Linux noob question: If I can install whichever DE I want on any distro I want (mostly), and if I can essentially install any software from one distro on another... why are there so many distros? And how the fuck do you choose between them if you can essentially set them all up to be the same?
inb4: picrelated
thought I'd post here to not make a new thread since my request is related. just installed win 10 for the first time and just felt extremal dirty and disgusted with myself... this OS has really dumbed everything down for users and I'm not prepared to do this to myself so I decided to install Linux.
need some help picking a distribution though. I am a uni student so I'll need it for studying and do play games also occasionally so might need to either dual boot or use wine or a virtual machine. athough I'm not above trying to set up a box that can run the games I play as I usually play obscure non mainstream titles.
From your pick:
"Do you like package managers?"
Gentoo has it, Slackware makes you do it yourself.
>why are there so many distros?
Probably because you can install (almost) whichever DE and software you want on whichever distro you pick.
That's like asking "if I can put gas in any car and it'll go where I want, why are there so many cars?" Wouldn't modularity of function encourage variety?
lies. Slackware has had package management for over two decades, and it had what most people think of as a "package manager" since 2008.
different distros package software differently. when you get a package from your distro's repository, it's not always guaranteed to be the same software that the developer released - many distros apply their own patches and modifications, add their own branding/themes, build it with specific options, etc. you also have differences in the package managers themselves, some are better than others, almost all of them have the basic set of functions, but they way they perform them is different. then you have differences in basic system design - where they put various system files, what init system they use; to continue the car analogy it's like choosing an FF over an FR over an MR over a 4WD. Everyone likes to hate on systemd (justifiably so) and even though many distros have moved towards it, some refuse and others have been forked from ones that have. But yes, in theory, you can install anything on any distro, or you can not have a distro at all, download all the source code for everything on your system, compile it yourself, decide what components you want, decide where to put everything, decide how to configure it. This is called Linux From Scratch.
>the games I play as I usually play obscure non mainstream titles.
these days a lot of "obscure" ("indie") games are released with native Linux versions. if they are older games, most of them run really really well on wine and if you are new to Linux and don't want to bother learning how to properly manage your wine installations, there's a python program called PlayOnLinux that automates everything for you.
There is not as many distros as you think if you group them by family.
Really it's pretty much just:
Debian (Ubuntu/Mint)
RHEL (Fedora/CentOS)
OpenSUSE
ArchLinux (Manjaro, Sabayon)
That's it. 4 major families.
>need some help picking a distribution though
if you want to use Linux right away without taking any time to learn how/why it works, Ubuntu (Xubuntu, Kubuntu) or Mint (you will get be laughed at on here and people won't help you)
if you want a system that does most of the dirty stuff for you but still expects you to understand what's going on under the hood, get openSUSE, Fedora, or Debian (in order from best to least best) and start learning about what all the parts of Linux are and what they do.
if you want to dive in headfirst and stay up all night reading documentation, Slackware or Gentoo (or a derivative of either). For a while, you'll have absolutely no idea what's going on, but unless you do something really stupid the system should work, and it will be a very "pure" experience, and when you finally get to the other side you will understand everything there is to know about Linux and would probably be ready for FreeBSD.
Don't use Arch. Just, don't. It's only for retarded ricer wannabes who think it's the only distro you can rice with.
>Didn't mention the exclusive Hannah Montana Linux family
Faggot
Thanks,
this is the reason why it's very daunting for new users coming into Linux. Analysis paralysis sets in (at least for me) and I can never settle on any of the decisions I make because there's always something else that's better in different ways.
I've used Ubuntu Linux before and I never liked it due to it being too similar to Mac. For me, I want a dietro that's so. every in the middle ground. Not Arch that basically gives you a complete blank slate... I don't want to spend time installing every program, but I don't want a distro that is bloated with a whole bunch of shit I never use on it. I like minimalistic, low resource cost and secure system that functions reasonably simply and straightforwardly.
So, atm I'm comparing Fedora, openSUSE and Debian
haha.. exactly the distros I mentioned.
where does gentoo fall under?
Gentoo is its own thing with other distros being based on Gentoo.
the simplest way to compare them is:
>leftist/socialist/communist/SJW
Debian (also very slow updates unless you use testing/unstable)
>IT professional/cutting edge/elite snob
Fedora (the testbed for RHEL, usually where new concepts are pushed to be adopted by other distros, pushes new releases out every 6 months)
>balance between the two but German and focused on practical usability
openSUSE (regular but not as frequent releases, but has a rolling release option if you want the latest stable/tested versions of everything, very polished management and configuration tools)
Early versions of SuSE were just modified Slackware, so it should really be Slackware, Debian, and Red Hat (from oldest to newest). Also Gentoo deserves to be considered a major family much more than Arch.
