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Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

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Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#121

Post by bleuuuu »

loxias wrote: post #97
jodoherty wrote: post #34

I live in a region with a lot of government contracting businesses, so Red Hat Enterprise Linux is something I have to maintain a working familiarity with. However, I use Debian for all of my personal projects and infrastructure. The reason? There's no for-profit corporate interest directly controlling the project. The project's organizational structure resembles a constitutional democracy: https://www.debian.org/int…

I've used exclusively Debian on all my servers and laptops for the last 20ish years. Can confirm, it will continue to keep working, however there might be some things that piss one off in a similar manner as Ubuntu's snaps. I hate systemd for example, but grudgingly accept it.

why the aversion to systemd?

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#122

Post by timbit42 »

cf100clunk wrote: post #32

Distrowatch carries on after all these years, and (at the least) gives a fairly good catalogue of Linux and BSD distro capabilities in textual and tabular format. https://distrowatch.com/ Try some out as VMs before comitting to bare metal installs. EDIT: I see that MX Linux continues to reside as the "top" distro according to that site's methodology. MX has been on top there for a very long time.

It's methodology is page hits so it can be manipulated pretty easily. I see MX Linux at the top but I never see people talking about it on social media so it makes me wonder how it got to the top of the list.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#123

Post by steelframe »

LinuxBender wrote: post #2

If you are comfortable with Ubuntu then perhaps Debian [1], the OS that Ubuntu was forked from would feel natural? [1] - https://www.debian.org/

For me Debian has really been "the girl next door" of Linux distros over the past 20 years. I've been momentarily pulled away by "the new hotness" like Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch, or Flatcar. But I just keep going back to Debian.

With a recent price drop I decided to upgrade the storage on my Thinkpad T480s, so I had occasion to reinstall the OS. I went with Debian Bullseye. Choosing all the default settings with LightDM and XFCE, everything except wireless "just worked." Understandably, I had to enable non-free for the Intel wireless firmware, but a simple apt install had that working flawlessly.

Everything about my base system is perfect for me. Booting is quick. Power management is great, with the battery (now at 90% of its original capacity) easily lasting all day. Full volume encryption setup was effortless. I even got Secure Boot running after following some steps (more or less copy-and-paste) from the Debian wiki. When the time comes to upgrade the laptop wholesale to something with a more recent CPU, I half expect that simply moving the M.2 SSD from my current laptop to the new laptop will just work, or at least will require minimal tweaking.

I've tried using snap to get more recent versions of things, but that ended up being more trouble than it's worth. Now I just build my own containers, running them with UID/GID mapping, giving access to X11, and bind mounting a dedicated home directory for the app. Sort of like a poor man's snap or Flatcar Linux, but it's easy enough to figure out, I get more customization, and I get to keep my old familiar Debian environment.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#124

Post by disordinary »

I've used Fedora for years as my desktop linux distro on my laptops and CentOS or RHEL for servers.

Fedora is the desktop focussed project which is upstream from the commercial RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS is the community distribution of RedHat Enterprise Linux.

This is a great, stable, and feature rich ecosystem that contributes a lot of innovation to opensource projects and upstream back to Linux, it has a strong community and has a long track record stretching back more than 20 years.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#125

Post by codetrotter »

cf100clunk wrote: post #61
shzhdbi09gv8ioi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hit me up when you finally notice that enterprise and seniors embraced systemd years ago while you kept avoiding change.

You implied that Devuan is disreputable.

I don’t think that’s what they are saying.

Debian is reputable because it is widely widely used for ages.

Devuan is not disreputable. It is simply a fringe variant of Debian that has much fewer users and no obvious reason to adopt for most people.

Debian has a good reputation.

Devuan does not have much of a reputation at all, because most people that might use it have no problem with using Debian and systemd.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#126

Post by hiq »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #89
404mm wrote: post #67

I dislike Ubuntu for the same reasons and I can recommend two paths: For environments where you expect and appreciate stability- Debian. Hands down. Your initial feel is going to be like a leaner Ubuntu with a few extra steps (non free drivers or software). Very low learning curve. If you don’t mind “staying on top of your OS and packages”, then I’d recommend Arch Linux for desktop (not server). There is never “end o…

Why not server? Because of stability? I use Arch as my main server for 5 years or so and never had any issues. I just update when I think about it.

> I just update when I think about it.

What about security vulnerabilities?

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#127

Post by Sunspark »

cf100clunk wrote: post #32

Distrowatch carries on after all these years, and (at the least) gives a fairly good catalogue of Linux and BSD distro capabilities in textual and tabular format. https://distrowatch.com/ Try some out as VMs before comitting to bare metal installs. EDIT: I see that MX Linux continues to reside as the "top" distro according to that site's methodology. MX has been on top there for a very long time.

Distrowatch rankings are based on clicks. If someone wanted Hannah Montana Linux to be #1 in the ranking, it could be done.

Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?

#129

Post by steelframe »

hanniabu wrote: post #51
bloopernova wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you be more specific? What exactly should Debian's website offer that it currently isn't?

More pleasing to the eyes and not from the 90s. A more attractive site wouldn't turn people off as soon as they visit it and would yield more users and support. Ubuntu's site for example looks nicer and only 0.1mb larger.

Are you volunteering to redo debian.org? Because that's how this works.
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