference in either way, I just like to tinker with linux and emacs. I guess I want to be able to use wayland and sway as window manager, but I assume most linux-distros can do that one way or another.
This is the way.
I wanted a new OS after W10 slowed my workstation and CAD down noticably. RehHat and SUSE were the only certified distros for my CAD. So I did some reading amd went with OpenSUSE and everytging worked well, especially because nVidia hosts openSUSE drivers. Btrfs and snapshot rollbacks made learning linux easy. Anything I broke I just rebooted to a working system. The firewalld with zone rules is nice since you can “move” your wifi from home zone to public or work zone, rather than adjusting ports and services every time to suit each location.
That’s interesting: I didn’t even consider OpenSUSE. I’ll check it out! Have you tried other distros for daily use before OpenSUSE?
Not really. Since OpenSUSE, I tried Arch, fedora, elementary, Zorin, mint, Ubuntu, PopOS, Endeavor, Linux Lite. But I always come back to OpenSUSE because I have gotten used to little detail things they’ve done. But my wifes’s system is set on NIxOS, it’s an interesting way of working with the OS, but runs super fast on her 12 year old machine.
I support production servers that run OpenSUSE and its been more of a pain than other distros to keep the zypper repo links working, especially when I need to version lock stuff and do patch reviews for upgrades. It seems like SLES gets all the attention and OpenSUSE is a wild west of find this repo URL here, oh no 404 doesn’t exist anymore.
I think at your age you’re supposed to distro-hop. Catch 'em all. Try another one every two to six weeks. I know several people who did it like this ;-) But your mileage may vary… I like debian.
I’m 38 and still distro hop. At what age are you supposed to stop?
I’ve heard you are supposed to stop by 150
Well… I just wanted to say you’re supposed to distro-hop when you’re young. I wasn’t trying to imply you should (ever) stop. I think - generally - people are supposed to settle at about 30. Some keep being rebels, though.
Gentoo.
Gentoo helped or hindered me.
Helped AND hindered you.
I have tried both PopOs and Manjaro. I dont really like both of them.
For Manjaro, I used one of the community edition repacks and many of my peripherals failed to work on boot like Wifi and keyboard. Unfortunately, the week I installed Manjaro was also the week the forums went down so that made things way worse.
PopOs felt quite buggy. I used to postpone every kernel upgrade by at least 2 weeks as something would always break after.
Currently I’m using Linux Mint and everything just works. If I were to start over I would go with Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora. I have found the WM and workflow that I’m comfortable with and would like to just be on a distro that works.
Been using Gentoo little under 20 years. I used Arch for few years in between, but switched back. I’d say all I’ve learned about Linux is via using Gentoo.
- Definitely Ubuntu, it’s the most user friendly for people coming from other OSes
- I’d say Ubuntu again, or maybe Debian. You built up skill and learnt the distro so you want to use something you know for work. On your personal computer, try other ones. I personally picked Arch at this time (around 2012), which helped me “understand” how the OS works, rather than simply use it. I reinstalled it quite a few times and broke the system a lot.
- Any distro with a simple package management system. My personal choice goes to crux, but it’s very barebones. NixOS or Gentoo would be fine too The point here is to learn how to build packages by building them yourself, and I feel like the “big” packages managers (apt, yum, dnf) are too complex for that. They also decorelate runtime libraries from headers files, which is a pain to work with as a développer IMO.
But it’s just my personal experience, many new distro popped up since then. Also for reference, I’ve been using Linux for 12 years now, and I run Crux on my desktop, Ubuntu at work, and OpenBSD on my servers.
Arch teaches you a lot of the basics… I learn a few things even having used Linux for 15+ years.
NixOS tends to encourage “proper” solutions instead of hacky temporary solutions, so while doing stuff on NixOS takes more time, maintaining what you’ve done is much easier, and it’s much easier to reason about, so I learned much more on NixOS than I learned on Arch (hell, I wrote two Nix DSLs for nftables and Lua because my perfectionism told me I need to do that instead of manipulating config as strings in Nix). I have an initrd hook that configures GPU passthrough by picking a GRUB option, I have a system configuration for an Arm router SoC (BPI-R3), which is a painful piece of hardware to work with, much like other SoCs, I have the router config itself (which I wrote a Nix framework for) - and if I ever forget how that all works, I can read the config to remember it, instead of trying to figure out what Linux commands I ran “back then”. But if your goal is just learning about Linux, look elsewhere - that was just a bonus for me; Nix is an abstraction, and you can only start learning Linux after you understand that abstraction.
Definitely give Debian a shot, there are just so many more, up-to-date resources available due to the popularity. Handles great out of the box and is super stable.
I use Ubuntu in the cloud, Raspbian for my home server and Ubuntu via WSL on my PC. So, all headless, I’m actually still looking for a desktop environment that I would prefer to Windows (which is slowing devolving…)
This post reminded me of getting free distribution CDs in the mail back in the day.
