How to choose your next Linux distro?

[callpaul.eu (Paul)]

Perhaps the groups should be

Install,
Update
Package manager
Drivers
Gui
Cmd line knowledge

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@callpaul.eu

groups should be

They dont form a series… they would have to each be a separate table.
Not sure I could produce an ‘Ease of install’ table
You are asking what makes a distro difficult?
Will sleep on it.

[berninghausen (Bill Berninghausen)]

@Sheila_Flanagan

I think @berninghausen was pointing out the obvious

Occam’s razor is my friend.

[callpaul.eu (Paul)]

Hickam’s Dictum is mine !

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@callpaul.eu

Hickam’s Dictum

I had to look it up

" Hickam’s dictum is a medical principle emphasizing that a patient’s symptoms can be caused by multiple diseases, contrasting with the principle of Occam’s razor which suggests a single, simplest explanation is most likely. "

So you use a medical diagnosis approach to computer problems… @berninghausen uses a scientific approach. Interesting

[callpaul.eu (Paul)]

@nevj

medical diagnosis

Is the same ? As

@nevj

scientific approach

Why stay with 2 solutions when many are possible,

So should it be

What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? ‘Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

Next revision of distro hardness table

Difficulty	Systemd distros	Non-systemd distros
Beginner	Mint
	LMDE
	MX/Systemd	MX/sysVinit
	Peppermint/Debian	Peppermind/Devuan
	Solus
Learner	Ubuntu & variants
	Zorin
	Ubuntu with PPA
Some experience	Debian	Devuan
	Fedora	Antix
	OpenSUSE slowroll	Alpine
	OpenSUSE tumbleweed	Artix
	OpenSUSE leap
Difficult	NixOS	Artix
	Arch without AUR	Chimera
	Manjaro	Void
	Garuda	Slackware
	Arch with AUR	Hyperbola
		GUIX
Requires dedication	Gentoo/Systemd	Gentoo/OpenRC
Pro		LFS

I added Alpine, and moved Artix up one level. Artix really is the easiest Arch based distro, and it does not have the stability problems noted for Manjaro.
There is really no non-systemd equivalent of Ubuntu.

[xahodo (Xander H)]

OpenSUSE Slowroll is in experiment stage. Issues are to be expected. Is this really in the category of “some experience” at this point in time?

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

Good point. I will move it down.
I want this table to be collective experience, not just me.
also an error… I duplicated Artix.
Tomorrow… I need the PC

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi Neville,

@nevj

the markdown viewer ‘remarkable’ does a much nicer job of rendering that same table

Hmm, it didn´t work with me.

This is what I got:

Keenwrite on the other hand produced the same result which you posted.

Cheers from Rosika

Edit:

O.K., I got it now. Seems an empty line was introduced at line 3.
I just copied your initial code.
After removing the empty line it worked:

Sorry for the bother.

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

Hmm, it didn´t work with me

Hi Rosika,
Take out line 3… blank lines muck it up.
Sorry… I see you worked it out.

Keenwrite is not quite correct?.. there are no lines or spaces between the blocks

Where do you think Lite belongs in our Table?
Regards
Neville

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

Another revision

Difficulty	Systemd distros	Non-systemd distros
Beginner	Mint
	LMDE
	MX/Systemd	MX/sysVinit
	Peppermint/Debian	Peppermind/Devuan
	Solus
Good second try	Ubuntu & variants
	Zorin
	Ubuntu with PPA
Some experience	Debian	Devuan
	Fedora	Antix
	OpenSUSE leap	Alpine
	OpenSUSE tumbleweed	Artix
Difficult or experimental	NixOS	GUIX
	Arch without AUR	Chimera
	Manjaro	Void
	Garuda	Slackware
	Arch with AUR	Hyperbola
	OpenSUSE slowroll
Requires dedication	Gentoo/Systemd	Gentoo/OpenRC
Pro		LFS

The markdown file to produce this table is available here

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nevillejackson/Unix/refs/heads/main/distros/hardtable.md

[Rosika (Rosika Schreck)]

Hi Neville,

thanks for your reply.

@nevj

Where do you think Lite belongs in our Table?

