I dont have any problem with it i simply would like to see peoples different opinions, so, this is what the system would be generally used for/what id like it to do:
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stay out of my way (just work), ex: i dont get any notifications i dont want from the system itself and all i need to do is type 3 letters to initiate an update
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requires little ram to actually use (not really needed due to hardware but simply to reduce the pcs noise as much as possible, bonus points if programs generally do the same thing on it)
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Doesnt require too much fiddling (endevouros never needs this generally, when installing something it usually installs everything you need for things to work, i prefer GUIs usually but if its deadsimple commands like yay its fine as well)
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I game and stream so both would need to be doable as easy as possible (i use obs, when it comes to games i usually do emulation and try to avoid proton)
id love to hear what yall would recommend, thanks yall in advance
Linux is Linux and you will be running the same or similar apps on most distros. One of them isn’t magically going to use less RAM. That’s dictated by the apps you run and the kernel’s memory management. Hell, you want to use RAM. It makes things faster and it’s doing nothing sitting there unused.
Just find something you like and stop worrying about it. Endeavour is a fine distro. If you want something a little more minimal then go with Arch. Fedora works too.
You could even use Ubuntu. For all the shit it gets for being a noob distro, there’s nothing really wrong with it. There’s this ridiculous notion that you’re supposed to start there and then move to a more advanced distro. They are all packaging similar software and have a convenient package manager. Unless you have a specific use case, there’s less difference than you think.
One note about Ubuntu, snaps are the thing wrong with it. They’ve gotten better in the latest release, but they still create annoying extra mounts, can be slow to start on lower-end hardware, and occasionally have issues with themes.
Which would be fine if they didn’t trick the user into using them, and make it a pain to try and get rid of them.
Snaps have been awful in the past, but they are dramatically better in 23.10. With most of them, there’s really no noticeable difference. LibreOffice is still pretty slow though.
I don’t get the complaints about mounts. So you run the mount command with no arguments and there’s a bunch of them. What’s the big deal? If need be, just use grep to filter out snaps.
I wouldn’t say they are tricking users either. They are transitioning to a new package manager. For better or worse, snaps are the future of Ubuntu. They are handling the transition by layering snapd on top of the legacy base.
I’m not some rabid Ubuntu fan. I’ve never used it beyond just checking it out from time to time. But, objectively, it’s a great distribution. They pretty much check all of the important boxes. It’s easy, it’s reliable, it’s secure, it’s a mature organization, there’s good community support as well as paid support, and it’s Linux. Unlike Red Hat, they give away the same exact product they sell to enterprises and even provide years of updates without a support contract. They do a hell of a lot to push Linux forward, particularly on the desktop, and we all benefit no matter which distro we use. They’re ok in my book even if snaps are meh.
Sounds like enough little annoyances and workarounds that I wonder why bother with it when something like Mint provides the same experience out of the box without those issues.
I used to recommend Ubuntu as the most basic, vanilla Linux desktop experience, but I just can’t anymore.
I wouldn’t say that having played with the new one for a few days. Spin it up in a VM and check it out. It looks good, it works well, the new App Store app is actually good. It’s so much better than that crap Gnome Software app. It’s still a good recommendation for new users - probably a better one now than the last couple releases. I think 24.04 will be very popular when it comes out.
I dabbled with Mint around 2010 or so. It was a nice distro back then. I haven’t seen it recently. Might have to take a look.
That’s fair, I have heard that the most recent version is a big leap forward, so it’s possible the next LTS will finally be worth it again.
There are many ways to work with mounts and you can’t always just grep your way around it.
For example, when I use ZuluCrypt to mount an encrypted volume, the list is cluttered with a million snaps. It’s annoying and slows me down. This is a problem with every utility that deals with mounts.
Everything you described won’t necessarily be done better in other distros.
I can’t think of an arch base that does not require fiddling of some sort. In a similar way, desktop Linux is more or less the enthusiast OS. You are kind of like the car person of computing. You do need to be comfortable with messing around with the system to get what you want.
I can think of a few nin-arch bases that require much less messing around with, but they are more “boring” than arch. I use Mint with auto updates and time shift backup. It doesn’t get more boring than X11 on a stable Ubuntu core. Flatpak install OBS and steam and set your computing on cruise control.
If you demand more excitement that a decades old DE Pop_OS shares a similar stability with some newer trimming. I also had a lot of success with Nobara if you want a non-Ubuntu core and desire something slightly with a little more pizazz.
I can’t think of an arch base that does not require fiddling of some sort.
He didn’t say that he wants something Arch-based.
