How to choose your next Linux distro?

[Tech_JA (Jorge Augusto)]

Hi,
First of all, thank you all very much

ihasama,
I don’t think it’s a hardware problem, but I don’t have in-depth knowledge of Linux to explore it further.

Xander,
thanks for the tip, but I excel at laptop maintenance😉

Neville,
I don’t remember adding services, I’m mistaken, I had services running, for example from the clouds: Dropbox, Koofr and Filen. These are services I always have running. However, I never detected excessive CPU consumption or memory.
One of the things I forgot to check today was, for example, what the current governor was, but I think it doesn’t changes on its own with the updates, does it?

pdecker,
I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble understanding your answer, so I’ll try to answer what I understand.
I don’t have any snapshots of backups on this laptop.
As for snapshots made by upgrades, I’ve always tried to wipe everything. I may have missed something, of course, and I truly believe it could be my mistake, as I’ve said in previous posts.

ihasama,
As a rule, I used to clean the cache periodically (with pacman) .

Well, I’ve already installed openSUSE Tumbleweed, and now it’s time to test and see how the laptop behaves after a few months with this new distro

Jorge

[ihasama]

I hope you enjoy OpenSuse. It’s great distro but I didn’t feel at home with yast/zipper (package manager). The btrfs is great with snapper.

[pdecker]

@ihasama

Manjaro needs to check older snapshots

No. I don’t know that updates take snapshots.

I just thought maybe it would automatically take a snapshot before applying updates or maybe Jorge did that himself as a way to back out of a bad update or just snapshots as part of a backup routine.

@Tech_JA

openSUSE Tumbleweed

I used that for a few weeks sometime about six months ago maybe. It seemed like there were quite a few updates available each time I booted up. Sort of got tired of applying so many updates and figured it wasn’t worth it for me. It was running in a VM and so it wasn’t quite as fast as on hardware. I would not have had to install all the updates. I could have waited and applied updates once a week or something.

[berninghausen (Bill Berninghausen)]

I’ve finally decided that Peppermint/Devuan, with runit, is all I want in a distro. You may talk among yourselves.

Nope, it doesn’t run Gnome Boxes reliably. Back to MX and Emmabuntus.

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

Welcome to the non-systemd universe.

[Gary]

Hi Neville

Can I join the non-systemd club?
Just taking my time deciding what to use.

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Gary

Just taking my time deciding what to use

Try the init diversity spin

Antix-23.1_init_diversity_edition

Here is a surprise. From out of the Antix community, an unofficial release of an .iso which installs 4 separate Antix versions, each with one of sysVinit, runit, s6-rc and s6-66+OpenRC. It generates a grub menu like this [antixinitdiv] That is the 386 version, there is also x86-64. I dont know what default is? It has taken off. There is already a Devuan5 copycat version and it has even more init options [devuaninitdiv] and there is an MX version https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/com…

[Gary]

Thanks for the info Neville but I’m nowhere near fully understanding all.
Basically, I’m tring to run before walking.

I understand a bit of knowledge doesn’t entitle jumping in the deep end.

As with anything there’s always a further learning curve.

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Gary

Basically, I’m tring to run before walking.

That is better than standing still.
With Linux you are always going somewhere.

[ihasama]

@pdecker

No. I don’t know that updates take snapshots.

I just thought maybe it would automatically take a snapshot before applying updates or maybe Jorge did that himself as a way to back out of a bad update or just snapshots as part of a backup routine.

Ok. I was thinking that Manjaro now has some kind of snapshot system build inside. They are behind Arch on updates. On Gentoo you can use official snapshots of the repo (webrsync). Here’s more info from Gentoo wiki:

Next step is to install a snapshot of the Gentoo ebuild repository. This snapshot contains a collection of files that informs Portage about available software titles (for installation), which profiles the system administrator can select, package or profile specific news items, etc.

The use of emerge-webrsync is recommended for those who are behind restrictive firewalls (it uses HTTP/FTP protocols for downloading the snapshot) and saves network bandwidth. Readers who have no network or bandwidth restrictions can happily skip down to the next section.

This will fetch the latest snapshot (which is released on a daily basis) from one of Gentoo’s mirrors and install it onto the system:

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Rosika

I think it would be suited for “Beginner”, “systemd”…

Hi Rosika,
I put Lite in with Ubuntu.
I also lifted Antix up to that second level.

Revised table

Difficulty	Systemd distros	Non-systemd distros
Beginner	Mint
	LMDE
	MX/Systemd	MX/sysVinit
	Peppermint/Debian	Peppermint/Devuan
	Solus
Good second try	Ubuntu & variants	Antix
	Lite
	Zorin
	Ubuntu with PPA
Some experience	Debian	Devuan
	Fedora	Alpine
	OpenSUSE leap	Artix
	OpenSUSE tumbleweed
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,

@nevj

I put Lite in with Ubuntu.

thanks. I think that´s perfect.
Your list looks superb. Thanks for putting so much effort into creating it.

Many greetings from Rosika

[callpaul.eu (Paul)]

This ties in with my question

What is wrong (or right) with using flatpak or systemd on a linux system

Perhaps I should have seperated into two questions not one. Yes I do know package manager use it a lot but was not clear before on the choice of flatpak or not.

On systemd.

For the average home user if offered a choice I am not sure which would help me make the right choice. Fine for advanced or knowledgeable linux users but not for all.

Glad its not offered to choose on mint, I go for that as it looks good and works.

[Tech_JA (Jorge Augusto)]

Hi Neville,
Just an idea: what do you think about you opening a new topic to post your table and if you need to update it, always edit the first post?
Put the link at the end of the post so they can read about the discussion in this topic.

I think your work is too important to get lost in 130 posts.

That’s just my opinion and, once again, congratulations on all the work you’ve done

Jorge

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Tech_JA

what do you think about you opening a new topic to post your table and if you need to update it, always edit the first post?

Great idea Jorge, I was wondering how to preserve it. Will do.

[xahodo (Xander H)]

Perhaps itsfoss can start a wiki?

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@xahodo

Perhaps itsfoss can start a wiki

Yeah… maybe not a comprehensive wiki…just somewhere to save and index valuable snippets from the forum.
At the moment what I do is store documents on my github repo.
On itsfoss.com there is a section called Resources. We dont want to compete with that.

[Tech_JA (Jorge Augusto)]

Neville,
But you can create a topic and on the first page you’ll put all the tutorial topics, yours and Rosika’s, and more on the forum, and it can be used as a Table of Contents, with links to all the tutorials.
If the administrators want, they can even create a category that fits that topic.
I think it’s very different from istfoss.com

I’m sorry to insist on creating these 2 topics, one for your table and the other as a ToC, but the information all of you have been doing is too precious not to be properly catalogued.

Jorge

[nevj (Neville Jackson)]

@Tech_JA

create a topic and on the first page you’ll put all the tutorial topics, yours and Rosika’s, and more on the forum, and it can be used as a Table of Contents, with links to all the tutorials.

Hi Jorge,
Yes, a Table of Contents or Index topic , containing links to forum tutorial topics only, may be useful.
I will think about how to design that.
First I will do the hardtable.md topic.
Thanks
Neville

[MHS_Jenkins]

I went through an entire arch of distro-hopping, starting with Ubuntu and then to Mint and then to Debian and then on to Arch, BSD, and Gentoo. Now I’m back on Mint; the logic is that it’s faster and easier for me at least to harden, de-bloat, and customize Mint than to install Arch or Gentoo and get them working.

That having been said I’m thinking of trying BSD again in some form or other . . .