Cool distros to try
Cool distros to try
I'm pretty comftable with linux mint right now but i want to peruse the wares so to speak, what are some cool or interesting distros that do things differently than mint?
Edit: i dont wanna distro hop people cool your jets, i just wanna look around cos i find it neat :3
Do any of you people actually use your OS, or do you just distro-hop and tweak things all day?
oh i only have a computer to sit there going "beep boop" and giggling to myself i've never turned it on
@TimeSquirrel @nicknonya Been runnin basically the same setup for the better part of ~20 years. That's not gonna stop me from playin with stuff I don't know or like though.
Distro-hop? Never. But getting something to work is way more satisfying to me than using that thing. (Slackware user since late 90s, recently diagnosed with adhd)
I do use my OS but I also like to play with it, that's one beauty of Linux: you can set it up and forget about it till the end of times or you can spend days tinkering with it if it provides you joy.
The answer to that is…yes.
We save so much productivity finding better distros that we have 50% more time to distro hop. /s
I'm pretty comftable with linux mint right now
For the love of God, spare your free time and don't move from what works. Consider tweaking your system instead and moving only when you broke something
spare your free time
But it's not free time if you're not free to waste it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"time you enjoyed wasting is not time wasted" - Hatzune Miku
i intended to spin up a vm lmao i'm not gonna trash my home in hopes of finding one with marginally better décor, i'm doing this for fun
This is the way.
OK so if you want my advice, if you wanna just try distros, use DistroSea. Let's you try out distros in your browser. But here we go:
On DistroSea
- Debian: There's a reason Mint and Ubuntu are based on Debian and it's always good to try out just straight up Debian. I know people are going to be all "uuugh but Mint is basically Debian with extra steps", don't care, try Debian, you might wanna use it for other things too. If you are familiar with LinuxMint, you're going to be familiar with
- Bunsenlabs Linux: Successor to Crunchbang, an OpenBox Ubuntu Distro. If you want something ultralight and different, you might wanna try Bunsenlabs. I used Crunchbang back in the day, may it rest in peace.
- Pop!_OS: Made for creatives and programmers, seems to be beloved, don't really care too much, ubuntu based.
- Fedora: Not a Debian/Ubuntu based system, instead a RedHat based system. Try it if you wanna check out a non Debian based system.
- Lubuntu: Is XFCE too heavy for you? Try Lubuntu, which used LXQT as it's desktop with an aim of being lighter than Ubuntu Mate or even Xubuntu. Aimed at old laptops and netbooks, and the website even brags that it can run on an rPi.
- Tails: Are you doing shit you don't want your ISP or Government to know about? Are you a Journalist or an activist? Well Tails is for you, designed to be installed on a pendrive for plug n' play action, this distro does everything through the Tor Network. It's also marketed to victims of abuse as well, but let's be honest if you trust the government these days you need to look at yourself in the mirror.
Not on Distrosea
- PuppyLinux: Holy ball this is a blast from the past. This is not available on Distrosea but it's available to download. It is designed to be tiny, and I mean smol. It's an example of how you can get a functional, low resource load OS.
- TempleOS: This is not a Linux distribution, it's barely usable as an OS, but it's legendary. TempleOS was created by Terry Davis, an extremely talented programmer and Schitzophrenic who created this OS to be the third temple of God. No I am not joking. It is, however, today considered a work of art by a troubled man.
Puppy has saved my ass multiple times. Love that tiny dog.
Speaking of Tails, a security minded user can also try out Qubes as well. It uses virtualization to separate different contexts like Work, Personal, Social, etc. You can have your Work profile connect to your workplace VPN while your Personal profile is on a torified connection in parallel. It does have its drawbacks, however. You need more system resources, and anything that requires direct access to GPU like videogames is not officially supported.
Fedora Silverblue or any of the other Fedora Atomic distros
Or something Universal Blue-based like Bazzite or Aurora.
I like the concept of atomic distros, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired for me. Having to reboot after installing any software seems counterproductive to me (admittedly this was my very limited experience when I tried Bazzite).
Alpine Linux, because it uses OpenRC and musl, it's an interesting choice a little bit different but I really like it nyself for servers.
Gentoo, the biggest source based distro, has Emerge, a very configurable package manager.
NixOS, uses the Nix programming language to install packages and configuring the system. Very powerful and breaks many conventions about Linux systems
Have you ever heard of Bedrock Linux? Its an extremely interesting "meta-distro" that let's you run multiple different distros at the same time only marginally isolated. The whole premise is to merge the systems together instead of separating them with a container style workflow. Tons of stuff works cross distro to! Its extremely cool to have Debian AND Arch packages just installed the normal way on each distro. Its a beautiful and horrifying system, that warms my heart every time I remember it.
Those are distinct distros, while Bedrock is a layer that sits on top of multiple different distros and actively merges them together. At a glance, vanilla doesnt look like they merge/manage other distros at all? So I'm not sure the comparison makes sense. BlendOS is a completely different approach by using containers to isolate the different systems. Bedrock wants to merge the different systems where ever possible. I wouldn't say either is better or worse as their goals appear to be entirely different.
If you don't mind reading a little bit and "work hard" to get some things done and "have fun" then I'd suggest to try :
- NixOS (it can do magic!)
- Arch Linux (easiest is the Arch based EndeavourOS and the shiny colorful Garuda Linux), learn some pacman and AUR.
I look back on learning to live with NixOS and laugh. It made my brain hurt, and if I'd only found the Misterio77 repo sooner, it would've saved a lot of premature aging. But, if you have some basic familiarity with programming concepts, it's an easy OS to live with, just different. And so, so, so, so powerful.
They do desperately need a set of opinionated example builds and much better documentation.
What actually makes Endeavor easier than Arch? I switched to Arch from Mint a few months ago, and so far I don’t think it’s that difficult.
