linuxmemes

The best one, of course

Mint, judge me

PS anyone have any favorite resources for absolute tech illiterate noobs? I'm trying, but without a baseline understanding of the subject, it's hard to find the right guides

This is great. Just to let you know, whatever decision you make is wrong. Cheers!

Put any distro in front of me and provided I don't need to master it, I'm good. Ubuntu is fine. Debian is fine. RedHat is fine. Fedora is fine. I even have a tiny low-end system that is using Bohdi. Whatever. We're all using mostly the same kernel anyway.

90% of what I do is in a container anyway so it almost doesn't matter; half the time that means Alpine, but not really. That includes both consuming products from upstream as well as software development. I also practically live in the terminal, so I couldn't care less what GUI subsystem is in play, even while I'm using it.

Hannah Montana Linux

Mint Cinnamon. Fight me.

Linux Mint. Cinnamon. With a Windows Vista theme. It confuses and/or irritates everyone who sees it.

Just curious does anyone actually care about what distro people use or more just a meme?

Distro wars, like the old vi vs emacs wars (showing my age, I know) is not entirely serious. I never understood sportsball fandom, but it's kind of like that. Debian is my home team; if you use Fedora, you're from out-of-town.

This is dumb because it's making it out to seem like there are Super Distro Wars and not just folks calling out bad decision makers like Ubuntu and Manjaro, and non-free-as-in-beer distros like Zorin and Elementary

I'm pretty sure outside of those two categories nobody really cares

Openbsd

I've been a Windows... Let's say a power-user, no expert but I could install it, find a way to troubleshoot most problems. Then at high school a friend lent me a bit outdated Knoppix CD. I never managed to make ppp work on that so no internet, but I loved the old KDE. Somewhat later, when we had a normal DSL line with a proper router, I got Fedora. Then Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian for a while...

Finally I found Gentoo. And there I am, some 10 years later, still on that. After a bit of a bumpy road of the first install (no automation, but the handbook is very helpful if you know the basic Linux and HW terms) it was almost flawless. I remember two problems, and both of them were my own fault. The first one was some testing kernel version that had a bug where small files on ext3 filesystem would get randomly corrupted. The second was when I was trying to remove some hidden files, mangled the command and ran basically rm -rf /* (seriously, don't do that, it will delete everything on your system). I reinstalled the system (I had data on a different drive that either wasn't mounted atm or it didn't reach them before I Ctrl-c'd that command.) and all was well.

Finally I did last clean install when I bought new (used) Ryzen build to replace my old i5-2500k, I would've had to recompile world anyway and I had pretty much dependency hell of my own making at that point (I was testing tons of unstable stuff, new Plasma 5 from testing repo and so on).

Now I'm running mostly stable system with only bunch of packages unmasked from testing and there are no problems with that. I never had that with any other distro. No matter if Deb based, rpm based, sooner or later I inevitably ran into some variant of "I need a package that's not in basic repo, and the package I found requires a version of some library that's not available as well" or something like that. In Gentoo, the packages either compile against the version you have installed, or if not possible, you can have more versions installed at the same time in different slots. Also if you need something that's not available in repo, you can just write a text file that downloads and compiles the version you need and it integrates in the package manager automatically, no need to create whole Deb/rpm package.

The one that does what I need it to do on the device I'm running it on. I've currently got four different Linux distros on x86 PCs around my house at this moment.

Screw that You're all great everybody from slackware to steam deck.

That's all well and good, but can we talk about proper use of this meme template?

This is why you just fucking lie and say "Arch btw"

Ooookay, this will get controversial.

Proud Manjaro/Debian user!

• Ubuntu and derivatives suck because of Canonical and their practices
• Fedora sucks because of Red Hat
• OpenSUSE sucks because RPM (why?!) and still SUSE (but they're the best of the three)
• Rest is exotic and obscure

So we end up with Arch and Debian. Debian 12 is good enough as is, and runs on a work laptop where I don't care about anything but stability. Arch is respectable and great, but requires excessive maintenance to work properly. Among its derivatives, Endeavour is just a nicer archinstall (so, why?), Garuda is cool but unstable and too gamer'y, Manjaro is a bit problematic at times but generally the safest bet when it comes to Arch. So, when it comes to my main PC doubling as a gaming rig, this is a no-brainer.

Fedora Workstation 40.

On windows until last year, after trying 11 on my T440s which made it unbearably slow so had to start over but instead of going back to 10 tried a bunch of distros.

Fedora stuck, mainly because of gnome vanilla (I really like the paradigm, don't care about deep personalisation) and how everything just worked great.

Fight me?

Fuck it, I'm switching to TempleOS

Whichever one you chose is the wrong one!

For as much as Linux nerds (myself absolutely included) complain about distros like Ubuntu and Manjaro, I'd still take either one over Windows or MacOS any day.

Just a humble Arch Linux user here

Nobara! switched 2 days ago, deleted my Windows partition 3 hours ago because it's smooth sailing and quite the different experience compared to bashing my head against debian jessie ages ago.

Edit: the final nail in the coffin were the fking backported ads in the start menu. seriously, wtf.

I have zorin and mint dual booting on my surface book.

really liking zorin, very pleasing to look at, simple, haven't run into any software I had on windows that I can't run here. I don't game on, could still be a slight negative, but so far I love it.

mint.