For me
Mint
Manjaro
Zorin
Garuda
Neon
Ubuntu is not overrated. It probably gets more hate than it deserves just because it is so popular. That said, I hate it. Slow and opinionated ( by bad opinions ).
Manjaro because it is lipstick on a pig. Looks gorgeous, seems to offer the benefits of Arch with less pain, is total garbage.
But it is less pain. Distros that package Arch to make it fit for human consumption perform a vital service for it IMO. Arch is a fine distro that I could never use otherwise because it’s too much work to keep it together. With Manjaro, Endeavour, Garuda etc. you get to use Arch albeit indirectly.
Mostly, I agree. Use one of the derivatives if you’re not ready for Arch itself. But, Manjaro has legitimate criticisms against it. They’ve made mistakes in the past which makes it hard to trust them and holding back packages for “stability” will eventually break your system if you start mixing in the AUR.
ETA: Here is a different link, since the original doesn’t seem to be working for me anymore.
I see this stability argument come up a lot but it’s not like Arch is a paragon of stability. I wouldn’t use Arch for a server, for example, I would use Debian stable.
For a desktop machine it depends on what your needs are. If it’s a personal, non-critical desktop machine then I don’t care about stability that much. Yeah Manjaro screws the pooch sometimes but the way it makes Arch simpler to use makes up for the occasional hiccup.
AUR does not figure into any of this IMO. Using “stability” or “compatibility” when it comes to AUR is nonsense. You take AUR packages as they come, there are no guarantees of stability or security or anything, and you should expect them to break at any time. If I need to rely on a 3rd-party package I use flatpaks or appimages not AUR.
I hear that. I wasn’t saying that the AUR is what causes the problems though. The AUR works better in Arch where everything is kept up to date, since that’s what the AUR targets. Manjaro holding back packages causes problems because the libraries and other packages might not be as up to date as the AUR scripts expect. This ends up causing more potential issues than the AUR otherwise would. If you’re not using the AUR then this all won’t have any effect on your usage of Manjaro, of course.
Fedora is highly overrated.
I think workstation is overrated and silverblue is underrated.
Flatpaks never worked properly on Fedora for me.
I thought I was going insane with Fedora. Literally every flatpack I tried had major issues. Went back to an ubuntu-based distro after a month of fix attempts.
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Fedora, in the sense that I often see it widely recommended, especially to new users.
It’s not bad by any means, but it’s a very opinionated distro that requires end users to install a bunch of additional repositories and packages just to make it useable for the average user.
It also still doesn’t come with out-of-the-box system restore functionality that works well with btrfs even though it is the default filesystem, unlike OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
The third party thing is outdated, you can enable it at install and have access to flathub and fusion repo. So installing Steam or Nvidia drivers is dead simple now. I would still say it’s not great for new users because it’s ultra minimal.
I ran Fedora 33, and upgraded it in place through to fedora 36. Ran pretty well the whole time.
I had snapper running for btrfs snapshotting, and did a double hop release jump to 38. Somehow I messed up my high water mark config for snapper in the mean time, and ran out of disk space mid-install without realizing. Symptom was firefox crashing. So I rebooted. Borked.
I agree with all of your complaints about it, and there’s plenty to dislike, but it’s still probably a good landing point for new users.
For me, it was the right amount of itjust.works at the right time, coming from debian (an update in 2018 killed my gdm, and I rage switched to fedora). Next stop is Gentoo!
Nobara fixes quite a few aspects of this.
I really don’t understand why backup tools like Timeshift or Snapper aren’t shipping preinstalled & preconfigured in all mainstream type distros when you go with btrfs, or at least have an option in the installer for that.
RedStar OS
Nope, it’s better then anything else here hands down.
Double checks for Hannah Montana Linux… Nope not listed… Yep it’s the best here
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=UQoLANsQu6Y
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Arch is for sweaty fanboy memes, not workflow
That wiki tho
Arch is a wiki with an association distro
Yea nobody would ever use Arch for the basis of anything game changing coughSteamOScough
Are you saying that Arch is the new Ubuntu?
