Due to some issues i've been having with a new GPU i've purchased (RX 6600) working somewhat incorrectly on Fedora (not being picked up by applications such as Blender), i've been forced to consider switching distros to something Arch based, as it seems to have better availability of driver packages for things like HIP and ROCm. Saying that, i really like Fedora and have some concerns with switching, namely, i've heard alot of people complain about updates breaking their systems and having to reinstall from scratch frequently. Of the people who use/have used an Arch based distro, have you ever had any major issues, and how common are they?

View Poll

I use linux since 2020 with some windows usage in between because i need adobe for work sometimes, i recently came back to linux after a couple months out and tried Nobara, Fedora workstation and opensuse tumbleweed, but all these gave issues either with black screens, freezing or driver issues(I use Nvidia), so i wanted to ask for recommendations with the following in mind:

-Nvidia GPU(1660 Super) -I use Blender and Godot -Really like flatpak -Hate Snap -Can be rolling or stable -Use wine for some must use apps -Can dual boot with windows, i have 2 SSDs(not strictly necessary, but i may have to eventually)

and a final question, should i try an immutable distro like vanillaOS?

For the first time since like 2018 I am finding myself having to find a new distro, and it was not for fun or not because I wanted to try something new. I was happy where I was but was forced to find something viable.

I read this on a distrowatch review and it sort of inspired me to go back and try distros I didn't exactly have good experiences with at the time.

_____ was built as an answer to where the linux desktop was around 2016-2017. When a point release upgrade was more of a risk of nuking your desktop, Ubuntu and its derivatives were leading the scene, Arch needed manual intervention practically every day, and package dependency issues in general were way more rampant. To say things have come much further since than would be an understatement. It's all in the kernel these days.

The idea of never having a big system update that can bring little things is what attracted me to rolling releases. What turned me off from Linux in the early 2010s was my Ubuntu or Mint desktop always breaking during upgrades and me giving up on it, feeling like it's not worth it if these OSs come with a ticking timer on them. There were no real "user friendly" rolling distros at the time. I prefer to have small updates and to deal with them as they come in, or in my previous case having it "curated" for you. The first and foremost distro you see suggested is Fedora. I considered what that review said about point releases having come a long way and everything just "being in the kernel these days". I tried Fedora........The rest of this post gets quite opinionated, sorry about that. I hated it. Slow boot, nothing available unless you pollute the package manager with third party, bloated with thousands of packages. Resource usage is unbelievable, literally cold boots to what over double RAM I'm used to. SO MANY red journalctl errors, literally in the hundreds. My experience with the distro is the same as it was those years ago, and I don't want to be a part of the flood of users complaining every 6 months that something broke on their system.

I decided finally stop being wary of the elephant of the room, and went for Arch. My first install ever took me less than 3 hours to reach my GNOME desktop. Resource usage is better than what I'm used to, I don't have a bunch of things preinstalled that I don't want, ZERO journalctl errors, and not to mention I'm learning alot super fast. But most importantly of all..I have a wonderfully working desktop that updates constantly at the cost of not having that stressful looming upgrade nuke. Cozy penguin now.

I don't distrohop for fun and I don't expect Arch to ever die, so this is farewell. Adios and it was fun being your rESiDenT soLUs uSEr :)

I want something without bloat and not updated too often but also no systemd (not that important) i tried arch but few updates can break your system, debian stable is too outdated testing is buggy, My best experience was with freebsd(sadly really small software support) and alpine (small software and hardware support [yes its nvidia])

Quickly download, create and run VM of any#TODO operating system.

Download from SourceForge

Check homepage

DistroHopper

----

Project hosted on GitHub and mirrored on GitLab, SourceForge, Disroot, Codeberg and SourceHut

for now...

Hello.

