When I was first looking into Linux I asked the only friend I knew who used it and he unironically recommended me Arch…
A year later I actually gave Arch a try, but by then he apparently hated Arch and switched to Gentoo and I stopped asking him for advice at that point.
I have been using Arch for a half a decade at this point and its worked out well for me. I like how its very stable despite being bleeding edge (relatively speaking). It’s made gaming a lot easier, and I was pleasantly surprised when Valve announced SteamOS was switching to it as a base.
A lot of people have varying levels of purism when it comes to linux, and it sounds like your friend dipped his toes in with Arch and realized “not pure enough” and then jumped in on the deep end with Gentoo. At the end of the day, Linux is Linux no matter which distro you pick, but each distro highlights different strengths and weaknesses of it. Its all about the package managers, the repository contents, and the maintainers. Occasionally, technical support might matter.
So, pick whichever distro you like, move around a bit to see what has the least papercuts for you, and then stick with that until you can’t anymore.
I switched from Arch to Gentoo, for me it’s just the next step of taking advantage of every last bit of my hardware. But unless you are seriously invested, I would never recommend Gentoo to someone. If you just want something that’s up to date, go with Fedora. If you have some spare time, go with Arch. If you have no hobbies at all, go with Gentoo.
NixOS:
Gentoo:
Gentoo obviously :
To install, easy just get this iso, with no GUI, then whip your hard drive, create partition, copy the Linux core, config your core based on the hardware technical details of every components you have and will use, compile it, add extra core drivers, compile them, add all the software you’ll use to get a GUI (Desktop environment), compile them,. Now you can finally restart without usb stick! Add all the software, configure and compile them. And for every update of every software you may check the details to be sure it doesn’t break your config.
Easy no? It just took you a month to get all the steps right!Gentoo is a little easier nowadays. It has binary packages and you can use any old Linux live CD you prefer to do the install :)
Hannah Montana Linux or Biebian
The kernel source code.
And suggest they go over it and optimize it before building.
Obviously Hannah Montana Linux.
I honestly don’t think Arch is that bad or complicated. It’s just that you have to go into it knowing that you’re in for some reading, tinkering and following step by step instructions along the way. I’d start with something like Mint or Ubuntu for a first look for sure. But once you’re ready to learn a bit more about how the Linux system works and is put together, Arch would straight up be my first recommendation. Even if it’s something you play with on the side in a virtual machine, for me at least, starting on Arch was when my Linux experience went from clicking at things and copy pasting commands into the terminal to still copying and pasting commands lol, but actually learning why and how and what too.
LFS
Is that a really young Brodie Robertson on the right??
I took picture from https://brodierobertson.xyz/ idk is this fake site or not
Arch is fine… It has good documentation.
NixOS or Gentoo is probably my pick.
Don’t run Linux, run the OG Unix. Don’t use a desktop, get a mainframe.
Who TF is scared by Mint?
Did a clean upgrade/install of Mint about 10 hours ago. I’m back to business as usual. Minor tweaks, no tinkering.
I installed mint, and my Linux knowledge (little to none) plateaued because it never breaks. I never have to fix anything. I’m the iPad kid of Linux.
How dare it work!
Great, now I’ve got the phonk walk in my head
Any BSD folk 'round here?
Yo.
Wouldn’t recommend it for novices, but I’ve just never had a better server distro, they perfected it.
As long as you have compatible hardware, it’s great. I didn’t bother researching when I built a new server and ended up switching to debian since bsd didn’t support my nic.
It’s incredible if your hardware is compatible.
Yeah, wifi is still sketchy though.
Former. Migrated to linux 20+ years ago because of…Flash support. Didn’t realize back then how quickly Flash would disappear and FreeBSD only supported it via its linux binary compatibility, which stopped working at that time.