“Overrated” is a very specific word here. Some of the distros he just talks about their users and not the distro itself. Confusingly, he also then ignores the users entirely for other distros. I went into this assuming it would be low effort content, but it went even lower and ended up being just a “what comes to my mind when I think of this distro” list, which doesn’t seem very fair towards some of the distros (near the top of the list even!) that don’t have real complaints weighed against them.
@valentino NixOS – I mean it is really nice to have a declarative OS, but I don’t like its logo.
I tried installing NixOS in a VM once and it spent at least 45 minutes doing something with python and I said “That’s enough of that” and killed the VM.
Python works, it’s pip that doesn’t work because it’s trying to install stuff into an immutable distro
Gotta appreciate the pettiness of this. 😆
I’ve never seen it before until now, but you’re totally right. I’m going to start hating it too now.
that logo is ancient and unappealing
You should take a look at the Gentoo logo. That’s an international hate crime of a logo.
waaaat? I like the logo tho!
Arch
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Being 64-bit doesn’t make you special, my Nintendo 64 is 27 yrs old and it’s 64-bit
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Being bleeding edge doesn’t make you special, all I have to do is sit on a nail and now I’m bleeding edge too
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Rolling releases don’t make you special, anyone can have those if they take a shit on a steep slope
/s (was hoping we’d be able to leave this behind on reddit, but alas, people’s sense of humor…)
Even when you are poking fun it is hard to find fault with Arch. Not even “funny because it is true” material.
I know you’re making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I’m running it right now. I was told it’s a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you’re doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.
…and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It’s literally the same as every other distro. “pacman -Syu” is no different from “zypper dup” in Tumbleweed. I don’t get the hype. I mean it’s fine. I don’t have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it’s annoying to change distros. It’s working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless “arch btw” attitude made me think it would be something special.
I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That’s DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s just Linux and it’s no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.
You are saying that the elitist reputation of Arch overblown. I agree. It is not that Arch it self is overrated though. Arch is awesome ( and not as “hard” as people make it out to be - we agree on that ).
My favourite distro right now is EndeavourOS and that is just easier to install Arch.
I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.
I run Arch as my daily but I installed Endeavour as my teen’s first intro to Linux (and also because I couldn’t be arsed manually installing Arch). I really liked Endeavour’s Welcome screen thing. It has yay installed by dafault and you can run stuff like system update just from pressing a button on that Wecome UI. Which means my teen who is clueless about pacman and has no fucks to give for learning can run and install stuff just from clicking buttons.
As to whether it’s better or worse than Manjaro (which is my usual go to for Arch based newbie distros), I’m not sure. I think Endeavour feels lighter on its feet than Manjaro but I haven’t dine any benchmarks to say for sure. I do like pamac and have it installed on my system and I do think it’s great for new folks or people who like a GUI. That said, you can still install EndeavourOS and plonk pamac on there too.
Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.
Arch seems fine and I’ll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I’m not completely happy I’ll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can’t say I’ve had any problems that would drive me back immediately.
Arch is supposed to be used, it is a normal distribution. It is not hard, it is simple. That’s its whole philosophy.
It is only difficult if you are new to Linux, because it doesn’t hold your hands and has no opinion about a lot of things hence you must make many decisions yourself and configure everything like you need it. You have to know what you need and want.
The notion of a difficult distro for the sake of it is ridiculous. Who would ever want to use it? Arch is popular, because it is easy to use, but lets you configure the system to your desires for the most part.
Yeah I get that. I’m running it as we speak. I suppose my expectations were set more by the community than the distro itself. Arch users, by and large (and perhaps not you specifically), talk about Arch as if Jesus Christ himself built pacman. I didn’t find it hard to install, but as you say I’ve been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I know exactly what I want. I got caught up the hype and the DIY aspect I suppose, and I was evangelized to pretty hard to try it. Maybe it’s people new to Linux using fdisk for the first time thinking they did something cool? They talk about “getting through the install” like it’s some rite of passage.
I think I probably still prefer Tumbleweed but I’m not going to bother changing again any time soon unless Arch gives me a reason to because it’s not worth the hassle. Arch and Tumbleweed are pretty similar but I think Tumbleweed has a few extra touches that I appreciate.
Just to reiterate my position, I’m not saying anything is wrong with Arch but the hype is enormous and I’m not fully convinced it’s deserved. Something like NixOS on the other hand is starting to gain a lot of buzz and I think that’s warranted because it’s so radically different it deserves to be talked about. So far Nix is my “learning in a VM” distro.
