Linux distro for a laptop I might barely use
For years, I've gotten by with a desktop at home running Arch and a work laptop running Kubuntu. Now I want a laptop that's not owned by my job, so that I can use a computer outside the house and not have my workplace own the IP rights of whatever I do on it. My workload is basically just going to be emacs and web browsing, so basically any distro can do it.
I've already got the laptop (HP Elitebook 840 G5, secondhand), but now it's time for the distro. I don't plan to use this laptop often, since it'll mostly be when I travel a few times a year. I don't want Arch, because I don't want to install 6 months of software updates the night before a vacation and then hope that everything works.
Thus, I'm looking at Fedora Silverblue, since that can apply updates atomically on the system, and I can always roll back. I'm wondering if anyone else has good recommendations for a distro to serve my needs.
I mean, base Debian should work out fine.
I'm fond of Linux Mint: Debian Edition for most of my computers, but run Solus on my travel laptop (recent change), though both of those might be problematic for your needs. Perhaps regular Linux Mint?
Not enough people here saying Debian. /j
You're right! We need more
cowbellDebian. I've got a fever and the only prescription is Debian!Devuan or Debian is great.
Debian is rock-solid! A very low maintenance and comfy system in my opinion
Voting for debian as well. Apt upgrade never gave me any hassle when i needed to update anything in a pinch
Debian with some low spec DE like xfce or Debian basic DE
Another vote for Debian.
Debian
Debian base with Sway.
What do you do for a volume icon/volume control?
slightly unrelated but I use i3 and use volume hardware keymaps. would be nice to have a tray alsa source switcher etc. don't know if one exists. for the stupid work meetings
I also use i3 and volume key maps, the tray icon I use is just called volumeicon and it can be used to switch sources. I think it has optional dependencies to do it though
For volume control, I use Wireplumber:
For icon I have configured the swaybar. I don't use notifications, thus they're simple to set for bindsym (above) if needed.
Thanks! By configure the sway bar, do you mean that it has a way to display the volume? I couldn't find that last time I tried to get things configured and ended up just going back to i3
I have 4 icons displaying the current amount of volume with white background and for mute I use red background. It was super easy to set in the config file even I don't speak C++.
Since you're experienced, I think Debian is appropriate. Rock-solid, well-supported, and comes with a decent variety of DE options. I personally rock GNOME and have Timeshift set up for rollbacks if necessary.
Any of the openSUSE distros should be fine. They have immutable offerings in Aeon (Gnome) and Kalpa (KDE). I can't speak to them but I recently updated Tumbleweed after eighteen months and it was fine.
NixOS, i was a long time btrfs with snapshots Arch user. But Nix is just more stable and makes my life happy knowing it will always work as a server, desktop, or on a laptop. The config file is easy to read as documentation as code. That can reproduce the setup and even use flakes and home-manager to copy all your dot-files with ease. Just modify the version number in the file to update it and all apps are independent of each other with no weird dependencies. Better rollbacks then btrfs as it uses systemd and you can save git of your configuration files. This is the future
Pop OS works well for me.
I know a lot of people have said it here, but Debian.
Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite, as you will reliably be able to update the system, even after half a year of not using it.
Updates are atomic, so either an update is installed successfully or no changes to your system have been done whatsoever, there is no in-between state (i. e. broken system) possible.
Any mainstream distro should work I feel like. I'm not familiar with Fedora Silverblue so I can't say anything about it.
I haven't had an arch update go bad since 2016, other than a few things that had instant fixes on the home page/mailing list, whereas with Ubuntu I have trouble with every distro upgrade.
I like Fedora's dnf package manager though, it's similar to Pacman. It's been a while but last time I used Fedora I got annoyed by packages being out of date and went back to Arch
Arch updates going bad is much more likely to happen if the system goes without updates for a long time. So I'd really not recommend it for a seldomly used laptop.
But regularly updated Arch is fine. Even if something breaks it's usually easy to deal with.
I should have added that I update one of my arch computers like once or twice a year, and the other maybe 4 times a year. The reputation for having update issues is just as out dated as Ubuntu's reputation for not having update issues
I say... Debian
I'm probably the only one here who doesn't like Debian for desktop lol, stable doesn't have to mean out of date
I like fedora, and I don't like how apt handle rollback in debian, so I'm same on desktop, I would rather use Fedora, and on Critical Production Server, I use RHEL/Fedora/RHEL Clones (Alma).
Silverblue is cool if you want to explore an immutable base and install most apps with flatpak or in a container. If you want to install packages in a "normal" way you "overlay" them, it's the only major difference
I found the GUI interface for firewalld on OpenSUSE was beneficial for travel. You set your open services and ports per zone: Public, Trusted, Home, work, etc. And when you connect to a network just move adapter to the appropriate Zone in the network dropdown settings. This way you arent a single zone and changing ports all the time.
Do they use yast or is it the general firewall-config gui?
It is a yast firewall module to config it all. Then your regular network manager settings to move wifi network to an alternate zone when you connect to various networks
Got with Fedora, Fedora Kionite, Silverblue, anything. rpm ostree, and if you need other things, go with distrobox. RPM OS Tree will be standard near future, I think.
But I will stick with XFCE Spin tho
I too use Arch on my desktop (on a daily basis). I think you will find MX Linux to be a great fit for your secondary device. It works like a charm on my laptop.
Nothing beats a baremetal install of (whatever you like using).
Xubuntu would be a nice easy one to install. Look into Arch as well. I actually run Arch just about everywhere and really like it.