favicon here hometagsblogmicrobio cvtech cvgpg keys

How should you choose a distro?

#linux #technology #workflow

Soc Virnyl Estela | 2023-05-12 | reading time: ~6min

Ever thought of what linux distribution to choose? You are not alone.

Linux (or GNU/Linux for the pedant šŸ˜›) has at least hundreds of different existing distributions. This gives users many distributions to choose from and the freedom to use their distribution of choice. This includes the popular distros such as Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Linux Mint and the most obscure such as Carbs Linux, Clear Linux, and some Arch derivative you never heard of before.

However, this can also be confusing to newcomers (or even old users) alike because your distro of choice can really matter when it comes to community support, maintenance, and also the life of the distribution before it f itself out of existence. This means that choosing the wrong distribution can result to unintended consequences for you as a user for areas in e.g. security, community, and support.

This nearly happened with Solus btw. The two posts summarizes what happened:

Good thing it's back šŸ˜„. I don't use Solus though. But what can we learn from this btw as a user? And how does this affect our decision to choose a distribution? Is choosing a distribution really matter?

Unfortunately, the short answer is yes. You can skip btw but if you want to read more I have some important points to take why this is so.

Your distribution of choice really mattersĀ§

It's painfully obvious that your distro of choice really matters. There are many factors to consider when choosing a distro. Choosing the "right" distro for you is very subjective but here are the factors you really need to consider:

Documentation and WikiĀ§

Why is this first mentioned than the other sections? Because good documentation and a wiki can help both old and new users to hop over a distro. Badly written or no documentation at all can be a reason why certain distros will never have any new users at all. Beginner-friendly distros are "beginner friendly" for a reason. That's because they have good documentation on how to install, use, and maintain their system. Even hard-core "do it yourself" distros such as Arch or Gentoo are popular because they have an informative Wiki where anyone can contribute or improve existing information.

A special mention for FreeBSD, as it is one of my favorite non-linux distribution with great documentation and manual. Easy to understand and grasp. Sadly, I really cannot daily drive it because some software work only on Linux. I do hope you try it out!

CommunityĀ§

What makes a Linux (or a BSD) distribution stay alive for years and years? What keeps it afloat? And what keeps it thriving still in the future?

It's actually the community behind your favorite distribution.

Growing interest and usage of a distribution helps maintain motivation from both project contributors and community members. However, incentives are actually needed to keep both the distribution and community thriving. This is shown to be true to most corporate and community backed distributions such as Fedora (from RHEL), and openSUSE (from SUSE). With no incentives such as funding and through donations, it is really hard for a community to stay alive, and again, this nearly happened to Solus.

This is important as well in choosing your distribution because you are given the assurance to stick to that distribution without worrying that it will someday become a dead project and a dead community.

Software AvailabilityĀ§

This is very self-explanatory really. Your distribution of choice may not have the software you use when you were in another distribution. This can be fixed by helping contribute to the distribution itself by volunteering to package the software you usually use. I don't think there should be an issue about that but it is up to you if you have the time to do that. No one is forcing you to contribute. The idea of giving back should be encouraged though.

Fortunately, packaging formats such as flatpak and snap bridge the issues with software availability. I definitely recommend flatpak over snaps though as flatpaks are truly platform-agnostic unlike Canonical's snap šŸ¤®. No to AppImage, I will write a blog about that soon.

LongevityĀ§

How long does a distribution last? New distributions are born nearly every year or so but the question remains. What keeps a distribution's existence last for decades?

The answer is very simple. Time and money. Unfortunately, free software is not actually free as you would like it to be. Contributors and project maintainers alike need some form of incentive for them to keep a project alive. *They gotta eat and sleep too you know...

Small time distributions rarely last a year or two before they become dead (insert another Arch-derivative meme here). These kinds of distros rarely last because there are no incentives and additionally, they are usually hobby projects or projects that only focus on a niche.

Corporate-backed and community-backed distros are on the clear because they have the means and incentives to do so. It is also why I always recommend distributions such as Fedora or openSUSE.

ConclusionĀ§

Choosing a Linux distribution can be confusing. Sometimes joining the popular is the safest option to take. Other times, you just want to try obscure distros just to be different. To be honest, preference is preference. Whether you like pineapple on pizza or not, it is up to you to choose a distro. However, ignoring the factors I mentioned to choose a distribution that you want to use daily can affect your productivity and time. If you really want to try out a distribution and test it out, I suggest run it inside a container or virtual machine. Explore and hop around until the shoe fits šŸ˜€.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Session Round 2

