Obviously Hannah Montana Linux.
Don’t run Linux, run the OG Unix. Don’t use a desktop, get a mainframe.
The kernel source code.
And suggest they go over it and optimize it before building.
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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.
Any BSD folk 'round here?
Yo.
Wouldn’t recommend it for novices, but I’ve just never had a better server distro, they perfected it.
As long as you have compatible hardware, it’s great. I didn’t bother researching when I built a new server and ended up switching to debian since bsd didn’t support my nic.
It’s incredible if your hardware is compatible.
Yeah, wifi is still sketchy though.
Former. Migrated to linux 20+ years ago because of…Flash support. Didn’t realize back then how quickly Flash would disappear and FreeBSD only supported it via its linux binary compatibility, which stopped working at that time.
Hannah Montana Linux or Biebian
NixOS:
Gentoo:
Not Linux, but 9front or that thing they wrap the gnu Mach kernel in.
I feel like a historian reading hieroglyphics trying to understand this 😭
LFS
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?
NixOS: How do I install OBS?
edit /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
locate environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
and add
linuxPackages.v4l2loopback (wrapOBS { plugins = with pkgs.obs-studio-plugins; [ obs-backgroundremoval obs-shaderfilter obs-vintage-filter ]; })Then you need to install the kernel driver
you can find the instructions here:
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/OBS_Studio
make sure you follow the part about boot.extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [ v4l2loopback ];
if you want to use the virtual cam driver.
You may find out that you want to install this in home-manager or flakes instead, but those are novels themselves.
edit: ohh yeah almost forgot run
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
after you edit the configs to install
NixOS: How do I update the version of OBS after it’s installed?
sudo nix-channel --update
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
If it breaks, the errors are mostly unhelpful, you need to poke around and make educated guesses.
If it bricks you can go back to the previous version in grub by selecting the second to the top entry
make sure you garbage collect every now and then or the app store gets huge.
I’ve been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I recently noped out of NixOS. It’s a great concept, but I’m old and I don’t want to spend the rest of my days configuring stuff just to get to where I would be in 30 minutes on a less rigorously designed distro.
That is, until your distro releases an update and you’re like “what do you mean the update failed? So does that mean the update script rolled the changes back?” and then you find out your entire system is in a half updated state and you need to clean install
until your distro releases
That’s saved my ass soooo many times. I now screw with X or Wayland to my hearts content, change 2-3-10 things at a time. ohh something didn’t work? reboot!
I just keep my home folder backed up safely. The software installed doesn’t really matter to me since I can redownload things pretty quickly
But how do you know which software you had installed?
I don’t really. I just sort of reinstall things as I need them
And then you’ll wonder why the game that used to run in Wine doesn’t run anymore
Not only that, programs just break by themselves. LocalSend broke because some deps broke. I use versions that I’ve verified to work. Being able to revert and just use my computer is a godsend.
Is this one of those Arch things that I’m too immutable to relate to?
Yes, that’s why I’d like to run something as clean as NixOS. For now my compromise is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed’s btrfs snapshots.
openSUSE Tumbleweed made me a full Linux convert. I have “messed up” quite a few times, since I’m still very much a Linux noob, but openSUSE gave me that real confidence in my setup that I now boot into Windows only for a program or game that won’t work with what I am needing at the moment, which is almost 10% of the time. Modding games is a hobby, and that’s still not as easy as it is in Windows. Come on Nexus Mods, you can do it! :'-)
I’m in an interesting place because I installed tumbleweed as a server. At some point there was a change to networking and when I updated, networking didn’t work anymore, so I had to roll back to just before the update. I don’t want to start from scratch, and I don’t want to either bring a screen to it and troubleshoot what’s going on again. I tried in the past, and after a few hours of getting nothing (everything should be fine, it just doesn’t send or receive anything), I rolled it back and walked away. I have a feeling I just need to run yast and reconfigure there after updating, I just don’t want to go through the effort of fixing it because it still runs fine.
Came here to say NixOS too. The idea behind it is neat but the implementation is the most obtuse Rube Goldberg machine I can imagine.
For me, it felt like old times. Bringing up slackware, then bringing up redhat, then fighting in laptop Nvidia and AMD drivers. I was scary how much of my existing knowledge was useless though. If you install it by the book, you can’t even run a linked library.
I spent a couple of hundred hours learning how to configure it. I’ve been running it for around a year and a half. I’m still sub-par. First time around, 23.11, I installed home-manager as a flake. I got it up and running in a couple of hours, but managed to wedge myself when it was time for updates. I had written just enough weird nix language to make my configs not work in 24.05. I could get the OS to come up, but not home-manager. I started fresh, taking old configs item by item and re-implemented them via the docs fresh.
When I got a new laptop, I booted off the USB, copied my home folder and grabbed configuration.nix and home.nix and it all just magically worked.
That said, NGL, 25.05 has me a bit worried :) But at least I don’t have to fight Wayland this time.
That’s way, way more time and effort than I’m willing to waste on getting my computer up and running, and I still fail to see any real benefit over copying my Arch home folder and reinstalling what I need from Pacman/AUR. If I had to set up dozens of computers at a time then yes, absolutely, Nix would be perfect!
that’s fair
It’s actually easier than that, but I know what you mean. Yesterday I installed arch on a new laptop, after two years of NixOS. I think I might swich the desktop too.
Kali Linux as daily driver
Arch is fine… It has good documentation.
NixOS or Gentoo is probably my pick.