Isn’t Gentoo the one for that title?
The Gentoo install isn’t hard, it’s very methodical. But it is a much more in-depth process than Arch, that’s for sure. Granted these days Gentoo seems to only do Stage 3 installs which is half the system in a tarball anyway. The way people spoke about getting through the Arch install I was thinking it would be a step-by-step process like Gentoo is. It’s really not.
10 years ago the installer dumped you out in the CLI and you had to run pacman -S kde (or whatever your desktop environment was), so that was much more of a “DIY but with good tools and the best wiki” kind of deal.
But yeah, agreed. These days it’s pretty dang easy.
That’s exactly how I installed it. The install media boots to cli. You partition your disks, install the boot loader, add a user, and then pacman does the rest. I didn’t really find this all that “hands on”. Sure it’s not the same as clicking Next on an installer but none of it is very complicated at all. Don’t get me wrong, as someone else replied, being needlessly difficult is stupid. But when people are saying “advanced users only, DIY, etc” I’m thinking like a Gentoo install or something. I was surprised how simple it was with all the hype and evangelizing that goes on around Arch. It’s a good package manager, AUR seems interesting even if I don’t really need it. But you must admit the hype is a bit overboard.
Oh, yeah, for sure. AUR stuff is a somewhat more hands-on, at least if you actually read/edit PKGBUILD files the way you’re meant to, and it’s not too hard to shoot yourself in the foot if you’ve never had the guard rails off before, but yeah, pacman makes stuff easy.
“Advanced users only” these days seems to generally just mean, “CLI is a hard requirement” and maybe “you have to edit config files and not use a GUI” or (heaven forbid) “you may need to actually read and follow instructions”
Some people needs recent packages. This is the main point of Arch IMO.
Well, most people installing Arch for the first time have no idea what a typical Linux install does under the hood. That makes it a worthwhile learning experience. The same commands you use during the setup you can later use to fix or change things. It basically forces you to become a somewhat proficient Linux user.
Which GPU are you using?
I spent a good 10-20 hours just trying to get it to boot to a largely error-free experience with SDDM and KDE. I set out to daily drive Hyprland and what a shit show that turned out for me on Nvidia GPU and Alder Lake CPU.
The basic gist is you have add nvidia, nvidia_uvm, nvidia_modeset and nvidia_drm to your mikinitcpio conf, regenerate your initramfs, then adding kernel boot parameters nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and i915.modeset=0 before it can even boot to a usable state. Apparently since 6.0, the igpu grabs the display and refuses to give it back. I don’t know how the fuck any “normal” user is going to figure out how to do all of that. Then I spent another evening trying to figure out how to get VAAPI working properly. There’s lots of outdated info in the wiki and not much else to go on, but I figured it out eventually.
BUT, having said this, I do recognise when you go Arch, you’re asking for all of these jank. And, for science, I wiped and tried out endeavouros, and it was surprisingly painless, mostly just worked out of the box (I didn’t check if it was nouveau but it might have been, I also didn’t check if VAAPI was working).
In the end after what seems like 400 wipes and reinstalls, I got it working just right. But it wasn’t painless and it certainly isn’t meant for the faint hearted.
Yes I know the fault largely lies with Nvidia and their shitty proprietary drivers, and so on. But the exact same machine worked just fine in W11, without a single jank or terminal command (not 100% true because I did run OOBE\BYPASSNRO to skip the online junk).
Moral of the lesson: go vanilla Arch if you are comfortable with figuring out shit on your own. Otherwise, stay the hell away and pick a starter distro like Fedora or Pop!_OS that is mostly jank-free.
obligatory I use Arch btw.
I think your experience is more to do with nvidia + Wayland than anything OS specific. Although I think other distros have done a lot of patching and coding around nvidia’s incompetence to get Wayland to work better and I think Arch doesn’t really do this sort of thing. Definitely seems like you unwittingly took on a project.
I also use nvidia but I have no desire to move to Wayland any time soon. X11 works just fine unless you get into esoteric setups like multiple monitors with different refresh rates. My first boot into KDE with Arch was completely broken and I thought “okay, here comes the hard part” until I realized it was defaulting to Wayland. Changed it to X11 in sddm and it’s perfect. I use my ForceCompositionPipeline script on login and set kwin to force lowest latency and it’s smooth as butter.