Last week, I wrote a blog post succinctly titled, Donā€™t Use Session. Two interesting things have happened since I published that blog: A few people expressed uncertainty about what I wrote about using Pollardā€™s rho to attack Sessionā€™s design (for which, I ā€¦

via Dhole MomentsJanuary 20, 2025

Status update, January 2025

Hi all! FOSDEM is approaching rapidly! Iā€™ll be there and will give a talk about modern IRC. In wlroots land, weā€™ve finally merged support for the next-generation screen capture protocols, ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1! Compared ā€¦

via emersionJanuary 18, 2025

The tech-industrial complex

I moved this blog off AWS to a local VPS outfit. I'm no longer giving any money to Jeff Bezos. Directly any way. I'm sure it finds its way to him via taxes & other things, but directly: No more. It's a small step, but one of many, & something I wanted to gā€¦

via Mike KreuzerJanuary 18, 2025

No billionaires at FOSDEM

Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, ousted board member of BlueSky, and grifter extraordinaire to the tune of a $5.6B net worth, is giving a keynote at FOSDEM. The FOSDEM keynote stage is one of the biggest platforms in the free software community. Janson ā€¦

via Drew DeVault's blogJanuary 16, 2025

2024 in review

I want to go through some highlights of the year. Thanks for coming along for the ride!1 A year of being independent This was my first entire year of my being an independent open source maintainer. Iā€™m very happy with how it turned out! I highly appreciā€¦

via seanmonstarJanuary 15, 2025

Brainwash An Executive Today!

I. A few years ago, I had an annual one-on-one with the Chief Technology Officer of an employer with more than ten thousand staff. Senior management absolutely fawned over this person ā€” extremely politically savvy, they would say. Amazing at acquiring fundā€¦

via LudicityJanuary 13, 2025

2025 Predictions

I was just enjoying Simon Willisonā€™s predictions and, heck, why not. 1: The web becomes adversarial to AI The history of search engines is sort of an arms race between websites and search engines. Back in the early 2000s, juicing your ranking on search eā€¦

via macwright.comJanuary 11, 2025

A journey into File Transfer Protocols in Rust

How it started I can for sure affirm that you've used File transfer protocols before. Let's exclude HTTP from here, because, of course it is currently used also to transfer files, but it's not bi-directional and it mostly a workaround added at a certainā€¦

via Christian Visintin BlogJanuary 06, 2025

The Adrian Dittmann Story

the evidence, from A to Z, and righting the wrongs

via maia blogJanuary 05, 2025

Bloat

Common questions we see in the OpenSUSE community are "which distro is the least bloated", "how can I remove bloat", "package X is bloat" etc. For the longest time this has confused me - Linux while sometimes slow, isn't "bloated". So where are all these qā€¦

via Firstyear's blog-a-logJanuary 04, 2025

Awesome Fish functions

Some awesome fish functions that I have accumalated over the years.

via Ishan WritesJanuary 03, 2025

Styling HTML details and summary with modern CSS

Use CSS to style and manage disclosure widgets, which are the HTML details and summary elements.

via Rob O'Leary | BlogDecember 26, 2024

Yer a Wizard! Tagging Hard-coded Credentials Can Lead to Finding Magic (Numbers)

As GreyNoise researcher, you always have things to write detection rules for. Some of them arenā€™t always exciting, but they become more interesting as you dive deeper. Letā€™s jump right in and take a look at CVE-2024-6633: The default credentials for the sā€¦

via GreyNoise LabsDecember 03, 2024

OpenGL is not Right-Handed

The original Twitter thread: https://x.com/TheGingerBill/status/1508833104567414785 I have a huge gripe when I read articles/tutorials on OpenGL: most people have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to coordinate systems and matrices. Specifiā€¦

via Articles on gingerBillNovember 10, 2024

Physics Simulations in Bevy

Bevy is the most popular and powerful game engine in Rust. Because of its flexibility, it can be used not only for games but also for (scientific) physics simulations. In this blog post, I will share my experience using Bevy for physics simulations from scā€¦

via mo8it.comJuly 19, 2024

Defending myself against defensive writing

I write this blog because I enjoy writing. Some people enjoy reading what I write, which makes me feel really great! Recently, I took down a post and stopped writing for a few months because I didn't love the reaction I was getting on social media sites liā€¦

via pcloadletterMay 27, 2024

The Elegiac Hindsight of Intelligent Machines

This essay was edited out of a chapter of my book, The Intelligence Illusion: a practical guide to the business risks of Generative AI, with minor alterations. ā€œSee the choice of dreamsā€, and then worry about it Very well. This book ā€“ this side, Dream ā€¦

via Out of the Software Crisis (Newsletter)October 13, 2023

Regex engine internals as a library

Over the last several years, Iā€™ve rewritten Rustā€™s regex crate to enable better internal composition, and to make it easier to add optimizations while maintaining correctness. In the course of this rewrite I created a new crate, regex-automata, which exposā€¦

via Andrew Gallant's Blog on Andrew Gallant's BlogJuly 05, 2023

Generated by openring-rs

favicon here hometagsblogmicrobio cvtech cvgpg keys