Tuxedo, Framework, Slimbook, System76, Starlabs are Linux-first vendors with an excellent track record.

It's like buying an electric sports car and immediately converting it to diesel.

I woke up tired one day at 28 and it's been like this ever since.

Sorry, the goal here was to offer a few sensible alternatives, not overwhelm the reader with choices. The gist here is "start with something solid, reputable and popular, branch out later".

Too much choices lead to analysis paralysis, and to goal here is to learn how to swim first. There are dozens of great distros, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list, as there are dozens of great DEs, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list.

No chance. Amazon has a long history of using a ton of FOSS code on AWS and contributing fuck-all.

From "too many damn Linux memes" to "look at my heavily modified desktop" in 72h, I'm proud of you my friend :D

Edit: removed racist term unknowingly used.

Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker and I work in IT :D

I however believe that it's more useful in the long run to use correct terminology (with a small explanation if necessary) rather than "dumbing it down", as it makes finding pertinent information quicker/easier.

Electronic music pioneer and fuckin LEGEND Wendy Carlos, thank you very much.

BallisticNG. Incredible WipEout homage, Linux native, VR compatible, runs locked at 60fps on Deck. Fun tracks, cool ships, nice lore. Physics and mechanics are by default more geared towards classic PSX games (1, 2097, 3), with "modern" physics and mechanics (Pure/Pulse/HD with absorb, barrel roll etc.) getting an overhaul in the next version.

I've been on trips that have been rudely interrupted by screaming executives when I came down out of the mountains into cell range because I was the only bus factor left on certain systems.

Wow, incredible management skills, genius move to treat your one critical employee like a piece of shit.

Makes sense, I think most users I've seen are french speakers. Which org?

Edit: nvm I found them, it's Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Thank you!

Fuck I wasted 30000 characters when I should've posted this instead :D

On my previous laptop, the trackpad had a bug that made it spam interrupts after waking up from sleep. It ruined battery life and basically kept one core at 100% permanently.

So I duct-taped a systemd script that unbound and bound the trackpad after each wake up.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
        post)
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/unbind
                echo -n "i2c_designware.0" > /sys/bus/platform/drivers/i2c_designware/bind
        ;;
esac

Is it really worse tho? A single build, against a single runtime, free from distro specificities, packaged by the devs themselves instead of offloading the work on distro maintainers?

A curl piped into a shell or some unofficial packages from various distros.

At this point I don't get why these projects are not Flatpak-first.

This is REAL Linux, done by REAL Linuxians.

"Hello I would like sudo pacman -Syyu apples please"

They have played us for absolute fools.

May I ask why you, as a beginner, specifically chose one of those distros instead of more "mainstream" ones?

Puppy Linux's main use-case is to be a live ISO, that doesn't need to be installed to run. It doesn't mean it's not a good idea to install it, but I think if you want to use an Ubuntu derivative, there are better options for a beginner like Pop or Mint that would let you install a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and so on.

Alpine Linux is specifically designed to avoid all the core system tools that are pretty much universal on most other distros like glibc, systemd or GNU tools and libraries, which will make your life hell as a beginner if you need to troubleshoot anything as most "universal" documentation like the Arch wiki would be at best partially relevant, at worst useless.

True.

Holy shit. I feel that pain. See also: the upstairs neighbor's TV.

I have almost the same laptop (PS63 8M, without any nVidia dGPU).

One of the issues I had to solve was the touchpad spamming interrupts after waking up from sleep. It would keep one core at 100% indefinitely, keeping CPU frequency (and temps) quite high and burning through the battery.

Here's the fix: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1865745#p1865745

This behavior seems fixed on modern kernels since I've installed Fedora recently and didn't have to do this workaround, but you can still check if this still applies to you.

You might also check if you can disable the dGPU in the BIOS (can't check since I don't have one), and/or play with power profiles either through Gnome or tlp (lower power profiles will make your laptop very sluggish though).

