Cool distros to try
I'm pretty comftable with linux mint right now but i want to peruse the wares so to speak, what are some cool or interesting distros that do things differently than mint?
Edit: i dont wanna distro hop people cool your jets, i just wanna look around cos i find it neat :3
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
Mambert
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •(⬤ᴥ⬤)
in reply to Mambert • • •oh I'm doing this for fun, i don't plan to actually switch any time soon
what are some desktop environments you'd recommend aside from cinnamon
u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •Mambert
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •I'd recommend KDE and Gnome. They're the two most popular and mainstream DEs. If you ever plan on switching to another distro, being familiar with these two will benefit you.
If you feel really confident, you can start playing with window managers.
pukeko
in reply to Mambert • • •Day 11: SwayFX looks cooler
Day 29: Hyprland looks wild
Day 44: niri looks fun
Day 63: This WM I found on a repo by a random Serbian guy looks great.
Day 97: I WROTE MY OWN WAYLAND COMPOSITOR AND WINDOW MANAGEMENT CONCEPT FROM SCRATCH
Mambert
in reply to pukeko • • •rutrum
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •aarroyoc
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •Alpine Linux, because it uses OpenRC and musl, it's an interesting choice a little bit different but I really like it nyself for servers.
Gentoo, the biggest source based distro, has Emerge, a very configurable package manager.
NixOS, uses the Nix programming language to install packages and configuring the system. Very powerful and breaks many conventions about Linux systems
lemmyvore
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •You could try a rolling distro like OpenSuse Tumbleweed, or something from the Arch lineage (Arch, Endeavour, Garuda, Manjaro in order from less to more handholding).
You could also try something from the Red Hat rather than Debian world,.for example Fedora has several interesting editions, there's the WorkStation desktop edition and Silverblue which uses Android immutable principles.
EuroNutellaMan
in reply to lemmyvore • • •please for the love of god do not use Manjaro and if you do forget about using the AUR, Manjaro claims to be more stable by waiting 1 week before adding Arch's packages to their repo, this breaks the AUR packages you use which may need newer dependencies. They also often forgot to renew the security certificates of their website.
Arco is better but frankly all being Arch distros the differences are close to none.
lemmyvore
in reply to EuroNutellaMan • • •Oh no, too late! 😲 I've accidentally used Manjaro for 4 years and it's been an amazing distro that's one of the top three most used in the Steam Survey and you don't know what you're talking about! If only you had warned me sooner! 😔
.
EuroNutellaMan
in reply to lemmyvore • • •lemmyvore
in reply to EuroNutellaMan • • •I did mention both Tumbleweed and Arch so not sure what the problem is. Unless it's that you just had to comment because you saw the word Manjaro.
It's very tiring to get this sort of comments at the mere mention of it, "hur dur manjaro.org didn't renew their certificates" — which is not even relevant in any way for the distro since it's not the distro maintainers managing the site. So it just comes out as stupid.
If you don't get the point of Manjaro you can just ask. All distros have a point, none of them exist just to be pointless and they definitely don't rise to the top of Steam charts by being pointless.
Manjaro serves a useful niche of people who would like a rolling distro but don't want bleeding edge and the risks that to with it. Manjaro takes the unpredictability down a notch. It also includes all kinds of helpful management tools.
I can apreciate that it's not for everybody but some people find it useful and shitting on other people's distro choices is crass. Especially if you don't even know what point the distro serves, and especi
... show moreI did mention both Tumbleweed and Arch so not sure what the problem is. Unless it's that you just had to comment because you saw the word Manjaro.
It's very tiring to get this sort of comments at the mere mention of it, "hur dur manjaro.org didn't renew their certificates" — which is not even relevant in any way for the distro since it's not the distro maintainers managing the site. So it just comes out as stupid.
If you don't get the point of Manjaro you can just ask. All distros have a point, none of them exist just to be pointless and they definitely don't rise to the top of Steam charts by being pointless.
Manjaro serves a useful niche of people who would like a rolling distro but don't want bleeding edge and the risks that to with it. Manjaro takes the unpredictability down a notch. It also includes all kinds of helpful management tools.
I can apreciate that it's not for everybody but some people find it useful and shitting on other people's distro choices is crass. Especially if you don't even know what point the distro serves, and especially in a thread about trying out new things.
moreeni
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •For the love of God, spare your free time and don't move from what works. Consider tweaking your system instead and moving only when you broke something
sunshine
in reply to moreeni • • •u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
in reply to moreeni • • •But it's not free time if you're not free to waste it ¯\(ツ)/¯
(⬤ᴥ⬤)
in reply to u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org) • • •(⬤ᴥ⬤)
in reply to moreeni • • •Quantum Cog
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •talentedkiwi
in reply to Quantum Cog • • •TimeSquirrel
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •(⬤ᴥ⬤)
in reply to TimeSquirrel • • •eshep
in reply to TimeSquirrel • •Linux reshared this.
