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.
he apparently hated Arch and switched to Gentoo
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.
very stable despite being bleeding edge
Try testing. And be just as amazed as me on how stable even that is. It literally runs on my main server. The one that, if it goes down, everything of me is down. Yet, I never had problems, for years.
Yeah, I used to run Arch myself, and I never had any issues with anything. Now, I’m no saying there aren’t people who have had issues, but it seems to me the reputation it has is undeserved.
I run NixOS now, and lemme tell you it deserves its reputation, no matter how much I love it.
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.
I dunno, apart from compile times, Gentoo is the simplest distribution ever. I have way more problems with my Arch or Ubuntu (Neon) installations.
That depends on what your goals are. And with Gentoo you can have a lot more elaborate goals than with other distros. Mine, for example, was to get rid of initramfs. I spent a week compiling and recompiling the kernel with different configurations before I was able to see a TTY for the first time.
Of course you can grab your distribution kernel and get default and perfectly safe use flags for everything, but, I would still be an Arch user if that was my jam.
Honestly the only thing you should probably understand before going with arch is how to properly use the CLI, then the wiki is a breeze
NixOS:
Gentoo:
have fun with the nix docs
You mean searching github with “lang:nix”?
I thought that was the ONLY distro…?!
It has been created to “attract young users to Linux”.
Might want to update their “kids these days love this” reference list a bit 😄
NixOS: How do I install OBS?
edit /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
locate environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
and add
linuxPackages.v4l2loopback (wrapOBS { plugins = with pkgs.obs-studio-plugins; [ obs-backgroundremoval obs-shaderfilter obs-vintage-filter ]; })Then you need to install the kernel driver
you can find the instructions here:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/OBS_Studio
make sure you follow the part about boot.extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [ v4l2loopback ];
if you want to use the virtual cam driver.
You may find out that you want to install this in home-manager or flakes instead, but those are novels themselves.
edit: ohh yeah almost forgot run
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
after you edit the configs to install
NixOS: How do I update the version of OBS after it’s installed?
sudo nix-channel --update
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
If it breaks, the errors are mostly unhelpful, you need to poke around and make educated guesses.
If it bricks you can go back to the previous version in grub by selecting the second to the top entry
make sure you garbage collect every now and then or the app store gets huge.
I’ve been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I recently noped out of NixOS. It’s a great concept, but I’m old and I don’t want to spend the rest of my days configuring stuff just to get to where I would be in 30 minutes on a less rigorously designed distro.
That is, until your distro releases an update and you’re like “what do you mean the update failed? So does that mean the update script rolled the changes back?” and then you find out your entire system is in a half updated state and you need to clean install
Ever heard of btrfs snapshots and immutable?
I use NixOS which is immutable
NixOS isn’t the only immutable distro…
It’s not even fully immutable, but it has a lot of the protections of it. The declaritive part is pretty hot and the package system is expansive and extremely safe.
it’s also really nice to be able to commit new changes without rebooting.
What’s not fully immutable? You can’t modify the store
To be fair, with btrfs and whatever snapshot tool your distro has, you can make any distro just about impossible to fuck up.
Yeah, let me enable snapshots when it’s already fucked
Yeah and while you’re at it, why not wait till after the boat is sinking to go out and buy life vests.
That’s exactly the point, that feature is only there if you know about it
until your distro releases
That’s saved my ass soooo many times. I now screw with X or Wayland to my hearts content, change 2-3-10 things at a time. ohh something didn’t work? reboot!
best thing is you can git branch if you wanna test some stuff out
I just keep my home folder backed up safely. The software installed doesn’t really matter to me since I can redownload things pretty quickly
But how do you know which software you had installed?
I don’t really. I just sort of reinstall things as I need them
And then you’ll wonder why the game that used to run in Wine doesn’t run anymore
Not only that, programs just break by themselves. LocalSend broke because some deps broke. I use versions that I’ve verified to work. Being able to revert and just use my computer is a godsend.
Is this one of those Arch things that I’m too immutable to relate to?
Yes, that’s why I’d like to run something as clean as NixOS. For now my compromise is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s btrfs snapshots.
I’m in an interesting place because I installed tumbleweed as a server. At some point there was a change to networking and when I updated, networking didn’t work anymore, so I had to roll back to just before the update. I don’t want to start from scratch, and I don’t want to either bring a screen to it and troubleshoot what’s going on again. I tried in the past, and after a few hours of getting nothing (everything should be fine, it just doesn’t send or receive anything), I rolled it back and walked away. I have a feeling I just need to run yast and reconfigure there after updating, I just don’t want to go through the effort of fixing it because it still runs fine.
openSUSE Tumbleweed made me a full Linux convert. I have “messed up” quite a few times, since I’m still very much a Linux noob, but openSUSE gave me that real confidence in my setup that I now boot into Windows only for a program or game that won’t work with what I am needing at the moment, which is almost 10% of the time. Modding games is a hobby, and that’s still not as easy as it is in Windows. Come on Nexus Mods, you can do it! :'-)
Came here to say NixOS too. The idea behind it is neat but the implementation is the most obtuse Rube Goldberg machine I can imagine.
For me, it felt like old times. Bringing up slackware, then bringing up redhat, then fighting in laptop Nvidia and AMD drivers. I was scary how much of my existing knowledge was useless though. If you install it by the book, you can’t even run a linked library.
I spent a couple of hundred hours learning how to configure it. I’ve been running it for around a year and a half. I’m still sub-par. First time around, 23.11, I installed home-manager as a flake. I got it up and running in a couple of hours, but managed to wedge myself when it was time for updates. I had written just enough weird nix language to make my configs not work in 24.05. I could get the OS to come up, but not home-manager. I started fresh, taking old configs item by item and re-implemented them via the docs fresh.