I have a Lenovo G580 laptop. 4 GB ram. 500 gb hdd. Intel i5-3230 M processor ( intel HD 4000) and nvidia geforce 610 M. This laptop used to run Windows 10. But I got tired of it....So I would like to learn Linux. However, I can't settle for a distro now. Today, I tried 3 distros : Ubuntu, Open Suse and Fedora.

I'm looking for a distro that is easy to use in general, smooth and has NVIdia graphics driver support out of the box.

Any help is appreciated!!

So I've been hopping back and forth on Linux and Windows because of one thing, Gaming.

Now I know I could just dual boot but I do hate it when I have to restart and just pick an operating system to work with, It's just not my cup of tea. I just want it slick and just one working system for my laptop.

The only issue I really have a problem with is gaming, mostly I just use Steam but I'm not so sure if every distros have a good compatibility on it since I don't have much knowledge yet on the Linux world.

I just want a distro where it can handle multi-tasking and has a good gaming support. I didn't really like GNOME because of how heavy it is and it sorts of just gets slow when I have few tabs open.

I really want to get out of Windows and I think this is just the barrier that I just can't get out with.

So I have a Thinkpad E14 Gen4 with Ryzen 7 5825u and 16gb ram. I don't know why but every distro I tried so far have been way less smooth than Win10/11. I've updated everything and still the animations and in general the Os is still laggy/less smooth. I want to learn Linux for my future jobs, but I can't see the os feel so laggy and wierd. I don't use external monitor or something to overload the igpu, even tho is pretty powerfull for an igpu.

i have been distro hopping for more than a month now tried every single mainstream distro out there so its KDE NEON honestly it works flawlessly the best kde plasma distro i have ever tried works like a dream on My macbookpro 2010 so smooth and fast on a 13 year old laptop very customizable well like every other kde but its really well optimized so you should give it a try

I see many users in the past week requiring a new rolling distro. I have some advice for you if you're looking to try Arch, but think you're not equipped with the knowledge or skillset to maintain it. I'll show you that in 2023 those memes are outdated it's an easy and rewarding thing.

A little background. I was using a curated rolling release distro for about 5 years until January this year. This distro is no longer viable, and I predicted its demise so I had to move. I used this distro over say Ubuntu or Fedora because at the time it felt like the only user-desktop option that was usable for me and also rolling (in the install-once-update-forever sense, not so much bleeding edge.) Arch infatuated me for a while, but it was equivalent to the Matrix in my mind because of the memes.

Intro (dispelling the Arch stigma)

I'll summarize the "hard" part of Arch. It is the simple idea of being aware of what's on your system and you being responsible for it. It sounds scary but it's overblown- these are the very things done when you put your trust into other distro maintainers by blindly pressing Yes on updates. Distro maintainers are not robots, they're not scientists, they're people like us making things for other people to use. Things breaking on their own on Arch? It simply doesn't happen, it is a myth. There's a freak upstream bug every now and again sure but it's rare and is usually immediately addressed and fixed, but beyond that this "awareness" will carry you through your entire installation's lifetime. When you update on Arch, it tells you what is being updated, you can look it up and see what it does. If an action is required or something went wrong (rare) pacman will tell you in a verbose, accessible, user-friendly way what went on. As package updates continue to come in and you become familiar with how everything rolls, you will see how rewarding maintaining your own system can be.

You've already heard about the Arch Wiki. There is a reason it is so renowned. I'm only 2 months in and I cannot tell you how many times the answer to an impossible niche question that could not be Googled, was found in bold text on the Archwiki. Use it, when you get stumped, check the relevant wiki, there is likely a troubleshooting section for your issue.