You are kind of like the car person of computing
15 years ago, yes. But nowadays, Linux is super user friendly compared to those old days. IMO, even more than Windows! My mum for example uses Mint and does agree with that.
Especially the new coming immutable distros like VanillaOS or Silverblue are really easy to use for casual users imo.
You are absolutely right today is a far cry from 15 years ago, but just looking at raw marketshare Linux is like 3% of gaming machines. large portions being steam deck. Linux is excellent in a lot of ways but having what I would call mainstream popularity is not one of them. Though with continued effort on the part of the community to make everything better and MS for making everything worse, who knows what the future holds.
I have a very very positive picture for future of Linux in my mind.
For the entire history of Linux, it was basically an OS reserved for IT-guys.
But nowadays, I see some change coming.
I, for example, don’t come from the IT space at all and use Linux casually, because I find it easier to use and more original than Windows (while not as locked down as MacOS), love the community, and much more.
But, there is always the hen-egg-dilemma.
Almost no casual users use it because it sometimes is a bit too techy (e.g. troubleshoot something with the terminal), and at the same time, nobody designs the OS in a way it appeals to normies, since only techies use it.But, I, like many others, try to change that. I often suggest new features for better accessibility, and sometimes talk about it in RL to clear up some of the misconceptions. With success! :)
I jumped on that waayyyyyyy to early convincing people to install Ubuntu or Mint on their machines in 2007. I learned a lot unscrewing up a lot of machines. The winding path of learning.
thanks for the info, (arch is not required lel), ill consider the ol mint in the future again
Can always install xanmod if you want a newer kernel and more recent improvements. There are plenty of ways to make it more exciting, difference being you get to choose those from what I would consider a rock solid base. Many distros sort of foist the making things exciting upon you because all of the sudden you’ll want to use a printer and become dismayed that your network printer doesn’t just work, or that Bluetooth isn’t doing what you want, or you’ll run into an issue and find only a disorganized discord for support. When your beard turns gray you tend towards the boring because, at least for me, editing esoteric configs to make my printer works has lost its excitement.
nothing against endeavour, it is a fine distro and it eventually got me to dip my toes into arch further;
but the arch installer is all you need.
Especially now that arch-install has been refined.
I feel like arch-install got worse. It used to walk you through everything step-by-step, now it lets you miss steps, hides the option to install a desktop, and has weird defaults
My recommendation is Fedora Silverblue, or to be specific, uBlue. SB is already great, but uBlue ships with some better QOL-defaults. It’s not a fork of SB tho, it’s just a project for custom images.
You can rebase anytime you want to a SteamOS-clone, KDE spin, and so on, with one command and without any traces.Why? Here are my reasons for you:
stay out of my way (just work), ex: i dont get any notifications i dont want from the system itself and all i need to do is type 3 letters to initiate an update
uBlue is even less.
It updates automatically in the background and creates the new (updated) image for you.
BUT, not similar to Windows, where the OS just decides to shut off your PC randomly.You can still keep using your PC and don’t notice the staged updates at all.
And when you switch on your device the next time, like once a week or so, you automatically use the new image.requires little ram to actually use (not really needed due to hardware but simply to reduce the pcs noise as much as possible, bonus points if programs generally do the same thing on it)
That’s the same on every distro, doesn’t matter. SB is very lean though imo, though not as much as Debian or Arch of course, but therefore very comfortable.
Also:- Unused RAM is wasted RAM. As long as it doesn’t bottleneck you, why care?
- This is why
- If you want to keep your PC silent, change the energy profile or install some fan control software/ more silent fans (Noctua f.e.)
Doesnt require too much fiddling (endevouros never needs this generally, when installing something it usually installs everything you need for things to work, i prefer GUIs usually but if its deadsimple commands like yay its fine as well)
Silverblue “just works” OOTB. It is very user friendly imo and I basically never open the terminal, only, when I have to install something through Distrobox, which isn’t often. But 99% is available as Flatpak in the Software Center.
I game and stream so both would need to be doable as easy as possible (i use obs, when it comes to games i usually do emulation and try to avoid proton)
Again, doesn’t matter which distro. Almost everything is available as Flatpak.
Why Silverblue?
- As streamer, you want something to always work reliably. An immutable distro ensures that by atomic updates and perfect reproducibility (less bugs and more secure)
- Easy to use (if you forget how traditional distros work)
- Huge software access: you work with containers all the time, and with Distrobox (pre-installed) you can access the AUR, Debian, and much much morenon the same distro! ^(works on other distros aswell…)
- Almost impossible to break
- Flexible: you can always rebase to another spin or variant with one command and without any trace
- And much more.
I would advice against Arch based distros like Garuda, Endeavor, and so on.
