"Must Try" distros and DEs?

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.

maness300,

Manjaro KDE.

Arksarius,

I cant really understand how people are still recommending Manjaro, just get Arch pure or EndeavourOS. Its more up to date and has fewer package conflicts and inconsistencies because they arent arbitrarily held back. Also doesnt ddos aur. It even has a guided graphical installer. Additionally if you need some GUI to manage your packages then just install pamac to get the same one as in manjaro or use pacseek.

maness300,

That’s nice.

The fact that you think Arch is a better replacement for Manjaro tells me that your opinion is not worth considering.

Arksarius,

Manjaro is Arch in a trenchcoat and on crutches lagging two weeks behind with its packages. Holding them back doesnt provide any additional stability and on the contrary has repeatedly caused conflicts. They simply dont have the capacity to check all the packages so its pretty much useless to prevent timely updates. The only difference between then is that manjaro has a few more preinstalled Apps and pamac. And EndeavourOS covers that, its a kind of Arch for beginners, easy install, and lots of Software preinstallable.

maness300,

Ok.

It’s always sad seeing you people get up in arms just to hate on manjaro. It’s like you feel it’s your duty to enter into an argument whenever someone mentions something good about Manjaro.

I think it’s tribalism at play.

mlg,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

XFCE with Compiz as the compositor

Or just straight Compiz

Make sure you enable all the funny effects like the cube, cube animations, 3D windows, advanced window animations, transparency effects, sky box, etc.

All easy to do with compiz config manager.

node815,
@node815@lemmy.world avatar

For a totally different experience, and if you ever want to spin up a distro in a “container” there’s BlendOS blendos.co

I’m an Arch user so I’m sort of staying where I am but am always open to ideas, so I tried Blend a while back. As said on this page for the distro: itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/

“In other words, you can install any package on the distro (RPM, DEB, etc.) while getting the immutability and update reliability as one would expect.”

That pretty much describes it and I recall, it did well. I also tried this one which is touted to be AI enhanced and feels more like they are making good progress: www.makululinux.comlinuxinsider.com/…/new-makululinux-release-brings…

To get the AI to the max, you need to pay a fee, but It’s all in the name of supporting development.

octopus_ink,

Wow, I don’t pay as much attention to developments in the space as I did a few years ago and I can see I should start to again. These are some pretty interesting distros you’ve linked.

sighofannoyance,
@sighofannoyance@lemmy.world avatar

|Original | free version to try|

|Debian|PureOS|

|Ubuntu|Trisquel|

| | Guix |

callyral,
@callyral@pawb.social avatar

i don’t think lemmy markdown supports tables, though it should

edit: lemmy uses commonmark which doesn’t appear to support tables

Guenther_Amanita,

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
pelotron,
@pelotron@midwest.social avatar

Hyprland DE is the new hotness

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines
    •