That is a very good question.
I don´t feel qualified to venture a guess, but here are some thoughts:
(taken from Linx Lites homepage)

• suitable for people who are new to Linux
• make the transition from Windows to Linux Lite as smooth as possible
• based on the Ubuntu LTS (Long term Support) series of releases
• for people who want a lightweight environment that is also fully functional
• low memory requirements
• intelligent, intuitive approach to design. # whatever than means

It should be at least as hassle-free as Ubuntu itself, probably even more so.
I think it would be suited for “Beginner”, “systemd”…
… but where exactly, I don´t feel competent enough to answer. Sorry, Neville.

Cheers from Rosika

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

It should be at least as hassle-free as Ubuntu itself, probably even more so.
I think it would be suited for “Beginner”, “systemd”…

That is what I thought too.
Thank you.
I will do it in the next table update.

[Tech_JA (Jorge Augusto)]

Hi,
Sorry this off-topic and for my late reply, but I’m short of free time

After wrote my experience with Manjaro in this post:

How to choose your next Linux distro?

Hi, About Manjaro (with KDE) It’s the distro I use on my laptop and I like it a lot. I don’t use AUR packages and what I have installed is pretty much what comes with the installation, plus a dozen other programs. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a rolling release, but it’s happened to me 3 times and now it’s having the same problem again: sometimes I notice that the updates start to affect the laptop’s performance and it degrades until it becomes very slow. If I install Manjaro again, I ge…

and following pdecker’s suggestion also in the same post:

How to choose your next Linux distro?

You had said you noticed your laptop slowing down. I wonder if you created a new test user and logged in as that user if things worked snappier or not. Just curious.

I created a new user and tested how Manjaro works. It seemed to me that both users were slower than normal.
Even so, on my normal user, I deleted everything I could relating to the KDE settings for the user and also sddm:

#!/bin/sh

clear
echo  "---------- ~/ directory ----------"
cd ~/
rm -rfv .cache  .kde4
echo
echo  "---------- ~/ .config directory  ----------"
cd ~/.config/
rm -rfv k* KDE manjaro octopi pamac plasma* qtvirtualkeyboard sys* sddmthemeinstallerrc session breezerc dolphinrc
echo
echo  "---------- ~/.local/share/ directory  ----------"
cd ~/.local/share/
rm -rfv dolphin k* plasma* sddm systemsettings rece* user*
echo

Base on Completely reset KDE Plasma to factory setting?

I rebooted, reconfigured sddm, splash screen and application style with breath theme.

I tested with the following kernels, but always after 4 reboots and the list is sorted by the fastest kernel:

• 5.15
• 6.12
• 6.1
• 6.6

In my opinion, even with the kernel change, laptop is slow and since I don’t know how to fix it any other way, I can only make it fast again with a fresh install of Manjaro.

Before I reinstall Manjaro, I’m going to install openSUSE, so I can answer Neville again:

@nevj

and you have Fedora and openSUSE harder than Debian.

Maybe this time I’ll change my mind.

ihasama,

@ihasama

Maybe you could have a dual boot laptop

At the moment I’m not going to dual boot the laptop because, as I need to work on it, I’m sure I’ll stay working on Manjaro and leave aside the other distro I’ve installed, but thanks for the tip, because that’s how I should do it.

From Neville’s table, congratulations on this thread, I decided to choose Tumbleweed as a tester instead of Leap

From the openSUSE Tumbleweed portal:

Many thanks to all
Jorge

[ihasama]

It’s strange that your system slows down after updates. Maybe changing the OS could help but it might be a hardware issue. Maybe something is breaking?

[xahodo (Xander H)]

Perhaps it’s dust collecting inside the laptop?

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Tech_JA

I can only make it fast again with a fresh install of Manjaro.

Hi Jorge
After you do a fresh install, do you add any services that require a daemon to be running.?
If so, check what each daemon is doing… eg is it consuming cpu time?
If you find a suspect daemon, try disabling the service… that may make it fast again.
Regards
Neville

[pdecker]

Since it slows down after many updates, I wonder about snapshots. Maybe there are layers and layers of snapshots the OS needs to wade through to arrive at the latest version of each file. I know that adds overhead in a VM running on VMWare. Maybe it isn’t so much the 3 or 4 or 5 days or weeks of updates, but the snapshots for backups?

[ihasama]

This is interesting. Are you saying that Manjaro needs to check older snapshots when updating the system? Or is it the system which slows down because the package manager (Pacman) is not cleaning the cache? I only used Manjaro for a short period years ago when I discovered it’s no stable. Maybe there’s something Pacman does on Arch but not on Manjaro?