Might as well strike Antergos and Manjaro. They're both just Arch forks. Gentoo and Arch are both remedially difficult to install in comparison to a click next kind of installation method. I don't recall having much personal success with Tumbleweed. But that might have been pebcak at the time. It depends on how deep you want to get.
Iirc for Tumbleweed you just enable the repos and update. It's been years and my memory could be fuzzy/it could have changed. I would assume that it would be the easiest to maintain.
Contrary to popular opinion, Arch isn't that unstable unless you're an idiot and enable testing repos. Otherwise the primary hurdle is setup because it's your responsibility to install all necessary packages that aren't part of the dependencies of the usual installations you would make. If that makes sense. You'll say why doesn't x work? Usually it's because there's something you may need to install. It does boast tools such as the Arch wiki which is a very good resource regardless of distro, and the aur which can have many useful binaries/source packages. From there there's advanced tinkering with Gentoo
Gentoo is geared toward compiling your packages with appropriate flags relevant to how you want to optimize your performance (in theory). Realistically it's often best to observe Gentoo as a learning experience with Linux and its ins and outs. Various reports have been cited (on Sup Forums so take them with a grain of salt) that the performance increases are negligible and that sticking with binaries is the way to go if you value your time. This is because in any case regardless of distro, compiling takes time directly corresponding to the size of the package.
In sort: >Tumbleweed relatively easy to use >Arch mild tinkering >Gentoo extreme tinkering
Jaxon White
had to do it
Wyatt Perez
Using Tumbleweed on the laptop, its easy to maintain.
Easton Myers
Fedora rawhide.
Grayson Sanders
Antergos or Manjaro, Sup Forums? Between those two only.
Michael Cruz
>I'm too dumb for Arch or Gentoo, but Tumblweed isn't edgy enough.
Colton Perez
manjaro
Julian Gray
I'd use either Tumbleweed, Arch, or Debian SID. I'd just go with Sid because you already know your way around Apt. Sid is also easy to install.
Xavier Edwards
>you already know your way around Apt quit that baby duck syndrome
Quick summary based on my totally biased opinions:
>Gentoo Gives you total control and total flexibility, but is a time sink because you will find yourself constantly wanting to tweak something. If you can't stop carrying local patches, trying out development versions or compiling out unnecessary “features”, this is the distro for you. Your packages can be as old or as new as you want them to be.
>Arch Designed around the fundamental idea of simply only ever having the latest version of a package available. True bleeding edge. The maintainer's word is also golden (fuck upstream, fuck users)
>Antergos >Manjaro Pointless arch reskins
>openSuSE Tumbleweed Unique in that every release is automatically tested by a big end2end process, but this doesn't stop it from being just as buggy as every other bleeding edge distro. More focused towards GUI users than the other two (the command line tools are sort of shitty, and they place more emphasis on the NIH YaST garbage)
>Solus No opinion
>Kali for skript kiddies
Levi Phillips
Oh, forgot to mention for >Tumbleweed Has btrfs integration for automatic OS snapshots/rollbacks, but you have to enjoy losing your data to consider enabling it
Grayson Ward
Gentoo
Jackson Ward
Debian Sid
Josiah Powell
mfw no rolling release completly libre distro
Lucas Cooper
Kali is basically just Debian with a lot of pre-installed packages right?
Landon Cruz
>The maintainer's word is also golden DELETE THIS
Christopher Brooks
Void, it's basically a better arch with no systemd shit
Joshua Brooks
Parabola GNU/Linux.
Grayson Allen
and no software. Not that I don't think void is cool, but the lack of stuff in the repositories seems pretty bad.
William Lopez
Manjaro is comfy as fuck, you can follow the arch wiki 99% (there are a couple of arch branded scripts that have been renamed).
You get a GUI package manager to manage both official repos and AUR with all software known to mankind. You will never have to crawl the internet to find a proper PPA ever again.
The downside is that it will require some maintenance from time to time, your system will start cluttering with orphan packages (ie. programs that were installed as dependencies from other programs that such programs no longer require) and it will sometimes break after an update.
People say this is a myth but fuck that, last time plymouth updated I got a kernel panic, or when they switched to libinput my trackpad stopped working.
Jordan Brown
manjaro
Jordan Mitchell
Nix OS my friend. Straightforward configuration and totally under control
Sebastian Watson
Tumbleweed 2bh
Jace Cooper
(you) for long post
Isaiah Murphy
OP here. Thanks Sup Forumsents!
Cheers for the considered post. Apreciated!
Hadn't considered Fedora Rawhide, but I I'm fond of Fedora - ran it on my laptop for about 18 months ending earlier this year. Your suggestion prompted me to do a fair bit of reading which is only a good thing.
Debian sid is another I hadn't really considered, but isn't it kinda 'unstable' by definition? To quote debian.org : "sid is subject to massive changes and in-place library updates. This can result in a very unstable system which contains packages that cannot be installed due to missing libraries, dependencies that cannot be fulfilled etc. Use it at your own risk!" Don't know if I'm brave enough for this..
Never even heard of this distro desu. But I've had a read up on it now and it looks interesting. Thanks.
Still struggling to decide but I'm actually leaning towards Manjaro if I'm honest. I've given Arch a try twice over the past 3 years but on both occasioins found it too time consuming and faffy for my taste. I have a wife, a young child and a full time job, so only so much time for figuring out why the last round of updates stopped [insert application name here] working properly. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but Manjaro might be the happy compromise if it takes some of the pain out of the Arch package management. ??
If the thread's still alive when I make my mind up later I'll post what I went with. Whether you care or not... ;^)
Levi Clark
Gentoo.
There are binaries available for the larger packages (chromium, ff, libreoffice etc) if you're running on a toaster or a low ram machine that would struggle compiling these.
The idea that you spend your entire time compiling is a meme.