>>Don't use Arch. Just, don't. It's only for retarded ricer wannabes who think it's the only distro you can rice with.
I use arch and I don't rice shit, because it's pointless. I use it because pacman is great, the repo is up to date and the aur is pretty convinient most of the time.
>pacman is great
>aur is pretty convinient
>most of the time
Yeah cos everything else on other distros is perfect with no flaws at all. And pacman IS great, I respect that you like yum but it sucks dude.
I don't like yum. I like slackpkg :^)
Everything on Slackware is perfect and has no flaws at all. Any flaws that might exist are introduced by flawed third-party software.
Pacman is great at what it does, which is enforce strict dependency checking, make rollbacks extremely inconvenient, sperg out whenever it encounters something it didn't expect, and be 20K lines of (mostly) C and (some) python code. I like package managers that are not great at that but at things more important for keeping a system simple and stable.
tfw he hasn't even extensively used pacman
I have kept Arch on a netbook for about 4 years until the motherboard blew out or some other shit, haven't been fucked to actually open it up and look at what happened. In that time, I've had pacman fuck my shit up two or three times, I've had to constantly reread the documentation about the dozens of (mostly useless) single letter options (that don't follow any kind of traditional convention at all), I've had it flat out refuse to update itself and therefore everything else, and of course that was after an update of a basic library used by a lot of programs that stopped working because I couldn't update them to the versions in the repo that were built against the new library, assuming the maintaners remembered to put them up in the first place. I've had to spend well over an hour trying to figure out the simplest way to downgrade a package, and I don't even remember what kind of awkward solution I arrived at.
I have never had these issues with slackpkg. I can write complex queries of the Slackware package database using grep, awk, and sort in less time than it takes me digging through the options of -Q, only to discover that what I'm actually looking for is under -S for literally no reason.
Before I extensively used pacman, I thought it was the shit. I was like, oh man, it has so many packages, and the command line is so neat and concise, and it's so easy to just update everything on the system, and I feel so cool using it. By the second time it broke, I fucking hated it and the useless fucks that develop it and the even more useless fucks that maintain the repos.
Have you used it recently? I can't speak of experience further back than 2 years but recently it's been great. Also -S means in the repo -Q means installed locally.
>it's not always guaranteed to be the same software that the developer released - many distros apply their own patches and modifications, add their own branding/themes, build it with specific options, etc.
yeah the original didnt work and the patch or mod doesn't either.
there are still a fuckton of distros that need people working on them... instead of such people contributing to fix specific problems on just a handful of distros. so you solved nothing.
Picking between them mostly means choosing defaults so you spend minimal time configuring it to your liking. Also this . Not only are they grouped by "family" they're also by default pre-configured to be either
>desktop
>server
>security
>scientific
>development
etc. And you're just meant to pìck whatever you want to use it for. So there aren't that many distros as you'd think, it's just an illusion.
ZorinOS
Ubuntu / Ubuntu MATE
Mint
KDE Neon
openSUSE
Manjaro / Apricity (if you want an Arch base)
Any of these. As I've said above, it's mostly a difference in default UI and software. ZorinOS is my go-to recommendation for any current windows user since it has a familiar UI so you won't feel as lost. Even though I think of openSUSE as the best and most professionally done OS.
My netbook died towards the end of August. I had been using it very infrequently, mostly for xwax because it worked with my dicer and it was small and easy to keep next to my decks. Or I would record to it, for the same reasons.
I'd probably agree that it's better than apt, might even be better than yum--I doubt it, from what I remember yum was pretty solid, I haven't used it in ages but I just bought a CentOS VPS so I'll have to start using that again--but being the best piece of shit package manager among other piece of shit package managers doesn't make it great.
At least not to me. Again, I like simplicity, I like robustness, I like not having shit forced down my throat.
I'm curious about openSUSE.
I noticed that I liked Fedora quite a bit except for when all of a sudden I had to go look for rpm fusion.
Does openSUSE have good hardware and software support, or is it more limited than other big distros?
You're better off asking someone who has used it for more than a day. When I got X200 a year and a half ago, I decided to try several major distros that I hadn't touched in nearly a decade before installing Slackware. Of the ones I tried, openSUSE was the comfiest and I really liked YaST. Like Fedora, it was (still is?) tied to a commercial enterprise distribution so I'd imagine it has solid support and lots of packages, and it seems to be more focused on stability and less on being cutting edge.