fosstodon.org is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Fosstodon is an invite only Mastodon instance that is open to those who are interested in technology; particularly free & open source software. If you wish to join, contact us for an invite.

Administered by:

Server stats:

11K
active users

Matt :opensuse: :wayland:

I honestly don't care about Linux distros anymore. The longer I use Linux, the less the distro matters. I think my channel will change a lot in the next year or so as I do less and less distro-specific content. It's already toned down to the point where I just talk about openSUSE and do a few long-term reviews, but even then, that stuff will happen less often too.

@thelinuxcast I feel the same, they are mostly the equal nowadays. There are a few exceptions that do not use systemd or do not have a dependency resolving package manager - otherwise its pretty blant. Comes down to window manager and how good it works/looks. For cutting edge stuff some distros are probably better than debian stable. But there is always a way to get newer software.

@js @thelinuxcast true but not for the DE itself or apps that need sudo privileges

@thelinuxcast I feel that! I use #ArchLinux :arch: since 2008 now. Before that I had #Ubuntu and #Debian for a few years. But yes, now after 17 years of using the same distribution – I just don’t care about distribution-specific stuff.

Everybody should use whatever they want. Be it Arch or any other distribution, or #Windows, or #Mac, or #BSD, or just a tablet/phone with #iOS or #Android. If someone asks: I’m happy to discuss it with them, but I stopped trying to “convince” people.

@dirk @thelinuxcast yes, you can tryout anything you want, therefore it's called open source: open to you to do what you want with it, without any garentees. The only thing you can tell people is you experience or that of others.

The things people have to do is where they rely on, so, we should help them with our experience to say what does work, they should choose to (not) listen, if they want.

@thelinuxcast yeah, once I settled into the tools I use, the distro no longer really matters, I've been on Void for over 2 years now, still rock solid.

@thelinuxcast every time i need a new VM or install, i use something different. The latest I've tried is Tails (from the Tor Project) running in a VM. Pretty solid. Pretty secure (given I am the VM host operator).

@thelinuxcast Fair enough. I’ve been on a stable base (of Fedora) for a few years now, on my laptop I use for any studying and just tinkering around.
Eventually I want to daily drive Arch as my main after a year of distro hopping every 5 minutes (a few years ago), I do feel I’ve settled down for now.
I’ll continue watching your channel, I never really watched the distro videos much anyway.

@orbitalmartian @thelinuxcast i agree. Distros are fairly boring now.
You eventually reach a point where all you want is a base level of system from which you know how to create the rest.
For me, that's #Arch and #Debian (and #FreeBSD, but not a distro)
Fancy package managers? Cool graphics? app stores? Composable systems? Nah, you can keep them. Give me a terminal with a basic package manager and I'm yours.

@paul @orbitalmartian @thelinuxcast FreeBSD is a distro, I would say it's more a distro than something like Android or ChromeOS. FreeBSD isn't a Linux distro. But it is an BSD-unix tasque system.

@thelinuxcast I think you're right. What's more important to me is the DE and the package manager. The distro is secondary to this in my mind.

@thelinuxcast It's all just Linux with ever so slightly different syntax for installing packages.

@thelinuxcast Congrats! You've survived the distro hopping phase :blobcatcheer:

@thelinuxcast This is the right attitude. Use what distro works for you. While it’s ok to be nerdy and technically adept, you have to back up every once in a while and think about what non-nerds really need. If the Linux community wants regular people to use Linux, they need to stop screaming at them about how they’re such noobs for not running Arch.

@thelinuxcast I'm planning a video to talk about this too.

I switched to Arch full time and my desire to distro hop (and work on my own distro) evaporated.

After a while, you just want something that works for you and that's it.

@thelinuxcast as someone who hopped from Arch to NixOS, I agree partially.

NixOS is fun. It's not the easiest distro to use, but it's more fun than Arch has become during the 3 year period I used Arch.

@thelinuxcast yes all distros are broken, just different broken

@thelinuxcast@fosstodon.org when you really think about it, they're all just Linux configured for different use-cases and audiences. at the end of the day, they all can do the same things about equally well; it's just a matter of how much extra work you need to do as an end user to get things set up the way that you want.

@thelinuxcast it's because they mostly don't actually matter. Distros like Endeavour don't need to exist, but I use them anyway because I don't want to mess with all the annoying configuration of printers, scanners ,bluetooth, WiFi, flipping android connection with phone etc etc...

So I tend to stick to desktop providing distros like endeavour, Mint, Fedora KDE, Pop!_OS I'll tryout next.