Aight. I've changed the comment a bit 😅 since. Perhaps it's more useful for you now 😉.

Your experience

Just in case*, I’m just the middle-man that connects this specific article by Solène to the audience on Lemmy 😅. I’m sure you’re aware of this, but I just wanted to make sure.

FWIW, I've put some effort into explaining how a dual boot of Windows 10 and Fedora Atomic (read Silverblue/Kinoite/Sericea etc) can be achieved. While it's far from exhaustive, it should be fine as long as your specific installation of Fedora Atomic doesn't require special attention (which happens sometimes with owners of an Nvidia GPU*). After Fedora Atomic is successfully installed, proceed with following the instructions found on the following parts of uBlue's documentation: here, here and finally pick whichever uBlue image you'd like to install from this list; specific instructions are found directly underneath the text boxes for each individual image, but ensure you're installing the one with the correct Fedora version (37/38/39/stable/latest etc (which are accessed via tabs)). If you can't decide on which version you'd like to install, then just go for 39.

and without all your configs it is a very different beast of an editor anyway and something you will need to get used to everytime you jump on the server.

Good point.

If you can install stuff to your home drive then it is quite easy to get helix running - it is a single binary with some language assets (requires one env var to point to them). So is trivial to get working from your home dir without a package manager.

I'm impressed. Thank you for pointing this out.

Ideally with things like ansible you should not need an editor on it at all.

Hmm..., honestly, I haven't yet done a lot of things with Ansible yet. Perhaps it's time to go explore that rabbit hole as well 🤣. Thank you (once more) for pointing this out!

Do you mean vi input mode in other editors?

Yes.

Your input has been much appreciated! Thank you!

Emacs I’m not so sure. If you’ve checked the news anytime for Doom Emacs, you can see the maintainer mentioning how it’s become progressively difficult to maintain the project. I’d imagine it’s a similar story for plugins and other derivatives. People have attempted remaking Emacs from scratch, but there was not enough momentum for it, so that went under.

This is news to me. Thank you so much for mentioning this! I'll have to look into this.

Have you had a look at the design philosophy behind Kakoune?

I actually hadn't yet, but I did just now. And I'd have to say that I liked what I read. There's for sure a lot out there that's worthy of being explored and I've become confident that Kakoune deserves to be further explored as well. Thank you for informing me on that!

I also recommend reading this article here that goes more in-depth on this point and has a comparison of vim, helix and kakoune.

I haven't read the article yet. But I'm pretty sure it's going to be another excellent read. Please feel free to share more from where these are coming from 😊! Thank you!

I saw that there were some controversies but honestly if I avoided everything in my life over every little bit of bad press or disagreement I would have nothing left to eat and nowhere to live.

The choices we make and the actions we take mostly come with compromises anyway; just because it's on topic: Manjaro probably continued to function as you were used to and thus you didn't see any reason to change that which "just works". Which, I somewhat alluded to in my earlier comment with:

the continued use of Manjaro is at least justifiable.

Moving on.

I am not sure why any distro that attracts new users is an issue considering we want Linux as a desktop to keep growing as it improves the lives of all having both more users, contributors, and devs building software.

That's not what I said, nor what I implied. What you just said assumes/implies that people start using Linux because they want to try Manjaro, which is just simply not the case. You might have mistaken Manjaro for Valve's Steam Deck. Perhaps this chart does a better job at conveying my thoughts. As you can see, the search "install Manjaro" has for a considerable period in the last 5 years been more than half times as often searched as "install Arch". By comparison, it just dwarfs the hits for "install EndeavourOS" and "install Garuda". That's the problem. To put it onto perspective, I'll follow it up with charts for Ubuntu with its popular derivatives and Debian with its popular derivatives. I tried doing the same for Fedora and openSUSE, but their respective graphs just showed me why their derivates aren't talked about that often 😅. Even Nobara is absolutely dwarfed compared to Fedora.

6

Something that hasn't quite been touched upon but might be important to note is that both Zorin and Linux Mint run 'old' kernels (almost two years old in fact). While this does not necessarily have to affect you, there's a considerable chance that you might not reap the benefit from improved performance and other good stuff that would be found on a newer kernel.

Generally speaking, you should be fine regardless. However, if you intend to primarily engage in high-fidelity gaming, then I'd argue it's at least worth benchmarking your performances on Zorin and/or Linux Mint and compare that to a Fedora(-based distro; like Bazzite or Nobara) or an openSUSE Tumbleweed (or perhaps even an Arch(-based distro) if you're feeling brave). If the differences are negligible, then you shouldn't let this be a factor to take into consideration. But if it isn't, then you might want to (at least) consider switching over to a distro with a newer kernel (eventually).

Finally, the 'old' kernel is -in a sense- one of the reasons why both Zorin and Linux Mint are even popularized for newer users. But, that's something I won't be able to go over in this comment for the sake of brevity.

WRT Arch: it grabbed my interest because having the option for the most current updates sounded appealing. It may not be necessary, but if the situation arises and it would help, I’d like to have it.

Fair. This is a legitimately good reason.

