221–230 of 329 posts
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The fact that you are celebrating one recent successful upgrade is telling.
I used Ubuntu prior to Fedora and I never experienced a single clean upgrade. I can't speak for recent versions of Ubuntu though.
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I've been using Gentoo since 2002 I think. It's a great distribution for developers, especially if you're developing Linux packages. It's very easy to create your own local overlay and test your package changes against a system, without needing your own custom repo or VM. I'm glad you mentioned Void too. I'm currently using that on my router. I like how Void is systemd free and Gentoo makes it optional. If you try bu…
I took Void for a spin on my desktop because, as much as I like OpenBSD, I do occasionally need to touch stuff that's Linux-only. It's like a breath of fresh air, really. I can go about and mind my own business, as if all the mind-boggling complexity that's been steadily poured into the Linux cup during the last 3-5 years or so has been nicely tucked away under the rug or just thrown out. Not having systemd isn't suc…
The manual partitioning also was quite cumbersome for me, even though I've done a lot of fdisk fiddling when I was younger. The main issue for me was the lack of clear documentation regarding this phase [1]. However, I took it as a "forced learning" opportunity and spend a day fiddling with it until I got it working, from which point onward it really is a fast and lean system to work with, very BSD-ish in style, that doesn't get in your way. I love it. My only alternative nowadays would be Manjaro-OpenRC.
[1]: If I remember correctly, you can screw up the rest of the partition management step if you select the incorrect "label type" (gpt or dos), with no clear way to revert your selection.
I also mentioned recent troubles with nvidia drivers, which very relevant to people shopping for a laptop based on prior experiences with nvidia binary blobs.
Finally, I linked to JWZ's relevant post on CADT, and how it leads to the sorts of issues that drove me away from Ubuntu in the first place.
None of this seems worthy of downvotes, but I'd like to hear what is so offensive. Color me confused.
Debian and I'm surprised more people aren't saying so. Ubuntu or Mint, which are built on Debian do not add much value these days, IMO and Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle is intolerable. If you get behind with upgrades you are screwed. Even after all these years it's hard to beat apt-get. I think a lot of people dismiss Debian as unmodern or some how less than the distros built on it but that's hardly the case. Debian…
> If you get behind with upgrades you are screwed. Why? You shouldn't rely on system files for development... you probably want a proper dev environment that can later be replicated into production or staging (eg. containerization, VMs, virtualenv, etc). Just stick with Ubuntu LTS releases, and enjoy the consistent updates (eg. security) and the massive support benefits (eg. forums) associated with running one of the…
Because if you miss three releases then you have to do three upgrades. If you setup a system and then come back to it a couple of years later and find you need to upgrade you can plan on fighting through multiple system braking upgrades. Yes I know you can mitigate this with LTS but that's a big compromise.
Debian and I'm surprised more people aren't saying so. Ubuntu or Mint, which are built on Debian do not add much value these days, IMO and Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle is intolerable. If you get behind with upgrades you are screwed. Even after all these years it's hard to beat apt-get. I think a lot of people dismiss Debian as unmodern or some how less than the distros built on it but that's hardly the case. Debian…
> Even after all these years it's hard to beat apt-get. I would say Fedora's dnf has it beat quite objectively, but to each their own.
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> If you get behind with upgrades you are screwed. Why? You shouldn't rely on system files for development... you probably want a proper dev environment that can later be replicated into production or staging (eg. containerization, VMs, virtualenv, etc). Just stick with Ubuntu LTS releases, and enjoy the consistent updates (eg. security) and the massive support benefits (eg. forums) associated with running one of the…
> Why? Because if you miss three releases then you have to do three upgrades. If you setup a system and then come back to it a couple of years later and find you need to upgrade you can plan on fighting through multiple system braking upgrades. Yes I know you can mitigate this with LTS but that's a big compromise.
As a side note, I love how this question would be begging for a distro war anywhere but HN. Here everyone says things in the way of "There's no best distro " or really humbly say what they are using and why. This is the best way IMHO that HN shows how it is the opposite of any random internet website; In HN we can have civilized conversations about some topics that are not possible almost anywhere else on the interne…
This is so true. I was really tired of not being able to find insightful content and discussions on so many other social networks and/or forums. Most of them are full of frivolousness, hatred, squable, swear, all that memes, gifs... etc. Then I came across HN, ~3 years ago. I am not a coder (trying to learn fundamentals on my own, though) and not so fluent in English either. Even though, it was (and is) like brillian…
This place does, however, have its limitations too. For reasons I cannot fathom, the community here absolutely _loves_ to nitpick. People will pick on the absolute nitty-gritty specifics of something some OP said and spend an inordinate amount of time splitting hairs.
ArchLinux is very decent distro. If you need something that you can tweak to be the continuation of your mind, environment designed exactly for you, it is Arch. If you have some time in the beginning to read archwiki, you will avoid a lot of problems in the future. After you understand how it works, it is easy to fix whatever breaks. For me Arch breaks extremely rarely. I use it for 7 years and remember no more than…
If you want an Arch-based system with less worry about updates, have a look at Manjaro. The team do a pretty decent job of making sure each batch of updates work together - though if you use the 'stable' branch you'll be a week or two behind Arch stable (but not for security updates). If you want it more frequently, Manjaro's 'unstable' is synced to Arch stable. Yes, Manjaro has a small team and occasionally mess up…
I recommend Fedora, it has more up-to-date stuff and very developer friendly. I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants, so Fedora is naturally a good platform for it. I've always had more trouble compiling random things on debian-based stuff though (probably has something to do with default linker flags and poorly-written packages). RH has a big virtua…
If the user just wants to get work done and doesn't care if they have the latest thing, why not CentOS?
Best giving them all a whirl and making up your own mind. A good starting point is The Live CD List[1] website. If you're switching from Windows to Linux for the first time, Linux Mint will certainly smooth the transition for you. Also for newbies, Ubuntu is a great first option. I usually test distros in a VM instead of installing them on bare metal. So far I have not found a distro specifically tailored to developm…
Another place to check out different OS's is distrowatch[3]. Its interface is a definitely a bit too busy, which can make navigation a pain, but it's constantly kept up to date and has fairly detailed information about each OS.
[1]: http://livecdlist.com/dragonfly-bsd/ [2]: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release46/ [3]: https://distrowatch.org/