Alt text: A line plot with 2 axis (confidence vs competence) referencing the Dunning-Kruger effect with various distro logos placed at different points on the line. Starts with mint/ubuntu near (0,0) and progressing through multiple distros to end up with opensuse/fedora at what it calls “the plateau of sustainability”

  • 0ddysseus@lemmy.world
    12·
    7 days ago

    Twelve years in, cloud engineer, have Mint on all my home machines cos i dont have to think about it. I like your chart but its dumb.

  • vaionko@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    7 days ago

    I went Kububtu -> Pop -> Arch with Sway -> Fedora KDE -> Arch again, now with KDE. I like Arch, been using it for years now and no interest of switching.

      • felbane@lemmy.world
        18·
        9 days ago

        Brother you posted this at the Americans’ lunch time (or second breakfast for the pacific coasters) ?? They were already arguing and here you come with petrol and a lit match

  • Bruncvik@lemmy.world
    90·
    9 days ago

    Mint, and I’ll stay with mint. Perhaps I’m not a good Linux user material, but I just want something that works and doesn’t get into the way. You know: a reliable, unobtrusive operating system.

    • voodooattack@lemmy.worldOP
      413·
      9 days ago

      And there’s no shame in that! Use whatever works for you and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

      • Lung@lemmy.world
        18·
        9 days ago

        There is SO MUCH shame in that, the pitiful noob wont even learn to RTFM, and then I’ll have no way to feel superior to them as I dip my beard into my off brand morning cereal #frostedfakes

    • Balinares@pawb.social
      17·
      9 days ago

      Mint is just perfectly fine, don’t listen to the naysayers.

      As the old observation goes, novices use something like Mint because it’s there, and it works; intermediate users use something like Arch because they want the control to tweak things in the greatest depths; experts use something like Mint because it’s there, and it works.

    • blargh513@sh.itjust.works
      121·
      9 days ago

      Same here. I started with mint 10 years ago, fucked around and came back to it.

      Not a Dev, but I work in tech, so it does most of the things I want and can tinker with nascent projects without blowing my foot off.

    • Destide@feddit.ukEnglish
      9·
      9 days ago

      Using mint doesn’t mean you’re bad at Linux using arch doesn’t mean you’re good at it.

      Mint is the start and the end for a lot of people for good reason.

    • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 days ago

      Mint is fine. If you love it, there’s no reason to leave. Personally, I’m a fan of KDE and I strongly dislike the retro-Windows feel of Cinnamon so I settled on Fedora after Mint dumped its KDE edition.

    • the_q@lemmy.zip
      621·
      9 days ago

      That’s because you use your computer and it’s not part of your personality. I’m reasonably well versed in Linux and I’ve used Pop for years.

        • the_q@lemmy.zip
          5·
          9 days ago

          It is, but they’ve been working on their new DE Cosmic which should be hitting beta soon.

          • overload@sopuli.xyz
            2·
            9 days ago

            Is it still not in beta? I was on pop in late 2023 and left for OpenSUSE TW because cosmic was taking too long and they were still on Ubuntu LTS 22.04. and Gnome Extensions broke on me.

            • the_q@lemmy.zip
              3·
              9 days ago

              Yeah they’re on like alpha 7 I think? That sucks. I hope OpenSUSE is treating you better.

              • overload@sopuli.xyz
                3·
                9 days ago

                I see it’s just recently been announced about the beta. Great that they’re hearing up for release. I’m in support of what they’re doing I think I realised that I didn’t like Gnome (neither does System76 by the looks!).

                OpenSUSE TW with KDE is perfect for me. Not a sexy/flashy distro but it is the most robust rolling release I’ve seen, and maintained by a European company that has been working on it for decades.

                Particularly like the QC/staggered addition of packages and YAST.