Maybe check if both your fans are running. I had to replace one of mine that was starting to fail a year ago.

Other than that, I've never had any overheating issues with this laptop.

There are daily threads started by new users who say stuff like "I read that systemd is bad, should I switch to [insert systemd-less distro here]" or "My RTX 4080 runs Sim City 2000 at 12 FPS, is Linux trash?", so there seems to be a need to at least help alleviate the fears of people who read conflicting stuff (or downright flamewars) on the internet and might be overwhelmed by those conflicts.

"Cloud Native" means uBlue's OS images are basically Docker images, but meant tu run on bare metal instead of inside virtualization, that are built automatically with GitHub actions.

The project itself is super interesting. It's not a distro, it's an alternative automated build pipeline toolkit for Silverblue/CoreOS that lets anyone build their perfect atomic image. It's still 100% Fedora+rpmfusion under the hood.

UBlue's official images have massive quality of life improvements over Silverblue.

I think Ubuntu was relevant 15 years ago, when Linux was scary. Nowadays, it's neither easier to install nor to use than, say, Fedora for example. I'd even say any current distro with a live CD and a graphical installer is easier to install than Ubuntu 15 years ago.

The fact that Canonical has successfully commercialised Linux doesn't always sit well with some people in the spirit of FOSS Linux, but they have also done a great deal to widen the distribution and appeal of Linux.

I agree with the second part but not the first. Linux would be nowhere near what it is today without some serious corporate investments, so commercial Linux is a good thing (or a necessary evil depending on your POV). The largest kernel contributors are large IT and hardware companies, after all.

What's bad about Ubuntu is that the "free" version is an inferior product, like a shareware of old. The biggest commercial competitors like SLES or RHEL are downstream from excellent community distros (OpenSuse and Fedora, respectively).

The community support, forums and official documentation are most useful. I don't currently use Ubuntu, but use their resources frequently.

Fortunately that knowledge can be used downstream and often upstream too. After all, most Ubuntu issues are Debian Sid issues.

I pondered a lot including a bit about rpmfusion in Fedora's paragraph, but I elected not to because there is already too much stuff here :D

As a 20-years Debian user who switched to Fedora a couple years ago on my main laptop, I would say confidently that Debian is the distro I'm the most comfortable with. I love Debian. But, there are a couple things that prevent me from recommending it as a very first distro:

• The base system is very barebones and you're required to manually install vital things like proprietary drivers (I think it's a bit more painless now with the nonfree installer but I haven't installed a fresh Debian in a few years). For me, having a fully functional Debian laptop is not hard work but requires a bit of knowledge beforehand.
• A lot of people want the latest and shiniest, and with Debian might be tempted to switch to Testing or Sid which is a very bad idea for a daily driver.

Good call about Kalpa, I'm removing it

"Hate" is a strong word. I don't hate Ubuntu. It's just irrelevant.

It's not alone anymore in the realm of "easy to install and use", and ongoing enshittification nagging you to upgrade to Pro™️ makes it an objectively worse product than its direct competitors.

I can't figure out how to setup flatpak. Everything seems to be working fine until I enter the last line in the terminal:

Assuming you've installed flatpak correctly (sudo apt install flatpak gnome-software-plugin-flatpak)

in a terminal, type flatpak remotes. If it lists flathub, you're good.

Try installing a random app like flatpak install flathub de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave

It shoud work. If it doesn't, post your logs.

I have to type a password in the terminal every time I want to use sudo

This is the intended behavior and should not be changed, it's a basic security feature. Once you've finished setting up you system, you shouldn't need sudo everyday anyway, except for updating/upgrading the system.

I'm used to a desktop interface with a toolbar/start menu that I can pin frequently-used programs to, but with Debian it seems like I need to click "Activities" to do anything. Is there a way to set up the interface so it's more like Windows in that regard?

