Distro hopping and my impressions

[Cas]

Like you guys know, I'm a GNU guy, yet I don't like hassle. I use GNU because of the freedom it gives me, really. And among that freedom, there's the great variety of flavours it has to offer.

I've been using Mint as my primary system for several years. I had been through some distro hopping before that, with different desktop environments in Ubuntu as well as Fedora and OpenSUSE at different points. And at work, I've been using mostly Rocky Linux, CENTOS and some Ubuntu Server, but those I use without GUI.

So now I thought it was time to go back for a while to some distro hopping and hopefully settle for a different distro this time. My first try was the new Debian 12. I saw many are endorsing it as the best Debian so far. My impressions these days with Debian is that it really is the very stable system you expect, which I love from it. Because it's stricter than other popular distros as regards software freedom, it does come with some difficulties:

- Hardware support is not as good. I haven't been able to get my desktop webcam working on it, although its microphone does work and my Jabra USB headset is also unsupported. Trying to find external driver has been futile and honestly, I don't know how to install external drivers. I understand this and highly respect Debian, but I admit it's annoying.
- For some reason, FAT32 hard drive partitions are mounted read only, yet this does not happens with USB drives. I don't know why. Trying to change this doesn't seem to work. So my bootable DOS partition, that I can use with FreeDOS, can't be written to from DOSBox while in GNU/Linux. Not a serious thing. I can just copy Stunts and other games to my ext4, but... it's a curious issue.
- Of course, no "universe" respository. That's Ubuntu stuff. So many programs, including some that are free software, cannot be found by apt. No problem, I download them from source, but this isn't something for everybody. I figure it must be possible to add Ubuntu's repositories to Debian, but what's the point of having Debian if you do that?  Ethical things.
- By default, libtinfo likes to get installed at version 6, but there's still software that looks for version 5. You have to manually tell it to install version 5 as well. Made me waste some time, but not a serious thing. Again, not something for everybody.
- A difference from Ubuntu and Mint, but once you know it, it's no problem at all: here the default user isn't a sudoer and you can't make it one. You can create new sudoers, but your installation-time user is not one. No problem, you can just do "su" in the command line and that's it. Just don't forget you're root.

A strange issue that's to be attributed to GNOME, not to Debian, really, is that, for some weird reason, the dedicated arrow keys are not recognised in DOSBox while in GNOME. If I log out and log back in in MATE, also in Debian, the problem disappears. Also, I understand GNOME wants to be special, but not being able to minimise your windows takes some getting used to.

So now I've downloaded a new ISO of Mint with MATE to have in one of my partitions and my new distro hopping test will be with Arch. Some months ago, I've been considering to try OpenSUSE again and see what's new with it, but I want something I have never tried and I think Arch could be my thing. The only thing I don't like from it's concept is the rolling release idea, but everything else is very much in line with my preferences, so I'll give it a try soon   I've already written it to a USB

[Matei]

You should avoid:

OpenSUSE

https://www.zdnet.com/article/parsing-the-details-of-the-microsoft-novell-pact/

Rocky Linux

https://rockylinux.org/sponsors

"Amazon Web Services", "Google Cloud"

Ubuntu

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.en.html

Anything based on Ubuntu.

Debian is fine, but:

https://fossbytes.com/linus-torvalds-doesnt-use-ubuntu-linux-debian/

[dreadnaut]

Wow @Cas, you have some spare time to change operating systems around like that

When I refreshed an old laptop recently, I tried OpenSUSE first. It's a nice community project today, connecting them to Novell's antics in 2007 is misleading. The installer is not as smooth as others, and had some trouble setting up partititions though. So all well and usable... as long as I started in recovery mode.

Installed Ubuntu next, and that seems fine. Canonical are not my favourite company, and the first thing I do is uninstall snapd, but the rest works as smoothly as a Gnome distro can be.

[Matei]

From 2018:

https://www.suse.com/news/suse-and-microsoft-collaborate-to-deliver-first-enterprise-linux-kernel-optimized-for-azure/

No thanks.

https://fedoraproject.org/spins/

http://mirror.rosalab.ru/rosa/rosa2021.1/iso/ROSA.FRESH.12/lxqt/

And for older computers:

https://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/

[dreadnaut]

I'm not clear what you are against, but it seems a strong feeling. Please don't mix up projects (e.g., OpenSUSE) with sponsoring companies (SUSE) thought. Otherwise, there's not much left, as Fedora itself is sponsored by RedHat.

[Matei]

And Red Hat was bought by IBM, but can you find anything better?

https://newsroom.ibm.com/Why-IBMs-acquisition-of-Red-Hat-is-a-game-changer-for-the-cloud-industry

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2545099/update--microsoft-wants-royalties-for-open-source-software.html

https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15-from-every-android-device-sold/

Microsoft steals from everybody anyway, directly or indirectly, so the last thing I want is to help them.