Wayland is the future but nvidia is definitely gatekeeping that future. I’ve got a 3080 in this machine that is going to last a pretty long time I suspect, but unless nvidia can manage to remove head from ass I see AMD in my future.
Same, my next GPU will likely be an AMD or Intel, been itching to give Intel my money for sometime. They need battlemage to just barely keep up with the same generation xx60ti and they’ve got my business.
@polygon @valentino @turkalino it’s kinda funny. Arch is like 2 steps away from just being a normal distro. Which is why Endeavor and Steam OS work so well. Just add some functions to take care of things like mirrors or installing the AUR or whatever and it’s a perfectly noob friendly distro. People got indignant about Arch install being added but at the end of the day I’d bet that most arch users at this point have the same defaults
Rolling releases
Yep, this phrase is now broken for me. It’s all just turds rolling down hills from here on out. Thanks for that
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Manjaro. It just breaks itself randomly, and performs poorly. Endeavour / ARCO Linux are more stable
Wasn’t Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That’s what I’ve heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn’t (isn’t?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
Stable is a vague concept but Manjaro takes more time than Arch to update software versions. To me both are rock solid.
Honestly straight arch was more stable for me. I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn’t break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn’t even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated
Still no breaks on my side after 3 years of daily use.
Manjaro is fine. Ran it for a year straight before I broked it.
My 2 cents is this. Don’t install from AUR unless you have to. Thats how i broked my manjaro install when i was uninstalling packages to fix a bad install. So my install order to protect myself is:
Main Repo
Flatpak (if its not a system tool like an IDE)
AUR
But the AUR is the best part of Arch. I agree with you but why not use Arch or EndeavourOS and be free to use the AUR without fear.
Yes the AUR is the best feature of Arch, which is why I am still using an Arch distro and not Fedora or Debain.
However one of Manjaro’s features which other Linux distros don’t have, is how much of the OS’s troubleshooting and repair is in GUIs. For the most part I can setup a fresh Manjaro install without touching the command line once. And that’s how I want to use my machines, I want to just browse the web, play games, or do office tasks (the reason I use a computer), not trying to figure out how to install a GUI package manager from the AUR in EndeavourOS since it doesn’t come with one.
“Ran it for a year straight alright before I broked it”. Exactly.
Manjaro is amazing ( for a while ).
It’s fine. I have a dozen installs of it out in the wild, with very illiterate users, and have had almost no calls from them for problems in the 5+ years that they’ve been using it.
Everyone likes to hate Manjaro, but frankly it’s bulletproof.
Aaaaand… commence the downvoting.
You have to keep updating it fairly often, otherwise things slip through the cracks. Most recently on a machine that hadn’t been updated in about a year it wasn’t able to install anything because it couldn’t update its GPG keyring anymore. I find the solution to be
pacman-keys --refresh-keys
or something like that. Why they can’t do that as part of one of the updates, I don’t know.There’s also small things that crop up during normal installs but that’s to be expected on any distro due to bugs in various packages.
Manjaro was one of many I tried after becoming increasingly unhappy with Mint. It’s also the one I stuck with, and it’s run just fine for me for years. I accept that the reports of it being flawed have merit, but I care the most about my own experience, which has been excellent. If you want to test it, by all means, test it! Find out how it works for you personally.
But also try EndeavourOS and other Arch derivatives. One of those might be more to your taste.
@clobubba @valentino @nerdschleife @VoltaicGRiD I did the exact same thing. Mint and then manjaro got me to stick with Linux but I’d never recommend it now when endeavor os is right there
Manjaro still hasn’t broken once for me. I probably have more AUR packages than ones from the official repos at this point, and I’ve used the three branches it offers.
I personally found Manjaro to be pretty nice, but i do have a lot of linux experience
RIP
Great, just in time. Uninstall it and try a serious distro like Fedora or Opensuse TW
I wouldn’t consider Fedora or Opensuse TW better than Manjaro. Just trading one issue for another. Honestly I replaced my 1 year old Manjaro install (when I borked my DE) with Fedora.