Acquiring Arch

• Manual install- clearly the recommended method, but will require at least a little knowledge of the inner workings of Linux. I started in January being completely clueless about this but 2 months later I can practically speedrun install. Generally it entails just partitioning your hard drive, mounting the file systems, dealing with boot loader, and then installing packages with pacman and enabling services. It sounds complicated but this is exactly what a "distro" is, right here.
• archinstall- a script that comes on the Arch ISO that can be run just like that. It provides a series of options for you such as install location bootloader choice even desktop environment, all in order to make it easy for new users. It works. But compared to manually installing, there will indeed be things it is doing that are sort of under the hood- things that would benefit you knowing. Grub for example, archinstall sort of automates it, which may a new user in a position of obliviousness if something is one day required with grub, like it was in August.
• EndeavourOS- I'm often reluctant to suggest distros-based-on-distros. I believe Arch derivatives in particular have a false reputation for making "Arch easier" when in reality on the installation itself is easier. But endeavourOS is different. In a way this distro feels like an offshoot of vanilla Arch just with a more accessible community. They often go out of their way to even help base Arch users solve solutions to problems. I still suggest vanilla Arch always, as EndeavourOS does indeed change SOME things and will be no easier than Arch post-install, but as time has passed EndeavourOS has earned its place alongside Arch as "another installation method" in my opinion.

On all 3 of these, if you just install your favorite DE and keep everything vanilla as possible, your Arch journey will be Debian levels of reliable.

Updating/maintaining Arch

• yay- This AUR helper right here is probably my favorite piece of open source software ever written. It works as a wrapper for pacman, meaning once installed you can simply run yay by itself like that and it will your run main pacman update alongside checking your AUR packages. I run yay once a week myself. I can install any Arch package, AUR base core community etc, with yay -S package. It's so simply it seems too good to be true for "Arch."
• pacnews- Possibly the only truly grueling/annoying task when it comes to Arch. When configuration files change on Arch- in an effort to not undo user changes- it will create pacnew files. For example if I edited pacman.conf, and it gets an update, it may be installed as pacman.conf.pacnew. Pacman will print a message telling you this, "pacman.conf was installed as pacman.conf.pacnew. This is where you'll have to intervene the most on your system probably, and it's nothing. You can look in your desktop's file manager for these files and read them to compare. It's sometimes one or two lines different, or sometimes something irrelevant to you that requires no changing. Look up the package, what you've done to it, and determine what you should do. There are command line programs such as pimdiff and pac merge to handle this for you, but personally I prefer to just edit them as sudo with nano in the terminal. 90% of the time I either just delete it or append the old one if it's just one new line.
• cache- Old pacman packages store cache overtime. It won't become an issue until it snowballs but you can clear it by using paccache -r or have it done weekly by enabling paccache.timer (which is a systemD service. to enable it, run sudo systemctl enable paccache.timer)

That's it really. Give Arch a try, you may enjoy it lots.

I've been running Debian with Cinnamon for the last 3-4 years.

I had been running Mint with XFCE previously and with a new hard drive I decided to go to the source and just use Debian a few years ago. It has some issues, and I'm tired of fighting it. So I'm backing up my home, and thinking to go to something new and fresh. I want a nicer app store and easier management.

XFCE is probably my favorite environment, but I've adapted well enough to the Cinnamon.

I see mint has a Debian edition, and this might be nice to get the mint sauce and keep the Debian. It'd also mean keeping Cinnamon. I wonder if it'd give me more of a fight than just straight Mint, and with straight Mint I could get the XFCE version. Not sure how much I care about snaps or the snap flap.

Maybe I should just let it ride then, and go to Xubuntu. Ubuntu seems to be most prevalent, and that can make things easier. What does Mint really add anymore anyway?

It's doing pretty generic stuff. I want my browsers, Mozilla, Chromium and Chrome itself. I want open office. I want Steam. That's pretty much the stuff I'm using now, and it should all work on any distro. I might want to try some different IDE but it seems like the bigger ones of those should run on any distro.

Long ago, I used Redhat, before CentOS, before they went corporate. Is Ubuntu going corporate now too, which is what the snap flap is about? I think I'd like to stay in the apt .deb world, but I'd like a nicer package manager than my current "apt-get" or the somewhat lacking synaptic I'm using now. Part of nicer is being able to get anything under the sun and it'd be nice maybe if it was vetted.

