1 yr. ago • 88%

Distro for experienced Linux user

Hi, I'm looking for a distro for my laptop. My first distro was Pop!_OS, then I switched to Fedora, then Arch for a year and 2 months ago I switched to Fedora Silverblue, because I wanted to try immutable distro that relies on containers and flatpaks to be usefull. Silverblue is great but not so much for me, its not flexible enough.

I'm thinking of switching to Arch but maybe it's time for something else. Maybe NixOS or Void, Gentoo probably not, I don't have time for compiling everything. What do you recommend?

It must support full disk encryption, secure boot with signing with YOUR OWN KEYS, systemd (because of MullvadVPN), everything else I think can work on any distro (Gnome, podman, kvm, etc.).

69 comments

Since I’m the NixOS guy, I recommend GUIX. 😉

32
- I always wonder why GUIX seems to get left out vs NixOS
  
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  If NixOS isn't ready for mainstream work, GUIX is at least doubley so. It is SUPER white beard while IMO, even an idiot (👋🏼) can grasp NixOS.
  
  12
- Said every Nix user ever. I'm also looking to switch.
  
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Switch to debian and go outside

30
I'd recommend rather boring Debian. Archlinux as well if you want to dive deeper.

EDIT: For Debian, you want Debian Testing.

25
- Debian is only as boring as you want it to be.
  
  9
- I installed Debian so I could install Proxmox. Now I have like 10 VMs with every flavor of Linux I could want. Still partial to Arch tho.
  
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- Debian i get the feeling "we do everything for you, don't question it", not exactly deep.
  
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I've been using Linux for 2 decades and I still use Debian for containers and servers and Pop_os for my desktop and laptop. If I was going to run a straight gaming machine I'd probably use something Arch based.

What kind of experience are you looking for? Something that's bleeding edge? Something that's going to give you 99.999% uptime with minimal hassle? Something to give you a hobby?

17
- Likewise, been using Linux for over 15 years but my main gaming PC runs Mint because it gets out of my way when I want it to
  
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  Linux user since 2008 here.
  
  Boring Debian for servers and Pop Os for my desktop because everything works out of the box
  
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- Linux user since 2008 here.
  
  Boring Debian for servers and Pop Os for my desktop because everything works out of the box
  
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- I'm sure many petrol heads enjoy fine tuning combustion and make sure the suspension is tailored 100% to their neighborhood roads and all... but sometimes they just need a car with which to pick up some groceries.
  
  Two decades here as well. And I run mint.
  
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I’m thinking of switching to Arch but maybe it’s time for something else. Maybe NixOS or Void, Gentoo probably not, I don’t have time for compiling everything. What do you recommend?

I'm a bit biased of course but you sound like you'd enjoy NixOS.

NixOS is immutable but quite a bit more tinkerable than Silverblue. Not quite Arch or Void levels of tinkering but this topic is not as black and white as it may seem.

secure boot with signing with YOUR OWN KEYS

Not yet in upstream NixOS but: https://github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote

systemd (because of MullvadVPN),

Unrelated to evangelising you into NixOS but I'm curious: Why does a VPN proxy software have any hard dependency on a process manager?

16
- Why does a VPN proxy software have any hard dependency on a process manager?
  
  Probably because of killswitch. App installs a service that manages internet and vpn access, the app is just a GUI for communicating with that service.
  
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- Can confirm NixOS is the shit. Can't imagine myself using anything else
  
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Don't sleep on OpenSuSE. It supports everything you're looking for and has options for periodic and rolling release.

16
- OpenSuse is great except for one (imho) zypper. When I do updates zyper has this huge section which is labeled "will not be upgraded". For me it's really distracting and makes reading which packages will be upgraded harder to parse visually at a glance
  
  This is what I mean: https://superuser.com/questions/273424/am-i-using-zypper-correctly#361047
  
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NixOS. I don’t know if NixOS is the future but, it kinda feels like it might be.

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- @zelifcam @chevy9294 I’ve become a fan. I’m not a coder or anything, and I have been able to navigate its package management easily enough. The manual could be made a bit simpler/clearer, but the system itself is not hard to manage.
  