Garuda has been great on all my computers, even handled the upgrade to kde 6 without issue. It's a bloaty boi tho. But that's why I picked it, every tool I've looked for was either installed or easily installed via the pre setup chaotic aur
Experiment with arch, void (musl), Nixos and atomic distros like fedora silverblue, bazzite
I've been enjoying bazzite!
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I used to install interesting and cool distros back in the 2000s. Now, I personally just want stability, and not bad surprises. So when I distro-hop, I only do it among well known, largely stable and well supported distros (e.g. mint, debian, fedora, ubuntu). I don't go for the weird anymore, although I did install Alpine on qemu in order to try it out. And the few times I feel adventurous, I try BSD or Haiku OSes.
That's how I was on Slackware at the time. Reputable, functional, stable - and totally tailorable to your exact needs.
Everybody talks about Arch as a "pedagogic" distro, but you'll learn a lot working with Slackware. I wonder if Lilo is still around.
You could try a rolling distro like OpenSuse Tumbleweed, or something from the Arch lineage (Arch, Endeavour, Garuda, Manjaro in order from less to more handholding).
You could also try something from the Red Hat rather than Debian world,.for example Fedora has several interesting editions, there's the WorkStation desktop edition and Silverblue which uses Android immutable principles.
please for the love of god do not use Manjaro and if you do forget about using the AUR, Manjaro claims to be more stable by waiting 1 week before adding Arch's packages to their repo, this breaks the AUR packages you use which may need newer dependencies. They also often forgot to renew the security certificates of their website.
Arco is better but frankly all being Arch distros the differences are close to none.
@nicknonya If it truly is "different" you want, take a look at stuff like Tiny Core Linux, MenuetOS, or ReactOS. If you want a bit more milder different, may go with a BSD/UNIX. There's loads of really weird stuff out there if you dig around a bit. Or just plunder DistroWatch for somethin that strikes you. Who knows, you may just find a new comfortable on yer journey. 😁
It may be remarked that ReactOS is not unix-like, but a Windows NT clone.
@Successful_Try543 Fair point, yes! ...but I did recommend it as a "truly different" choice. 😉
Also Haiku. I was impressed by the amount of software available for it.
Most distros are the same under the hood. I'd recommend downloading different desktop environments. You can stay on Mint and keep all your files.
oh I'm doing this for fun, i don't plan to actually switch any time soon
what are some desktop environments you'd recommend aside from cinnamon
Definitely KDE Plasma.
You could always dip your toe into a tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment. Its got an initial learning curve, and it helps to have something to do to learn it, and not just playtesting it.
Linux from scratch, does that count?
(It isn't a distro, but more of a learning project that will expand your knowledge a lot, after you've emitted buckets of blood, sweat and tears)
Gentoo is a good alternative to this - at least after you are done setting it up you will have a useable, updateable OS.
@krash @steeznson I always recommend #gentoo to anyone interested in learning about linux. I'd advise LFS only as a follow up to that once they have an understanding of what goes where.
I recommend a Fedora Atomic distro like Silverblue or Kinoite, or Universal Blue, which is based on Fedora Atomic. It offers 3 images: Bazzite (made specifically for Gaming), Aurora (featuring KDE Plasma) and Bluefin which uses GNOME.
I've been on an immutable distro and declaritive distro kick lately.
So the bluefin project, which has so much sugar it a damn cake (in a good way, lots of stuff to get you to a usable running state for a lot of Dev environment and gaming).
I'm digging into SUSE microos more now, mostly to play with elemental (I really want a featureful CI/CD env for my desktop, so containers to full VM and isos is neat to me).
Nix has been super, super useful for packages that I want between OSs, but the alure of getting better configuration with them on full nixos is slowly drawing me in.
Guix on the other hand is my current ideal, I am just super impressed with their full source bootstrapping and really love a lot of the philosophy of the project, but they don't get as much love from the professional crowd (nonacademic, non amateur).
Rhino-Linux for rolling release Ubuntu-based. I never tried it myself as I'm not into Ubuntu much. I reckon it has UI for installs, so I'd recommend it to any non-technical person.
ZorinOS was my go-to recommendation due to it looking the most polished out of all distros I've seen, but I cannot recommend non-rolling-release as I don't believe anyone should ever need to re-install the system regularly like this when it's clearly not needed.
EndeavoursOS is terminal centric and the most easy to use distro I've had. I'd recommend it to anyone who is ok with no UI.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was generally a weird experience. It has a UI, but it feels like a terminal with UI elements. I used to recommend it, but I don't feel like it's actually good tbh.
I stopped hopping thanks to EndeavoursOS. NixOS tempts with different folder structure, but I like things just working, so I think I'm gonna stay.
EndeavourOS has a UI of course ( currently defaults to KDE but there are many DE choices ). It even has a graphical installer.
Perhaps what you meant is that package management is text based by default.
If you really have to have GUI package management on EOS, yay -S octopi or yay -S pamac-gtk are pretty easy to type ( installation of GUI package managers ).
I'm a huge proponent of Gentoo Linux as a learning experience. It's a great way to learn how the components of a system work together and the distro enables an amazing amount of configurability for your system.
Even following a handbook install in a VM can be a good experience if you're interested.
Nixos is a declarative distro, it's an interesting concept.
Also, Immutable distros:
- Fedora Universal Blue
- Bazzite OS
- Vanilla OS
- Blend OS
Install virtual manager (sudo apt install virt-manager)
From there you can spin up as many VMs are you desire as long as you have enough ram. I like Fedora
Take a look at gobolinux. It changes the filesystem in interesting ways. All programs are in their own directories under /Programs.
Indeed. GoboLinux is neat last time I tried it. Although it's not clear to me how active its development is.
Qubes OS