The Arch wiki has also been a big incentive

Friendly reminder that the contents of the excellent ArchWiki translate surprisingly well to other distros.

as well as the AUR

Which you're free to benefit from regardless of which distro you end up installing as long as an Arch container offered through e.g. Distrobox is setup on your system. Not all packages are supported like this, as custom kernels offered through the AUR have to be installed natively and thus require to be installed on Arch(-based distros). But most of your needs from the AUR (or literally any repo/package from any of the supported containers distros) should be satisfied regardless.

If I’m not mistaken, Arch is also a distro that allows me to pick and choose aspects of my operating system with intention as opposed to having a system that comes with stuff that I don’t use or need.

Correct. Though, while Arch defaults to a blank slate. Other distros like Debian, Fedora and openSUSE (to name a few) do offer similar functionality on specific ISOs (or just as an option in the YaST installer for openSUSE).

I was also looking at TW because it was a distro that supported KDE, but I’m learning from this thread that KDE is not ideal if I’m looking for a Wayland session.

That's perhaps a bit too harsh on KDE Plasma without giving it an honest shot first. Don't let others' opinion on the matter deter your willingness to genuinely explore, experience and judge for yourself 😉. Furthermore, it's important to note that the development of Wayland has accelerated (relatively) recently. Therefore, the issues of others might have already been resolved since.

Glad to hear that I was able to contribute 🙂 ! And thank you for your great reply!

I prefer KDE over gnome (I think that’s what’s bothering me about my install of popos at the moment)

That could definitely be it. No worries, even the community is somewhat polarized on GNOME; with a big chunk of the community favoring it over all the other desktop environments, while another big chunk doesn't tolerate it at all. However, the reason that everyone has an outspoken opinion on it comes primarily from the fact that a lot of distros come with GNOME by default; with both Ubuntu and Fedora being the big ones (sure; both have flavors/spins with other desktop environments, but their main ISO defaults to GNOME). Regarding recommendations; while any major (independent) distro should technically suffice, I would argue that Kubuntu and openSUSE (contrary to the others; openSUSE actually defaults to KDE) are both excellent choices, with both Fedora's KDE Spin and Debian (on which you can pick KDE during first install) are very good choices as well if you lean more towards minimalism. While Arch deserves a mention regardless, I don't think you're ready (yet).

Typing command line doesn’t bother me (on the opposite: I feel like I understand what is going on better if I can actually type in commands)

That's great to hear!

but I don’t fully understand the difference and advantages/disadvantages between pacman, apt, yum, etc. I’m more used to apt and I feel like there’s more information available, but that’s it.

I won't be able to be exhaustive on this, so I instead I'll lean more towards being somewhat oversimplistic for the sake of brevity.

• pacman is the package manager on Arch(-based distros)
• apt is the package manager on Debian(-based distros)
• yum used to be the package manager on Fedora(-based distros), but has since been replaced by dnf. You can still install packages using yum on these distros, however it's just an alias for dnf.

These are not the only package managers out there, as almost all independent distros come with their own package manager; apk (on Alpine), eopkg (on Solus), xbps (on Void) and zypper (on openSUSE) etc. The tasks of the package manager are varied, but all of them are to be interacted with when installing, upgrading and removing software. As the feature-set is different, so too are their performances. A rolling release distro like Arch will receive a constant stream of updates, thus having access to a package manager that's very fast is beneficial. Thus we find that pacman is very optimized for speed. To perhaps illustrate how much difference this can make, I compared Alpine's apk with openSUSE's zypper. Note that Alpine is one of the most minimalist distros out there, and its apk might be the fastest package manager that's in active use. So here are the results:

• sudo apk add firefox 0.01s user 0.02s system 0% cpu 8.216 total
• sudo zypper install -y firefox 0.02s user 0.06s system 0% cpu 33.727 total

On which the number before total reveals how much time it took in seconds. These tests were done in distrobox containers btw*.

Speed is not the only important metric, however as ultimately one can not engage with packages without waiting for them to be installed/updated/removed, a lot of the discourse is about how fast the package managers are at installing, updating and removing packages.

The GUI elements missing in Arch are missing in Mint and Ubuntu, Fedora, PopOS, all of them.

I would agree that they're roughly in the same ballpark as long as you had picked KDE Plasma on Arch. Though I would argue that Mint and PopOS have a noticeable lead, though I don't think that point deserves more discussion. However, none of them come close to something like openSUSE's YaST or MX' Tools. That's why I deliberately mentioned them. Perhaps worth a watch for those wondering how Windows compares to different Linux distros GUI-wise.

I happen to be struggling through an audio issue right now. Can you find an OS that lets you change the Audio sample and bit rates without messing with config files ? This is basic function, and the PulseAudio and Pipewire have been around long enough for a GUI to have been created, but no, it doesn’t exist.

I'm unfortunately unaware of any solution for that. Wish you good luck!

Thanks for the detailed reply!

Thank you for being appreciative!

Though, I couldn't help but wonder the motivation behind your inquiry. Are you just exploring the waters beyond Ubuntu? Are you interested in rolling release and got curious when you learned what openSUSE Tumbleweed had to offer in that space? Were you perhaps looking for a distro well-suited for gaming and did you perhaps come across someone mentioning openSUSE Tumbleweed which subsequently peaked your interest? Are you perhaps unhappy for some reason with Ubuntu and looking for something to replace it with?

Lots of questions, of which I don't expect you to answer more than a couple (if at all). I would already be more than happy if you could provide us a bit more insight regarding the motivation behind your inquiry.