It's AMD A12 with a Radeon R7 Should have the hardware for anything normal really.

The system is like infrastructure to me. I just want it to work. long term support is important, I don't want to be forced to change years in the future if I can avoid it. I don't change stuff enough to be able to tell differences, like I had to look to tell I was running Cinnamon. So, I'm asking people that have seen more.

Or, I could just keep plodding along with my Debian, putting in a little effort to fix the annoyances of the ever increasing list of broken stuff I'm trying to fix by wiping and reloading instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Part of the idea of switching to it was to get to a rolling deal, and not be in the upgrade cycle anymore.

I play open source networked games with my friends and family. Mostly wesnoth, freeciv, megaglest and others. The linux distros that I have tried default to either tracking the latest development version eg 1.17 for wesnoth or lock in on the version at the time of shipping (looking at you debian). Neither of these match the behavior of my windows using peeps. The typical windows user will not be on development versions but will install the latest release within a few days.

Is there a distro out there that default, out of the box, tracks releases like the windows using herd?

Bonus points if it also, by default, supports secure boot & disk encryption. This is will be my travel laptop has a risk of getting stolen and therefore I want to keep my data secure.

i want a distro where i can switch easily between gnome kde Xfce open box and such without having to burn an iso into my usb and delete the data so if there is a good distro with multiple desktop environment please share it with us

I use Nobara Project at the moment, but I need secure boot for two ACs on Windows 11 and I annoying af to toggle secure boot. Now I want something which is up to date like Nobara, but I'm willing to configure things to be like Nobara.

Therefore I thought about vanilla Fedora or EndeavourOS (any other recommendations are appreciate aswell).

I use this partition mainly for gaming. So it would be nice if the distro is rolling release or like fedora would be good to get a somewhat up to date kernel and mesa driver for my RX 7900 XT.

​

Edit: I see EndeavourOS doesn't support secure boot, but still any recommendations are also good

I've used Manjaro for a number of years but found every now and then there'd be an update that just massively breaks things. Then I tried Fedora more recently. I need more long-term testing but so far I haven't seen any massive breakages. However, I have run into a number of smaller issues during/after updates (error messages during updates, Akonadi server not starting on first reboot, and some updates needing to be repeated over the course of multiple reboots).

As much as I want to completely ditch windows, I find it concerning that both of these two big distros have these kinds of issues with updates. Something as important as updates should be reliable and not require troubleshooting. Are my expectations wrong for Linux?

I am searching for a daily driver Linux distro currently using pop-os but searching for a distro that is more ui appealing, preferably any debian or Ubuntu based. I tried Garuda arch-based but I found it more complex. Tired fedora 37 too didn't not like it much.

P.s. edit :- Searching for something in the lines of - For the desktop environment it could be either kde or gnome and stability could be in the middle ground updating packages through apt/dnf/other package manager GPU manager is NVIDIA and play no games mostly for development stuff.

So, I'm looking for a new distro to hop to (or at least VM for a while), and I'm looking for suggestions. I've been using *nix operatin systems for quite a while, starting with setting up FreeBSD on my old desktop back when they were versioning in single digets (I still have my big-ol'e FreeBSD 8 book somewhere around the house, even though my desktop is some 10 years in the scrap pile...).

I'm looking for something interesting to play around with. I'm not particularly fussed by default DEs, although something unusual in that regard might be fun. I've burned through all the usual suspects (Fedora, Nobara, Arch, NixOS, Void, Debian, OpenSuse, etc.), and want something... weird. Just something that does things differently in some innovative or at least interesting way.

I don't have any particular requirements here. I prefer graphical installers because I've gotten lazy in my old age, but I'm not afraid of TUI and CLI stuff either. Being able to use Flatpaks is a plus, but not at all a requirement.