Fedora lasted 1 month before the btfs filesystem broke and I lost all of my files with no way to recover. Ontop of the difficulty of adding community copr repos for features like XPadNeo, DNF being so slow that Discover would barley function, and being about 2 months behind software fixes for a specific graphic driver bug that prevented me from playing some UE4 game.
It’s in the MOTD. Very easy to permanently disable, but still annoying.
What??
Misinformation.
What??
The shell MOTD defaults to an Ubuntu Premium ad. It’s low-key but it’s indisputably an ad.
ads in the server version (CLI)
Dude, what?
I see it is in motd, but is it dynamic? I mean does it fetch new ad when needed?
I run the newest version of ubuntu server and it’s pretty much adds for ubuntu pro. But to be honest I don’t really mind it. They offer the extended updates for free for a handful of computers if you sign up for it. If the tradeoff for 10 years of support is some adds I am okay with it
OK, but you’re not seeing Coke ads in the CLI. It’s just for the pro version. Lets stop with the pearl clutching.
Pearl clutching is an exaggerated outage. They didn’t even show any outrage. Just noted a fact.
It should probably take Mint’s place on this list.
indeed. Mint became what Ubuntu used to be, afaik.
I’ve never really used Ubuntu or Mint. I think I’ve installed both in VM but that’s it.
Only issue I can see with LMDE compared to the Ubuntu variant is that some of their homegrown tools and stuff aren’t included in LMDE for whatever reason. But, if they shifted their focus to LMDE and added all the tools there to give you the proper Mint experience, I think it would be amazing.
I agree on both. The reason I left Cinnamon was because I had to use Waydroid, so I switched to plasma and never came back.
Linux Mint surely is disabling more “features” from Ubuntu than it’s using at this point.
Based.
I agree with this entirely. Back when it was like V 3 or 4, it was amazing to get non-tech people into the Linux userspace. Now, it is atrocious and the last distro I’d ever suggest to someone.
I respect a lot what they did though. Ubuntu and Fedora worked and improved a lot of Linux’s new technologies. Plus their focus and model is more focused on the server side.
Yeah. Ubuntu has kind of taken a turn over the years but its still a super user friendly distro and they have done a lot to make linux more accessible for the masses. They also serve as a base for a number of other distros to build off of an as a result theyre an easy choice for a newbie to gravitate towards.
IMHO NixOS, which is what I’m using (full disclosure), is heavily underrated. His subposition was based on an hour of use “a long time ago”, which leads me to believe he doesn’t fully grasp the versatility of NixOS - or rather the “nix package manager”, which is more of a scriptable deployment tool.
What I can do with a dotfile and a single command equates to many more steps in any other given distros. I can recreate a system simply by running said dotfiles on another install, or indeed convert it to a VM image if I wanted to.
So it’s like if you took ansible, the aur and added the ability to configure everything from services, packages, filesystems, modules, virtualization, kernel’s, users, from a JSON-like dotfile consisting of booleans, arrays, strings and even functions.
It is however overtly complex, there’s a disconnect between old nix (“stable”) and new nix (flakes, “unstable”, experimental but mainstream in the NixOS community) and the documentation needs work, which is what has been funded and is being worked on now.
Thought I’d just chime in, because this guy’s take seems glib, uninformed and dismissive…
…though I agree in regards to elementary and solus though.
Last time I tried NixOS, I tried to get some newer and lesser known wayland window managers to work. After like an hour of trying to get a custom session option into gdm, I had to give up. The nix package manager is fantastic, truly, but NixOS imho alters the way the system works way too much. Either it supports whatever you’re trying to do out of the box, then it’s very nice, or you’ll be in hell trying to map whatever explanations you find online to the clusterfuck that is NixOS’s altered file structure. You don’t simply add a
.desktop
file to the xsessions folder.Whatever solutions to problems like these you build in NixOS are always meant to be beautiful and reproducible, but building such solutions is a lot of work. For a window manager that I only wanted to try for a couple days, way too much work. For a system that I don’t intend to install on any other machine, probably not worth it.
I.e. NixOS trades initial time invested with beauty and future time invested. A solution in NixOS is more beautiful, and much quicker to reproduce on another machine, but it takes way more time to set up the first time around (e.g. just doing it as opposed to writing a script that does it). As someone that does a lot of experimenting with new setups, NixOS was frustrating as hell. But for someone that needs to frequently install the same system on multiple machines, it’s a game changer no doubt.