                • deczzz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  2·
                  7 days ago

                  Love me some SUSE. People forget that it is one of the OG distributions out there. Been trying Linux from time to time but only switched completely from windows earlier this year. Been messing with Fedora and SUSE way back as a teenager. Unfortunately my experience with opensuse was laggy YouTube on a complete fresh install (AMD btw) so I just switched to cachyos which didn’t have any issues (sooo much better than Manjaro IMHO). Still love SUSE… And fedora. These two will always have a place in my tech heart.

                  Edit for typos from typing on glass.

        • the_q@lemmy.zip
          2·
          8 days ago

          Uh yeah it’s context because Ubuntu and Pop are on the “beginner” side of there chart.

    • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
      25·
      9 days ago

      I’ve been using Linux since you created a boot floppy by using dd on the kernel. I use Ubuntu because I just want something that works, is stable in the LTS sense of the word, and I don’t have to futz with. I’ve heard enough about Mint now that I’ll probably switch over to it when I build my next machine in several years.

      • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
        5·
        9 days ago

        I’ve been using Linux since you created a boot floppy by using dd on the kernel

        Wait, is that not how you do it anymore? I swear, I just went through trialing a few more distros, and I dded like crazy.

        • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
          9·
          9 days ago

          You might have been using dd to burn an ISO image onto a USB stick or some such, but sincerely doubt that you were writing just the kernel to the first sector of a 3.5" floppy disk and then booting off of it, while it found your ISA hard drive.

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
        1·
        8 days ago

        Same here, except I switched to Mint a couple years ago. You won’t be disappointed. And if you’re sanguine about waiting until you get a new machine, just go with LMDE.

    • RustyNova@lemmy.world
      8·
      9 days ago

      Been maining Linux mint for 3 years now. I did distrohop once to nobara to see if the grass was greener on the other side, but had to revert due to Nvidia.

      … The grass wasn’t green, but tasted exactly the same. Apart from Nvidia (which isn’t a distro issue but more shitty company that can’t make things right), the only noticeable changes is going from cinnamon to KDE.

      There’s no “stupid distro” nor “smart distros”. Everything is valid. (Although I’d argue that Linux mint is the best beginner distro, to let people get into Linux gently before eventually trying something else)

      • Lena@gregtech.euEnglish
        2·
        8 days ago

        I don’t feel the need to switch. Ubuntu serves me well. And I prefer GNOME

        How’s the Wayland support in Linux mint?

  • plm00@lemmy.ml
    59·
    9 days ago

    I want to see a graph where X ranges from “ambitious” to “I’m so tired”, and Mint is at the end. That’s where I’m at.

    • inbeesee@lemmy.world
      1·
      4 days ago

      Linux experts vastly overestimate the amount of annoyance average people will put up with. Most people just want it to work, and want to learn almost nothing. I don’t blame them, Linux is a means to an end.

      • mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        9 days ago

        tried a few distros before mint because i thought it was less cool or whatever, but then it was the only one i could get working. every few months i try something else and come crying back…

  • cally [he/they]@pawb.socialEnglish
    511·
    9 days ago

    i’m on NixOS

    …and I’ve been on NixOS for mount stupid, valley of despair and, perhaps, the plateau of sustainability

    • talou@jlai.lu
      17·
      9 days ago

      Agreed, NixOS is all states in once all along. Don’t look inside the box to maintain incertitude.

    • redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      31·
      9 days ago

      Truely don’t understand how this one became popular. But I’m sure it will fade like Crunchbang or a dozen others before it.

    • Jack@slrpnk.net
      91·
      9 days ago

      Why Arch?

      Genuine question, I have been on pop os for some time now, recently changed laptop and am thinking of changing os as well.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20·
        9 days ago

        I’m not RanzigFettreduziert, and I don’t know much about PopOS, but…

        • Rolling release is awesome.
        • Amazing documentation.
        • Helpful user base. (The forums are great.)
        • Does pretty much nothing that you don’t specifically tell it to. (Like, very little is installed without your express say-so, for instance.)
        • Customizeable as fuck.
        • Doesn’t making things harder by trying to hide the “hard parts” from you.
        • Doesn’t take days to install Libreoffice like Gentoo.
        • AUR is great for software that isn’t available in the official repos. (Always review the pkgbuild, but practically everything is there.)
        • Very up-to-date (even cutting-edge) on everything.
        • And surprisingly stable given how cutting edge it is. (That said, I’ve never run a keyword-unmasked system.)
        • Definitely will teach you a lot.
        • Very actively developed.