Assuming you're using Gnome, this is easy to solve using Extensions. First if it's not installed already on Firefox, install Gnome Shell Integration. It'll let you manage Gnome Extensions directly from https://extensions.gnome.org/

Then, install dash-to-panel for a "windows-style" experience, or dash-to-dock for a "macos-style" experience.

After that, you can go wild on the extensions you want to use ;)

If I need to do a clean install, I'm thinking of switching to Ubuntu, since I'm more familiar with the interface.

Don't. Ubuntu will teach you nothing but the Ubuntu way. Debian is as Standard Linux as conceivable. If your only concern is the Ubuntu-style interface, configuring dash to panel to appear on the left side is all you need.

Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think "well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start".

Exactly. KDE people praise its flexibility and tweakability, but I feel it tries to cater at too many use cases at once, and looks much harder to maintain as it always felt buggy and a bit janky to me.

Gnome devs may have very strong opinions and that seems to anger some people, but their approach is actually the best for small teams: focus on a single use case, make it as polished as possible, and let users develop extensions to cater to their own use cases.

Maintainer team size matters in the long run. CachyOS is maintained by 3 people, Nobara by one single person.

I moved my SSD from my old 8th gen Intel laptop to my brand new Zen 4 Framework 16. It was absolutely uneventful. Almost disappointing 😅

Yes. Tuxedo is German, Slimbook Spanish, Starlabs British, NovaCustom Dutch.... Framework is US/Taiwanese but sells within select EU countries and the UK. AFAIK S76 is US/Canada only.

Edit: most of these actually ship worldwide but won't collect VAT and probably won't honor warranty claims outside their territory.

Will report :D

The only thing that scares me a bit is that not only he's a newbie, he also actively refuses to understand how computers work ^^;

3.5 Lennarts.

FWIW I ran my gaming rig on Manjaro for a couple of years.

It doesn't need constant maintenance, and it doesn't break. The whole point of it is to be a stable variation of Arch.

It does need regular maintenance, as highlighted in every single stable update announcement. It doesn't break if you follow these maintenance steps when relevant to your install. It is absolutely not stable (as in Debian Stable or RHEL or SLES stable) as things are moving quickly. It might be "stable" as in "crash-free", but it is not "stable" stable. And as I said, after running it for 2 years, I'm not convinced it's that crash-free either. I remember an era (I think 5.9-ish kernel series) that crashed all the time.

It doesn't have a highly irregular update schedule, it's quite regular — every two weeks

Okay, almost-semi-regular then.

AUR doesn't "expect" anything, it's a dumping ground where anybody can put anything.

True, AUR is not sentient. AUR creators, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly Arch users who builds their scripts targeting an up-to-date Arch system.

I'm doing an experiment right now. I'm giving my previous laptop to my dad to replace his very old, very close to death MacBook Air. I've installed Bluefin, rebased to the Stable branch and keeping everything else stock.

We'll see how it goes :D

Happens to everything that becomes a commodity.

But Model Ms and Model Fs are still in production, and the MK ecosystem has never been so vibrant

Well, it's simple.

Solomon Epstein discovered a way to make fusion drives orders of magnitude more efficient. Unfortunately, he grossly underestimated how much more powerful his new drive would be, and died testing it while sustaining more than 11G for 37h, yeeting his own corpse in deep interstellar space.

Fortunately, his files were recovered by his widow, who sold them to the secessionist Martian Colony government, who in turn sold them to the UN in exchange for independence. Earth and Mars developed the engine design so ships could move much farther and quicker than had been possible before, enabling a new gold rush in the outer Solar system and especially the Belt.

And that's why the Epstein Files were so important.

You and me brother.

Which machine did you choose? I went for the Lelit Bianca, never regretted it.

True. Although this post is less a comparison of the two than a renewed appreciation of what makes Gnome fantastic, especially the QOL parts taken for granted for so long ;)

Oh nice, I like it. Although a few minutes with it and it's starting to look suspiciously like my Gnome setup :D

Also, the tray doesn't seem to work on my machine, probably some missing dependency.