Mint. Cinnamon is weird. I’ve had more problems and weird glitches with Cinnamon than any other DE. And it looks like it’s straight out of 2004. That’s why I’m a KDE junkie on KDE Neon now.
As a KDE junkie, I’d still choose Cinnamon as the backup.
Yeah Mint is really ancient, not shitting on the Devs but everybody is moving to Wayland. While they keep their old project that runs only because of nostalgia. Opensuse TW is better than Neon. The latter is used for testing dunno why people keep using it
And I’m sitting here not understanding why people like KDEs’ looks so much.
But then again, looks don’t matter when you can theme everything. Nightfox Dusk with Tela Purple icons is a banger
I like a pretty much stock with tweaks KDE, personally. Nice and simple, utilitarian, but not necessarily minimal.
I’ve never really cared for the MacOS visual style though.
I shouldn’t really care, but I may have to change DEs if I get a new high refresh rate monitor.
I’m currently using EndeavourOS with XFCE, so Wayland is a No. Could become a problem. Kinda is a problem already, because I’d like to overclock my main monitor to 75Hz, whereas the second one can only run 60.
Last time I tried to get Wayland on KDE a few months ago, it was a bit of a pain to get it working properly and then it was pretty buggy. Admittedly this was months ago, on Nvidia, and regular updates on making it better have been coming pretty consistently.
Gentoo. There’s way better methods to learn Linux, compiling, and the filesystem hierarchy standard. Start with Linux From Scratch and go from there.
I’m not implying that. I am implying that Gentoo is overrated as a distro. See, the title of the thread.
LFS doesn’t give you a usable system in practice though. A distribution is nothing without package management.
Gentoo gives you a thorough course in Linux fundamentals, and has lots of other benefits. Forget the mild gains of compiling for your specific CPU, it’s really all about the incredible flexibility of Portage.
incredible flexibility of Portage
Exactly.
I know people running systemd AND OpenRC on their Gentoo installs. Gentoo is a metadistro. It gives you the tools to build your own distro. SO in comparison to LFS, Gentoo is pretty similar. It’s just the tools that differ (although one can use Portage with LFS…)
Gentoo gives you a thorough course in Linux fundamentals
I basically learned everything Linux related from using Gentoo.
I can’t imagine why someone would want both init systems; that’s awesome.
I also know few cases of runit+OpenRC.
IIRC one of those support having an external service manager…
There are also few s6 users. I’ve kepts things quite simple with OpenRC+openrc-init.
Yeah but which one teaches you more about how Linux works, versus how this distro works ? Linux isn’t a package manager.
LFS surely teaches more, but not by much.
Portage lets you see down into the proper guts of Linux deployment. It’s much more applicable knowledge than almost any other distro. Plus, the install and maintenance teach non-specific fundamentals as well.
LFS gives a bit more learning and an utterly impractical OS for real life.
Gentoo teaches slightly less, and gives you an extremely robust and flexible OS.
The kernel isn’t, but distros, as people think of Linux, kind of are package management projects.
the whole user demographic is like 5 dudes. I agree why go for Gentoo when you can go for Linux from Scratch. Maybe simply because it has a catchier distro name
Gentoo is a metadistro - a set of tools to build your own distro. LFS is a documentation to build your own Linux system. And if one chooses to install some package manager and configure a repo for it, it basically becomes a distro. LFS can become Gentoo if you choose to install Portage and use Gentoo repository.
Setting Gentoo up seems to be quite simpler option compared to LFS. Sure LFS might teach you even more than Gentoo.
Gentoo installs are able to be maintained.
LFS not so much.
… unless you install a package manager, which turns LFS into an another distro. 🤷
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Or you could start with something which already has a package manager.
LFS is fun weekend project, but it’s not a daily driver.
When I started thinking about the amount of work needed to maintain an LFS install, I realized I should install Gentoo. It’s Source based, and other people already put in the work.
Or you could start with something which already has a package manager.
LFS is fun weekend project, but it’s not a daily driver.
Agreed. It’ll teach a lot, but to make it last longer, you want a package manager.