  I’ve been meaning to figure out if I can set up the system and then generate a new configuration file based on what I installed using nix-env
  
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  That sort of configuration after the fact would be a fantastic addition, if not already in place.
  
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You want immutable distros but Silverblue wasn't flexible enough? Why not try NixOS? It's really nice.

I've been using it for two years and I love being able to make changes to my config and having those changes apply to all my computers. It's also basically unbreakable, if my computer explodes I can just reinstall NixOS with my config files and it will instantly be set up exactly how I want it.

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Whichever one works best for you.

Now that's an experienced user.

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Linux From Scratch 😉

9
Guix !

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Plain old minimal arch to start is a great solution that's not too painful to manage IMO. That is where I landed after not wanting to figure out how to make full compiles palatable.

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I prefer doing useful things with my workstation vs playing with the OS itself, so mint cinnamon is my recommendation. Servers are ansible-managed alma. Professionally I'm a Linux systems architect and devops engineer.

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Permanently Deleted

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I love arch. I want to switch to NixOS for my home server but I think I’ll be sticking with arch for my main I see no further reason to switch.

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- I learned that using nix on arch for the home directory in addition to pacman and the aur is quite an unbeatable combo that I prefer to having everything managed by nix. The problem with nix and nixos I see for one is that it leaves some performance on the table for reproducibility and that many packages are or cannot be packaged for nix. Additionally arch already is quite reproducible albeit not as much as nixos. Writing your own meta package with a simple pkgbuild to manage the system base seemed like a good substitute for me.
  
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  There's an immutable Arch project out there called AstOS
  
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The one thing I’ve learned over the years is that the more experience you have with Linux, the less you rely on preconfigured distributions. Find a stable minimal install and build up your own set of base packages, DE, configs, etc.

Only you know your habits and needs and experience is how you narrow down the field.

For me personally, I have found my groove in a minimal Debian install with a first run setup script or two that is repeatable and automatable so I can start with a known quantity for any applicable need I have.

7
Arch is a good choice, Endeavour was my flavor of choice, but these days I use Linux Mint: Debian Edition, which works mostly fine for me (got one minor piece of software I can't get for it).

6
- Seconded LMDE. Super stable, polished, and intuitive.
  
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every distro is for experienced users, you can tranform arch in ubuntu and vice versa, but if you want sumething different try fedora silverblue, or other nonmutable distro, it's fun learning how to use it(it's what i'm doing with my laptop)

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- I don't know who downvotes this, but it's true, you can get your hands dirty with any distro.
  
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Since you're experienced with Linux already try a BSD for something new.

6
- BSD sadly lacks a fair amount of support for things that Linux does. I gave FreeBSD a try a few years back and it annoyed me, especially coming from Arch. All the packages were so outdated and compiling updated versions from Ports took forever. Also the BSDs are just different enough from Linux to be annoying.
  
  I'm a Linux System Engineer and at my former job we had a few thousand Linux hosts but a handful of Solaris 5 hosts. Shelling into one of those, expecting it to be Linux and then raging when something didn't work but then realizing it was Solaris and not Linux was always fun.
  
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if you want systemd then void is out of the question, void uses runit.

5
- And that's actually one of the reason to choose it, runit feels so smooth on old hardware!
  
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  i know, i have it installed on two machines, i love it. op wanted a distro that supports systemd.
  
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NixOS definitely. The disk encryption with keys you may need do that manually though.

5
I use debian as my absolute base and build lxc containers for everything above that with my own kernel, works for me.

I set my own complexity, but debian also doesn't get in my way which works for me.

Ubuntu container for dev work (c++ mostly), arch container for some stuff, few vms for private data.

5
- @InverseParallax @chevy9294 whoa LXC / LXD since it uses virtualization means one can rock their own kernels? Hmmm
  
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  Oh sorry that was badly written, I compile my own kernel and run lxc on top of that, with debian base userspace otherwise.
  
  Then kvm on top for really different stuff.
  