[dreadnaut]

Microsoft steals from everybody anyway, directly or indirectly, so the last thing I want is to help them.

Microsoft is a corporation with too much money, and behaves just like all other corporations with too much money*. From there to "I suggest you to not install a linux distro sponsored by a company who at some point helped Microsoft optimise a kernel" is quite the jump.


{*} Compared to others, Microsoft actually runs a number of positive initiatives (example, example). They have quite a good-will debt to pay pack, but at least they are working on it.

[Erik Barros]

@Cas, Have you ever tried Deepin? It is a very beautiful Debian-based distro.

[Matei]

https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html

Fedora
[...]
The policy requires that most software and all fonts be available under a free license, but makes an exception for certain kinds of nonfree firmware.

That's Ok.

Mint GNU/Linux

Mint does not have a policy against including nonfree software, it includes nonfree binary blobs in drivers packaged with the kernel,

That's not Ok.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/resources?rtc=1

Get familiar with our products

That's some positive initiative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepin

Deepin ships a mix of open-source and proprietary programs such as Google Chrome, Spotify and Steam.

oH n03Z.

[Cas]

I really didn't have a lot of otime, but last weekend, I used the little I had to install Debian 12 because I had been wanting to try it for a long time. I had tried installing Debian years ago and it was indeed a complicated thing. Debian 12 is very straightforward to install and works well. The problems I found are the ones I mentioned. I wouldn't "blame" Debian for them, though. It's just the nature they chose for valid reasons.

Of course I don't like some big ones sponsoring or installing spyware in free operating systems, but in my opinion, as long as we are able to circumvent that, it's fine. I don't use the non-free parts anyway and I avoid the spyware and I wasn't the one who put them there. And yeah, Ubuntu is very annoying with snap. There are things you can find with apt on Mint, but not in Ubuntu. It forces you to use snap or else, you need to activate other repositories.

I've tried Fedora in the past. It's good too. I just want to try now something different from what I've been trying. I still think Mint is very good at some thing. Specifically, it's the distro that's quicker to install and get going with all you need and it's removed some annoying Ubuntu spyware. But yeah, I'd like something more "prestigious", ha, ha. That's why my next test will be on Arch.

I've heard about Deepin. I think it's a Chinese distro, right?  What I've heard is that the desktop look is what it excells at and it's focused towards gaming.

Probably, the best is that, whatever distro one chooses, it's as barebones as possible, and then we add what we want. So that it can't have as many unwanted things (be it non-free software, spyware or just software we don't use).

[Duplode]

I have been happily using Arch as my main distro for many years now. One of the nice things in starting from a minimal, unopinonated base and adding to it what you need is how that gives you a system with hardly any hidden corners (the excellent documentation in the Arch Wiki also contributes to that). The rolling release aspect has not been a problem for me, as Arch updates have been very reliable -- broadly sticking to the recommended practices should be enough for a smooth experience.

[Matei]

Looks like I found a GNU/Linux forum again.

myl.ro, archive.org

Right now I have Fedora 34 installed on most of my computers, but I also have Fedora 14, Fedora 12, Fedora Core 6, Fedora Core 1 and Rosa Linux 12.2. I tried other distributions (Ubuntu, sUsE before the problem with Micro$oft, Slackware, Gnewsense, FreeBSD 5.5, Mandrake 10 from 2003, Dragora, Mageia 8, CentOS 6.10, Scientific Linux 7) and some of them were usable, but I was only satisfied with Fedora, CentOS 6.10 and Rosa Linux 12.2, which is like Fedora except that it also has versions for 32-bit CPUs.

[Cas]

I'm now trying Arch and my general impression is really good. It's not hard to install as is often said, but unless you use "archinstall", which makes it just as easy as any other distro, you may forget what you had to do next and maybe skip a step, so it's wise to be following the guide, only that. Once installed, it's very user friendly. pacman is just as comfortable to use as apt or yum. I actually found Arch to be less problematic than Debian in many ways.

One thing is that, because it's starts so nearly from scratch, everything you install changes your fonts, ha, ha... but that's not a problem for me. Just a curiousity. Of course, when you install some new software, it comes with new fonts. When the system sees you have new fonts, it sometimes switches to the new ones in some other programs. I chose to use MATE as my desktop in this case.

About distributions I have tried in the past: Red Hat 7, then 8 (the old ones, not the enterprise ones), Ubuntu (including Kubuntu, several times), Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Antergos (an old, discontinued, Arch-based distribution that would install to desktop directly) and probably more that I don't remember.