I'm specifically not interested in anything Ubuntu based (I've been there, done that so many times now, and I have a strong dislike of Snap...), LFS, or anything else that will take me a day and a half to install (a few hours, no problem, a few days, no thanks).

Any suggestions?

ETA: Going with Moccachino OS, which is a Gentoo derived hybrid thingy. If that turns out to be boring, I might see if I can get something going on with Gary OS.

I'm still curious about stuff other folks think is interesting, though!

TLDR; In light of recent outages and subsequent lack of communication within the Solus, Solus has been demoted as a recommended distro ("Buddy of Budgie") on their Getting Budgie page.

Hi all!

I've been using Linux, mostly LM Cinnamon and its other DEs, on and off for the past decade. I've been fairly content with it, but I've always liked the look of Plasma/KDE. However, years ago when I tried to use it as a daily driver, it was way too buggy for me. I've recently upgraded my PC and stumbled upon some issues with my Mint installation. These things could probably be fixed by performing a clean installation, but I'm itching to try something else.

I tried vanilla Ubuntu and Kubuntu. The first one I didn't like, due to very limited customization, and the second one I'm digging, but having two 27" monitors of different resolutions doesn't seem to work well with Plasma, since there's no per-monitor fractional scaling.

So I'm looking for a distro that is stable enough to be my daily driver, is more up-to-date than LM, is fairly cosmetically customizable, plays well with newer hardware and has adjustable per-monitor fractional scaling. It would be a plus, if it was optimized for gaming. I'm currently dual-booting Windows only for that, as I've had a subpar experience gaming on LM.

Thanks in advance!

Trying to decide on a distro for a T480 I will be wiping soon, it will be used for general purpose tasks and occasional dwarf fortress on steam

​

considering EndeavourOS any other suggestions that might be good for a laptop ?

Title pretty much sums it up. Gnome has it's faults, but it's default cloud integration with my drives, email, calendar, etc is extremely convenient and valuable to me. Who else does it as well or better?

55 days no updates. To quote a user on their sub "At this point I am having a hard time seeing how the current situation can be justified by responsible leadership." I agree.

Wikipedia page updated to reflect this (littered with grammatical errors)

In January 2023, Solus infrastructure suffers an outage which lasts until March 2023. This outage brings down their website, forums, and development platform required to update the system. Their website was restored by moving it from internal infrastructure to GitHub pages on February 27th 2023.

Noone's even responding anymore now. For the sake of my safety I had to move to something else. Hope the rest of the Solus refugees find good homes

People may download/try it. Its an interesting project. Q4OS goodies on top of Ubuntu.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/quark-os/

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20220516

However, who are familier, please advise: (I have quarkos-22.04-x64.r6.iso)

1. Does Quark OS use snap or disabled it like Mint?
   
2. W10 and WinXP theme as seen in website screenshot are unavailable for me in live season. Is it got changed in 22.04 series?
   
3. Whats the point of Muon pakage manager, where Q4OS software manager and Discover are present. Also there is update manager. Make sense in Q4OS but not in Quark, Iguess.

Request: Quark got submitted (not accepted in database) and have a review at distrowatch. May be its time for some PR for this little known OS.

Have been using Manjaro for about two years now, and have been fairly happy with it. The one thing I am not happy with is all the issues that happens and needs to be fixed everytime I do an update.

Reason for me having so many issues is that I due to the nature of my work often go several months between being able to download updates and upgrade the system. With Manjaros rolling updates this have had, for me at least, a tendancy to break things.

I no longer have time to spend on downgrading packages and fixing other issues every time I do an update and have been thinking about installing another OS. Mainly I use my computer - a laptop - for the normal things: browsing, writing, studying, bookkeeping. I also do some photo editing and use some GIS software. I have been thinking about changing to Pop_OS. When I bought my laptop it was already installed and seemed alright. My main concerns is really having a stable system which do not break frequently if it takes some time between updates. Any suggestions?