I don’t see much reasons to use them and due to their nature, they might be not as reliable. It would suck if your install breaks before or while streaming… With SB, you can roll back to your old image in just seconds and everything works again, even if you fucked up.
Most stuff you mentioned works on every distro, you don’t need Arch for that. If you like it’s UI, then go for Kinoite (the SB KDE spin), or, better, uBlue KDE.
wow thats a very detailed response! those are some very compelling reason.
are files in home affected by an immutable distro? Would you still recommend silverblue for nvidia? when i tried fedora before (3 times in total) my system was honestly nigh unusable with or without nvidia drivers
are files in home affected by an immutable distro?
No, there’s a clear distinction between “your stuff” and “the OS’ stuff”, which is one reason I find immutables easier to work with, especially for beginners.
Pretty much everything you interact with (files, program data, configs, etc.) are in your personal folder.On traditional ones, there’s a weird mish mash and everything is cluttered.
Would you still recommend silverblue for nvidia?
Yes, but especially the uBlue Nvidia spin, where the driver is integrated and more guaranteed to work.
On “normal” SB you have to install that driver yourself.To rebase to the uBlue Nvidia image(s), you just have to follow the easy guide for the net-installer or rebase to one of their images, which is also very easy.
i dont trust myself at all, every time something has to be done manually there is a good chance, even with simply copy and paste instructions that it might fail (and it has in the past), are there readymade images available?
The cool thing is: you literally can’t do anything wrong!
If you do a mistake, which honestly is hard to do, you just rollback and try again. You only loose 2 minutes.
The images are already pre-made. You just either
- Use the net-installer from uBlue, where you can select the image, or
- Go from the original SB (I had to do that, since the installer didn’t work at the time due to my internet connection) and rebase.
The How-To is also very easy to follow, and that’s coming from a dumb-ass like myself.
Try it, and if you have problems, ask me. I’m here :)
thank you again for being so considerate about all this and since you offer your help… so, i see that rebasing is a thing, does that simply mean it changes the entire system? is it just the immutable part? if i wanna install a certain DE for one reason or another…does that count as part of the system?
apologies for these questions i just never used an immutable distro before
As I said earlier, there’s now a clear distinction between “the OS base” (stuff like your UI and the whole construct that provides a working PC, which you shouldn’t touch or worry about) and “your stuff” (programs you installed yourself, cat pictures, and so on).
They are, opposed to traditional distros, decoupled now.
And “rebasing” means just that: you swap out “the OS”-part, while keeping your cat pictures, Spotify and OBS.
On a normal distro, you basically have to reinstall the whole OS, since switching from Gnome to KDE for example messes with many many dependencies, and in the best case, only makes KDE now more unstable and in general messy.
If you are experienced, you can do it relatively easy, but the times I did, it felt really really dirty…
On Silverblue for example, you have a Gnome and a KDE spin. And if you rebase, you now switched to the KDE version, just like you would by reinstalling the whole OS and then copying your files.
The cool thing now is, the KDE base is just one of many potential bases, especially if you look at uBlue.
There are hundreds of community deviations, like a “Vanilla” Silverblue with pre-installed Nvidia-drivers, which are tied to the base OS, so they should be less likely to break because you use the same image as thousands of other people. Or a special “gaming-console”-image, which is a clone of SteamOS with many gaming related tweaks.
P.S.: I don’t wanna be rude, but why did you choose EndeavorOS? Was it because of the good looking desktop theme?
You don’t seem to be experienced enough to use Arch in my eyes. I wouldn’t be too if I’m honest.You know that you can just theme KDE or other DEs exactly like EOS with one click, right?
I moved from endeavor to nobara and have been liking it so far
He mentioned low RAM usage. EndeavourOS offers XFCE and some window managers. GNOME is quite RAM-heavy and I’m guessing the extensions GE added will only make it worse.
There is a KDE edition, which should use the same ram as xfce
Arch
Don’t know why folks are downvoting you, but you aren’t wrong.
They’ve never heard of Archinstall or BTRFS system snapshots.
Don’t know why folks are downvoting you, but you aren’t wrong.
OP isn’t experienced in any way. He/ she probably only used EndeavourOS because it looks cool out of the box.
Arch and arch based distros are fine by itself, but not if you want something reliable and dislike the CLI, like they mentioned. That’s just a recipe for desaster!
In my personal opinion, you should either install “real” Arch or no Arch at all. The main pro of it is the extreme customization if you set it up yourself when you know what you’re doing, but by using something pre-configured you have all the disadvantages but no advantage.
For the AUR, I just use distrobox, safely from my immutable Fedora Silverblue base. I still get the newest Arch stuff, without having to worry about a broken system tomorrow.