1ostA5tro6yne
in reply to TimeSquirrel • • •TimeSquirrel
in reply to 1ostA5tro6yne • • •1ostA5tro6yne
in reply to TimeSquirrel • • •TimeSquirrel
in reply to 1ostA5tro6yne • • •ulkesh
in reply to TimeSquirrel • • •downhomechunk
in reply to TimeSquirrel • • •EuroNutellaMan
in reply to TimeSquirrel • • •Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •Fedora Silverblue
fedoraproject.orgEugenia
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •ReallyZen
in reply to Eugenia • • •That's how I was on Slackware at the time. Reputable, functional, stable - and totally tailorable to your exact needs.
Everybody talks about Arch as a "pedagogic" distro, but you'll learn a lot working with Slackware. I wonder if Lilo is still around.
eshep
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • •Linux reshared this.
Successful_Try543
in reply to eshep • • •like this
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eshep
in reply to Successful_Try543 • •Linux reshared this.
nyan
in reply to eshep • • •Haiku Project
Haiku Projectlike this
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eshep
in reply to nyan • •Linux reshared this.
56!
in reply to eshep • • •Haiku Project
Haiku Projectlemmyreader
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •If you don't mind reading a little bit and "work hard" to get some things done and "have fun" then I'd suggest to try :
pukeko
in reply to lemmyreader • • •I look back on learning to live with NixOS and laugh. It made my brain hurt, and if I'd only found the Misterio77 repo sooner, it would've saved a lot of premature aging. But, if you have some basic familiarity with programming concepts, it's an easy OS to live with, just different. And so, so, so, so powerful.
They do desperately need a set of opinionated example builds and much better documentation.
Glitch
in reply to lemmyreader • • •amber (she/her)
in reply to lemmyreader • • •Valen
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •lemmyreader
in reply to Valen • • •New Discourse forum for GoboLinux
www.gobolinux.orgabbiistabbii
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •OK so if you want my advice, if you wanna just try distros, use DistroSea. Let's you try out distros in your browser. But here we go:
On DistroSea
- Debian: There's a reason Mint and Ubuntu are based on Debian and it's always good to try out just straight up Debian. I know people are going to be all "uuugh but Mint is basically Debian with extra steps", don't care, try Debian, you might wanna use it for other things too. If you are familiar with LinuxMint, you're going to be familiar with
- Bunsenlabs Linux: Successor to Crunchbang, an OpenBox Ubuntu Distro. If you want something ultralight and different, you might wanna try Bunsenlabs. I used Crunchbang back in the day, may it rest in peace.
- Pop!_OS: Made for creatives and programmers, seems to be beloved, don't really care too much, ubuntu based.
- Fedora: Not a Debian/Ubuntu based system, instead a RedHat based system. Try it if you wanna check out a non Debian based system.
- Lubuntu:
... show moreOK so if you want my advice, if you wanna just try distros, use DistroSea. Let's you try out distros in your browser. But here we go:
On DistroSea
Not on Distrosea
neutron
in reply to abbiistabbii • • •Puppy has saved my ass multiple times. Love that tiny dog.
Speaking of Tails, a security minded user can also try out Qubes as well. It uses virtualization to separate different contexts like Work, Personal, Social, etc. You can have your Work profile connect to your workplace VPN while your Personal profile is on a torified connection in parallel. It does have its drawbacks, however. You need more system resources, and anything that requires direct access to GPU like videogames is not officially supported.
krash
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •Linux from scratch, does that count?
(It isn't a distro, but more of a learning project that will expand your knowledge a lot, after you've emitted buckets of blood, sweat and tears)
steeznson
in reply to krash • • •like this
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Kangie
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •I'm a huge proponent of Gentoo Linux as a learning experience. It's a great way to learn how the components of a system work together and the distro enables an amazing amount of configurability for your system.
Even following a handbook install in a VM can be a good experience if you're interested.
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fruitycoder
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •I've been on an immutable distro and declaritive distro kick lately.
So the bluefin project, which has so much sugar it a damn cake (in a good way, lots of stuff to get you to a usable running state for a lot of Dev environment and gaming).
I'm digging into SUSE microos more now, mostly to play with elemental (I really want a featureful CI/CD env for my desktop, so containers to full VM and isos is neat to me).
Nix has been super, super useful for packages that I want between OSs, but the alure of getting better configuration with them on full nixos is slowly drawing me in.
Guix on the other hand is my current ideal, I am just super impressed with their full source bootstrapping and really love a lot of the philosophy of the project, but they don't get as much love from the professional crowd (nonacademic, non amateur).
warmaster
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •Nixos is a declarative distro, it's an interesting concept.
Also, Immutable distros:
Possibly linux
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •Install virtual manager (sudo apt install virt-manager)
From there you can spin up as many VMs are you desire as long as you have enough ram. I like Fedora
Anna
in reply to (⬤ᴥ⬤) • • •