"Must Try" distros and DEs?

Linux@lemmy.ml – 87 points – 6 months ago

Hey folks! I'm getting a fresh laptop for the first time in about a decade (Framework 16) in a couple of months and am looking forward to doing some low-level tinkering both on the OS and hardware. I'm planning to convert into a "cyberdeck" with quick-release hinges for the screen since I usually use an HMD, built-in breadboard, and other hardware hacking fun.

On the OS, I'm planning to try NixOS as a baremetal hypervisor (KVM/QEMU) and run my "primary" OSes in VMs with hardware passthrough. If perf is horrible, I'll probably switch back to baremetal after a bit. But, I'm not likely going to be gaming on it so, I'm not likely to have much issue.

Once the hypervisor is working in a manner that I like, I should have an easy time backing up, rolling back, swapping out my "desktop" OS. I've been using Linux as my pretty much my only OS for over a decade (I use MacOS as a glorified SSH client for work). Most of my time has been on distros in the Debian or RHEL families (*buntu, Linux Mint, Crunchbang, CentOS, etc) and I pretty much live in the terminal these days.

With all of this said, I am coming to you folks for help. I would like you folks to share distros, desktop environments, window managers that you think I should give a try, or would like to inflict on me and what makes them noteworthy.

I can't guarantee that I'll get through suggestions, as my ADHD has been playing up lately, but I'll give it an attempt. Seriously. If you want me to try Hannah Montana Linux, I'll do it and report back on the experience.

EDIT: Thank you all for your fantastic suggestions. I'm going to start compiling them into a list this weekend.

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My #1 distro recommendation would be Fedora Atomic (immutable Fedora variants).

It's still a bit "underground" and hasn't reached huge popularity yet, but I see its potential that it will very soon.

I have ADHD too and Fedora Atomic is a lifesaver. Why?

You can "distrohop" anytime you want by rebasing. With that, you basically swap out the OS with something else (examples will follow), but keep your data and some settings. If you are on Fedora Workstation (Gnome) and want to have KDE, installing and removing those packages is a huge huge mess. On the OSTree variant, it's just one command, 5 minutes of waiting, and bam, you have a clean install. I do that all the time.
Less bugs and better security by reproducibility. Every install is the same.
Very quick rollbacks if something did go wrong. You can't brick your OS, which I did a lot before.
Huge choice. See at universal-blue.org , it provides vanilla images with some quality of life changes, as well as custom ones, including "unsupported" DEs and spins, e.g. a gaming distro. They aren't forks per se, they are basically build scripts and maintain themselves, which is why they're always up to date and way better than Nobara for example.
Distrobox pre-installed: you can just create an Arch container and use the AUR from it. So you don't need to run (and troubleshoot) Arch on bare metal, but can comfortably benefit from all great things Arch provides

Similarly OpenSuse Aeon. A Benefit of Suse is the greater portability of the tooling.

I just went through setting my new PC up with Fedora Kionite (the atomic KDE version). I had some issues at first, but now that it's running it's awesome! Though I should mention I'm using an alternate distribution called Universal-Blue (basically provides batteries-included images of atomic Fedora), specifically kionite-nvidia.

The things I ran into:

My monitor has a long startup time, so I had to increase the GRUB timeout to see previous kernels
Kionite didn't start after initial rpm-ostree update (fixed by disabling internal GPU)
Steam games didn't work properly (fixed by switching to X11, probably due to NVidia GPU)
Sometimes the first login after boot doesn't work on the default TTY, probably due to sddm (fix by switching to TTY2 when it occurs)

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