We now almost convinced OP to use Mint or Silverblue, since they’re waay easier to maintain and are more robust.
He wanted something that just works and have very straightforward updates. On Arch you should read Arch News and check the output from updates to make sure no manual intervention is required, you need to understand Pacsave/Pacnew files, etc. One can coast along for a while without this but one day things can suddenly get funny.
I guess you could try an immutable distro (Fedora Silverblue comes to mind) if you want something that just works and you don’t want to use it for programming
I would really love to try Window managers and try Hyprland on fedora and do something like Sericea, an immurable Hyprland based Desktop with all the nice stuff in it.
Just for OPs info, afaik EndeavorOS uses KDE? So Kinoite, you may want the UBlue versions
Endeavor allows you to pick from a number of DEs/WMs on installationa
I recently hopped to XeroLinux (page). Arch based, KDE already “riced”, it has a greeting app that lets you update with literally 1 mouse click, a number (1-4) and the enter key. It’s really nice looking, it’s fast and it’s ready to use. The only thing I added for it to be perfect was bauh app center, to manage flatpaks, packages and appimages (even sanps if you want to).
I honestly don’t see a reason to recommend a distro like this to a user who wants everything to conveniently just work.
If I want Arch, I install Arch. The main pro of it is the extreme configurability of “building your own OS”. What are reasons to use a distro like Xero, Endeavour, Garuda, and so on? They all just provide a cool KDE theme and pretty much not much more outside of that. Everything recreatable by installing one theme, they even tell you how to…
Arch might be fine, but not for this use case.
Exactly 3° point of the requirements. Arch “the arch way” needs a lot of tinkering. But that’s just me. You might be right, maybe we should just encourage people to use debian, arch and Gentoo.
CACHYOS !
seems to be a very young distro, interesting, mind selling me on it?
I loved is that it isn’t bloated like some other arch based distro and the blazing speed (for real) due to the BORE scheduler. I used it to save an old laptop and now it is also on my gaming laptop which works out of the box with Nvidia GPU. In one sentence it is clean and fast and that’s what I was looking for.
Sounds like you should try silverblue. Its out of your way and has auto updates. I think vanillaOS is basicly the same too. Immutable seems the way to go for normal users since its so reliable. As long as everything they need is available as a flatpack.
immutable OSs are killing the desktop OS, keeping the user restricted.
As long as the mutable options stay around I don’t see how that’s a problem. For normal users the restrictions are worth the extra reliability. It’s not a true restriction if you can just go install the unrestricted version anytime.
How so?
1&2 - Can be solved by your DE and disabling notifications altogether with a toggle. XFCE4 panel has a notifications plugin that I have switched to DND when installing the system and haven’t turned it off since. It’s been 3 years :)
3- I can’t comment on as I use #4. When it works, it works. When a bad update is pushed, it really doesn’t work
4 - Garudaedit: WM -> DE
Garuda Linux is probably what you want. If you need the DE to be customizable, go with KDE. If you prefer stability, choose XFCE, MATE or Cinnamon. GNOME is also available, but they’re planning to drop X11 support in favor of Wayland, which is absolutely not ready for general adoption.
Garuda is Arch-based, most of the applications will be identical. It’s also preloaded with gaming-related utilities. Not exactly easy on memory usage, but that’s a compromise you’ll have to make (KDE uses more RAM than all other DE options).
I recommend bodhi linux. I was looking for something similar to arch and i think this is a good alternative. I have been using it for about 3 years now and had no serious issues. They recently updated to 7.0 and now the packages are much more up to date.
It is based on ubuntu 22.04 and uses apt as a package manager. I find installing nix package manager alongside it can help get any packages it doesnt have, but i havent really had much issue with that since moving to 7.0
Its designed to run on old hardware, and i can vouch it works fine on a system with 2gb ram so it will not use much resources.
It comes with thunar as manager and terminology as terminal. I have also used pcmanfm and mate terminal on the system and they work fine as well.
It uses moksha desktop environment which is a fork of enlightenment but i have also used lxde on it as well and switching was not hard.
I dont really game on it since it is on low end hardware but it should have no problem with retroarch on a more powerful system.
It has synaptic package manager for gui installs but tbh i haven’t really used it since i use cli for that. You shouldn’t have any trouble installing flatpak on it as well. And you should be able to use obs on it (tho i haven’t tried)
I would say this distro should do most of what you want extremely lightweight and mostly out of the way (don’t really get notifications on it).
It requires a bit of tinkering at first because it is minimalist and only ships with the minimum required packages but this gives the option to put the packages only you want on there. But once you’re set up you really won’t have to change anything
