The obvious answer, for true fear, is to either run TempleOS or Red Star
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 😄
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
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
Same!
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
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
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 :)
Make them use an old, abandoned distro.
Like Brazil’s own Knoppix fork Kurumin.
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
I exclusively use the Hannah Montana KDE fork out of spite.
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
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
I honestly don’t think Arch is that bad or complicated. It’s just that you have to go into it knowing that you’re in for some reading, tinkering and following step by step instructions along the way. I’d start with something like Mint or Ubuntu for a first look for sure. But once you’re ready to learn a bit more about how the Linux system works and is put together, Arch would straight up be my first recommendation. Even if it’s something you play with on the side in a virtual machine, for me at least, starting on Arch was when my Linux experience went from clicking at things and copy pasting commands into the terminal to still copying and pasting commands lol, but actually learning why and how and what too.
The kernel source code.
And suggest they go over it and optimize it before building.