        Downsides:

        • Learning curve. (Definitely not as bad as, say, Gentoo, though.)
        • You’d definitely have to get really comfortable with the command line. (Arguably as much a good thing as it is a downside.)
        • The biggest exception to the “customizeable as fuck” bit is that you’re stuck with SystemD, which is practically a whole OS. (And Artix (Arch but with a choice of init systems) is… kinda janky last I tried it.)
        • Support for non-x86 (like ARM, for instance) is abysmal.

        It’s kindof the second-most hardcore OS out there after Gentoo. (Nobody actually uses LFS as a daily driver, so I’m not counting that for this.) It’s the sort of OS that will teach you a lot and let you get down in the guts. But also avoids a lot of the downsides of Gentoo by remaining a binary OS.

        • metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
          6·
          9 days ago

          There are a lot of binary packages in Gentoo, for the bigger packages (like LibreOffice), plus you can just use a binary repo if you want. I’ve been on Gentoo a while now, it’s pretty fun and I like all the customization even though I know the relatively minor efficiencies don’t make up for the compile times lol.

          • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            9 days ago

            Yeah, I know about the binary repositories. I’m running Gentoo as well (on one box with the intention to expand to other machines), but haven’t had occasion to use the official binary repositories yet.

            I imagine I’d probably only ever use them if I wanted to install something temporarily. Install LibreOffice, view a file, uninstall. Just seems weird to have one package compiled with different USE flags than the whole rest of the system.

            And, the compiler optimizations definitely aren’t why I use Gentoo. Probably more than anything, I’m sick of SystemD. And Gentoo feels a whole lot more “under my control” than Arch. (Arch is great for the most part, don’t get me wrong. I just like what Gentoo has to offer.)

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
            1·
            9 days ago

            relatively minor efficiencies don’t make up for the compile times lol.

            It’s sometimes even a regression. For instance, self-compiled pytorch is way slower than the official releases, and Firefox generally is too unless you are extremely careful about it. Stuff like Python doesn’t get a benefit without patches.

            I think the point of Gentoo is supposed to be ‘truly from source’ and utility for embedded stuff, not benchmark performance. Especially since there are distros that offer ‘march’ optimized packages now.

      • RanzigFettreduziert@feddit.org
        11·
        9 days ago

        I came because of all the memes.
        I stayed to say ‘I use Arch by the way’.
        Thats all and i like the idea of a rolling distribution.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        9·
        9 days ago

        What Toot said.

        Things I would emphasize are:

        • The community “critical mass” is amazing with the wiki, online posts and such. You get a lot of support that isn’t ancient, jank and ad hoc like Ubuntu.

        • Arch emphasizes paying attention. It’s not a hands free OS: you have know what graphics drivers you run, and what your desktop environment is. When you update, you have to watch the log for emergency messages and such, including official notifications from the arch repos themself. It’s not a “hands off” OS where you can operate without knowing anything about it, but the reward is that shit gets fixed quick, officially, without having to stray from defaults and break your system, or accumulating a bunch of hacks you have to maintain yourself.

        • Much of Arch’s bad reputation comes from AUR. Don’t use anything from the AUR (instead of an official repo package) unless you absolutely have to. This is when stuff starts breaking. Installing standalone apps that aren’t on the repo via AUR is fine, but to be clear, avoid things that integrate with the system if you can.

        • It doesn’t have to be hardcore barebones like Gentoo, there are all sorts of Preconfigurations like Garuda and Endeavor. I recommend CachyOS (which I have kept for two years now, and will into the future).