When I got a new laptop, I booted off the USB, copied my home folder and grabbed configuration.nix and home.nix and it all just magically worked.
That said, NGL, 25.05 has me a bit worried :) But at least I don’t have to fight Wayland this time.
That’s way, way more time and effort than I’m willing to waste on getting my computer up and running, and I still fail to see any real benefit over copying my Arch home folder and reinstalling what I need from Pacman/AUR. If I had to set up dozens of computers at a time then yes, absolutely, Nix would be perfect!
that’s fair
It’s actually easier than that, but I know what you mean. Yesterday I installed arch on a new laptop, after two years of NixOS. I think I might swich the desktop too.
To scare them? Windows.
It’s the absolute best way to make someone become a Linux user for life.:-)
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 :)
Neither existed when I installed Linux the first time.
When was this? Arch Linux was initially released in 2002, about a year before I tried knoppix for the first time.
What was your first distro, unless you used Linux before distros, if so what was your first installation experience like?
Around '97, playing with MKLinux.
Wtf reading about this, such a weird system
Linux running on top of a mach micro kernel, kind of like paravirtualized. And then the userspace and xfree86 ran on linux? And FVWM? How was that?
And then you could run Lisa apps?
wow, I forgot knoppix was a thing, memory unlocked
Same!
I didn’t use knoppix a lot, but I did use Mandriva more, and then Ubuntu was released and I daily drove it back then
Hannah Montana Linux or Biebian
UwUntu
Arch is fine… It has good documentation.
NixOS or Gentoo is probably my pick.
Or Linux from scratch
deleted by creator
Ya there’s Arch. There’s NixOS. There’s still Slackware.
But have you heard of 9front?
9front is useless. You won’t be gaming or working with it.
Mostly, you’d learn how operating systems are constructed.Or DoomOS or DoomLinux. It’s a basic linux system where DOOM is the shell.
I forked this and tried to get it running. Learned some interesting things. Still doesn’t work for me. :]
https://github.com/fl64/DoomLinux9front is not useless!
you can run catclock.
Now available on Shithub!
https://shithub.us/aap/catvclock/HEAD/info.html
Using DoomLinux to mess with someone would be hilarious. Plug the USB into the back of their computer then alter the boot order so it prioritises USB. Each time they start their computer it boots into DOOM.
@gwilikers @dbtng also it only runs on bios cd, so will not boot form usb even if mbr supported
@gwilikers @dbtng but it will not boot because of missing csm/mbr support. Need EFI version (basicly you may run doom on pure EFI without OS, as it supports everything needed and even more)
I think what you are saying is that the project I linked won’t work for USB boot on a new EFI system. I imagine your assessment about EFI is correct, but I’m mostly interested in virtualized systems.
Their are several DOOM linux things out there. The version I’m working on builds out with busybox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnXWOUKhTAMy eventual intent is to use DOOM agents as a load tester.
I’d like the ISO to boot, look for a local game, and join a bot to deathmatch.
And then the testing metric would be a simple count. How many dooms can it run?
I have lots of projects. I might finish that one some day.
We used to do this back in the day with Win95.
You could change their shell to Notepad or something, and then that’s all the computer would run.
It was a slightly moar advanced trick than stealing their mouse ball.@dbtng @gwilikers why not just adding DOOM to autoexec.bat?
Um … because its windows. Really. Almost downvoted you for that.
@dbtng but win95 boots DOS first
Indeed. I guess OP was looking for something besides windows tho …
and I’m just teasing, of course. I’ve got several Linux hosts running right now, but I’m typing on Win11.
@dbtng You mentioned Win95, which have option to configure different shell (it allowed to select between explorer/progman shell)
But it allowed to run something in DOS mode before windows starts by editing some bat file (not sure if it’s exactly autoexec.bat)
The nixOS slander in these comments would be valid if nixOS were simply a distro and not a cult…
that’s absurd. cults kill people, and we only ruin marriages.
Good thing I’m not married. Been meaning to try NixOS, glad there’s nothing stopping me :)
Slackware still exists, if they survive they’ll be nigh immortal.
slackware
<graybeard> Way back when, in the bad old days of ISA cards and IRQ collisions and who knows what “90% soundblaster compatible” means, slackware had amazing install images. you had some dusty old 386 with 5 1/4" drives? Oh and you added an ISA SCSI card so you could use one of those new fangled ZIP drives? Yep…just look thru the ftp site and I bet you’d find what you needed.
Mind you, still had to write all of your own /etc/init.d scripts, and every other config file under the sun, but you could get almost any machine up and running before all them fancy new modular kernel drivers came into existence. </graybeard>
Can confirm. Been living for far too long at this point
Make them use an old, abandoned distro.
Like Brazil’s own Knoppix fork Kurumin.
I exclusively use the Hannah Montana KDE fork out of spite.
Alguém devia ressuscitar o Kurumin
Em espírito, eu concordo contigo
Olhando lógicamente, não teria sentido, já existem tantas Distros, metade das quais são só forks de Debian e/ou Ubuntu que mudam quase nada. :S
Knoppix! I forgot that existed. Wow, what a blast from the past. I remember trying that out in high school. 3.2 or 3.3. Something like that. I just knew it took a long time to download via dial-up.
Knoppix wow, a whole OS on a cdrom. My first foray into Linux, I think read about it an issue of MaximumPC (or maybe it was Maxim)
I felt like such a sorcerer when I crossed the threshold from just burning bootleg media to burning and running an ephemeral operating system.
Thanks for reminding me knoppix is still alive and kicking
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!
username checks out
Is that a really young Brodie Robertson on the right??
Honestly, I can’t tell if it’s not an anime girl avatar anymore.
I took picture from https://brodierobertson.xyz/ idk is this fake site or not