  For my server it's debian on the bottom with zfs file serving raidz2, and on top of that 1 kvm for debian docker containers, and 1 kvm for freebsd jails which actually hosts most of the services I care about, docker is fallback if they're a pain to set up.
  
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I use Arch (btw) because of the ArchWiki, and I'm totally comfortable configuring my system how I like it.

But I do appreciate Debian a lot. You can customize things to almost the same extent, but packages come preconfigured with great defaults and designed to better work together, unlike Arch which uses the upstream defaults almost universally.

5
Void Linux was my daily driver for around a year and it was fast, really fast, and had a lot of tinkerability. I highly recommend it.

5
- Void is lovely, I use it on my computer as my sole OS, but OP requested systemd so that's a no for Void.
  
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  Oops, you're right, I read as the opposite!
  
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There are a few options. Like many have mentioned, Nix OS is a wonderful distro with it's own quirks.

If you are looking for something normal, consider Opensuse Tumbleweed and arch linux (or arch based distros like EndavourOS).

4
I'd recommend go back to arch. I use arch myself and have decided to stop distro hopping. I always end up regretting and come back to arch. The arch install script is quite good now, spares me hours of hunting down what packages to install for a working desktop and configuring of bootloader, etc, that I had to do before for installing arch.

Last time I tried something else was fedora. I liked the seamless experience, but I was annoyed by the very slow updates (why does it take soo long to refresh the repos?), and I missed the awesome wiki and package availability on arch.

3
- I'm a long time arch with plasma user and recently tried arch with gnome and couldn't get into it, so decided to try something new so I switched to Fedora Kinoite and yes, updates are incredibly slow. I mean it's ridiculous really when compared to arch, but the distro seems solid ( curious how long I'll last before inevitably going back to arch).
  
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Use wireguard for Mullvad

Likely void, gentoo, Slackware, or just do everything on Debian

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Gentoo probably not, I don't have time for compiling everything

Just wanted to say I use gentoo and was going to recommend it. Compile times really shouldn't impact you that much as they're running in background and can be configured to not impact other processes. And compiles are very fast for most applications, it's only the few heavy ones that aren't.

2
Linux mint

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The secure boot implementations in Debian and Fedora trust kernel/modules with keys signed by Microsoft. Everything that you listed you want to do, you can do on Arch and with AUR you probably won't need to compile 99.9% of programs.

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Arch supports all of those.

NixOS does too, but I don't believe Void does.

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Void, hands down, if you're halfway experienced. Nix is cool but complicated and quite unlike amy other system.

Except void doesn't have systemd, if you really need it, but it's easy to write your own runit routine.

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Vanilla OS 2 Orchid sounds very interesting, I think. It's in alpha now. Have a read about their package manager - it's kinda meta, allowing you to use other package managers in parallel.

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Fedora 38

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Let me suggest: Fedora. It's a solid distro that makes some good decisions, doesn't require a huge amount of effort (unless an update bricks it but it's been a long time since that happened), and can be further customized if needed.

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All distros are exactly the same. Theres no such thing as a "distro for experienced users". With that said, just do a minimal install of (pretty much anything you want).

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- Different distros have different limitations and advantages but there are usually good reasons for these things. For example, Debian strives for stability, but that also means fairly old packages. Some other distro might not have a very wide selection of apps in the repos, but it might have some other areas where it excels. As long as you agree with these sorts of design decisions, it should be a good distro for you.
  
  You don't even have to like the default DE or any other package related decision that comes with the default image. Maybe there's a bare bones image that allows you to build your OS which ever way you like, and install only the packages you really need. in this regard, every distribution can be made more or less similar, but your decisions won't change what is or isn't in the repositories or how the devs make their decisions.
  
  For a lot of people, the default image is the one they'll use. In that regard, every distribution is different, but can still be made similar if you put the time and effort into it. Some people prefer to have this and that preinstalled, while other people want something else to work out of the box. With these sorts of decisions in mind, there are huge differences between distros.
  
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  means fairly old packages
  
  It takes very little effort to maintain a debian system with fresher packages. stable is not the only release nor the only mechanism for running newer versions of software.
  
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