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
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
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
We save so much productivity finding better distros that we have 50% more time to distro hop. /s
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.
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.
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.
