rozodru

honestly any distro you want. Try a few out. Load a bunch of live ISO’s on a usb drive and give them a spin. Distro hop until you find one you really like. that’s the beauty of Linux they’re all pretty easy to set up (hell even Arch is easy to set up now) so you can try a bunch of different ones.

You want to tinker and play around with your system? try an Arch based distro. You want something that has great support and will just work out of the box? try an Ubuntu one. Want something really unique that you can take with you where ever you go? give NixOS a shot. There are a ton of options and they’re all pretty good.

I would suggest you get one that’s arch based, one fedora, one ubuntu, maybe nixos, one debian, etc and see which one you like best.

the other night a friend of mine wanted to switch to Linux and was dead set on using Pop!_OS after reading about COSMIC and seeing some images of it on unixporn. He even asked an LLM about the best distros for his rig and what he liked to do and the answer was Pop!_OS. So he asked me to help him install it. I suggested other distros but no, dead set on using pop.

Live boot USB and the entire time during the install it’s complaining about not being able to connect to the internet while being connected to the internet. After the install, it locks up immediately on logging into the OS. try again, ok not locking up now. start doing some apt installs/updates - it crashes. Finally get it to a stable state and try installing steam and a game to test out the nvidia stuff that the LLM claimed Pop was fantastic for. Game crashes. system locks up again.

I eventually say “dude, I got cachyos on this usb too…wanna try that instead?” fine, install CachyOS (which gives you the option to install COSMIC during the install) everything just works. no more crashes, everything is smooth, his games work flawlessly. COSMIC crashes. just the DE. switch him to KDE and that was that. no more issues.

I’m honestly a bit worried about System76. They put all their focus on COSMIC and it feels like with each alpha release it progressively gets worse. I mean during the early Alphas I was seriously considering daily driving it but with each alpha release it just “felt off” and a bit slower/worse with more features added (and there aren’t many). the OS has noticeably gotten worse because it hasn’t been worked on. Even the distrowatch reviews for it have gotten worse.

But hey if you want GNOME with a tiling toggle then have at it. It’s just weird that its taken them this long for something that doesn’t have much to it and it’s not very good.

yes and the reason for that was the massive security risks to users systems that Deepin refused to resolve. ALSO their community packager utilized workarounds to bypass the RPM packaging mechanisms to install “restricted” assets.

yeah, don’t use this distro AT ALL. I’d trust RedStarOS over this and friggin RedStarOS is proven to modify your files.

shit all you have to do is try to update/upgrade the thing and it’s like rolling the dice if it’ll bork your system or not so they’ve done an excellent job in people hating them for that one reason.

without fail whenever they roll out an update you’ll see threads on mastodon or bluesky with people saying “welp, my Ubuntu is fucked” after an update.

I mean…why? you said yourself there’s paid stuff that you’re not going to use so just use soulseek if you’re going to be downloading anyways.

I dont’ use any music streaming service because the artists get paid peanuts and won’t see my dime when I use them. so i’ll support them more directly. Take your money, buy your favourite artists shirt or other merch.

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yeah I don’t get it either. tiling I guess. the problem is, they’ve progressively made it worse.

There’s just something “off” about Cosmic that I can’t but my finger on. In the early alphas it was good, decent for being an alpha. But with every release, to me at least, it just feels like it’s gotten worse. slower, features that haven’t really been expanded on, etc. It just looks/feels like GNOME with the option of tiling. the options for customization, much like GNOME, are limited. no where near what you could potentially do with KDE. the thing is though if you want a DE with basic tiling then it stands out. its good for that. I mean sure you can get tiling with KDE if you use something like Krohnkite but that on it’s own is pretty janky for certain things.

I dont’ know it’s weird. I once went from early alpha using COSMIC as a daily driver to now trying it out again and immediately getting rid of it. maybe I’ll give it another swing today.

in your case I’d say Fedora with a DE you can customize to your liking. Honestly just go for a KDE Fedora then you don’t have to think about it.

I’d also say CachyOS but that might be out of your ballpark. Cachy just works. yes it’s Arch based but it’s by far the best Arch based distro out there. Monthly, on the dot, updates and works with whatever DE/WM you want to throw at it. Hell during the installation it gives you a bunch of DEs/WMs to install with it and all have been customized to work with CachyOS so you don’t even have to think about it.

It’s pretty much the best and only option for KDE but even then it’s very janky. COSMIC is going to be the best option for this but again, you’re then sacrificing the customization you’d get with Plasma.

And that sums up Linux DEs/WMs. If there’s something you want you’ll have to sacrifice something else. because there are NO DEs/WMs out there that will have everything you want in one package unless you build it yourself.

…unless you’re MaoMaoWM and you’re the dev who just said “fuck it, I’m including everything”

blame the devs for that. There was an git issue a year or so ago about just that. a user asked for tiling, many other users chimed in and said “yes, please” the KDE devs said “no, we personally don’t like or use tiling so you’re not going to have it either.” Which essentially sums up KDE development. IF they don’t use or like something than neither will you.

eh I’m going to take a wait and see approach.

The early alpha versions of COSMIC I really liked but over time with each new Alpha release it just felt…off? like kinda leaning into GNOME “please don’t actually customize me” territory? and there were a couple keybinds that just weren’t there. also it felt like it was getting slower with each release.

That being said I think if you just want a very simple DE with the option of good tiling then COSMIC is the way to go. It’s been awhile since I tried one of the previous alphas so if his release really is the shit then I might consider switching my WM to it.

it depends.

I’m old enough to remember when PC demos were a thing and essentially if a demo didn’t exist, the game likely wouldn’t sell well. Hell there used to be entire websites that ONLY had demos for download of upcoming releases. So now game companies don’t do demos anymore, I pirate the games as a demo. If it’s something I think I’ll play through and come back to in a month or two or even a year then I’ll buy it. If it’s an indie dev I’ll buy it because I want to support them.

If it’s something I’m no likely to finish or will finish and never pick it up again, high seas.

Music is different. I just soulseek everything. I’m not paying some crappy streaming service to then provide pennies to the artist. I can support artists I like via other means. Merch sales, going to concerts, etc that’s where they get their money.

TV and movies? fuck em. I’m not paying for that crap when 9 times out of 10 something that I like is just going to get cancelled after 2 seasons. They don’t need my money.

Books? nope, always pay for those.

no prob. I think for certain situations immutable is good. Like in your cause where you use it at work, it makes sense to have a workplace on an immutable distro, just makes things easier. In my case since I’m a developer it also makes sense as the likely hood of me absolutely breaking something is high. plus with nix and the nix flakes and nix shell environments it makes developing a breeze.

For someone at home who is NEW to Linux, yeah it also makes sense. For everyone else? meh I don’t really see a need for it if you know what you’re doing. Don’t get me wrong I love Arch and all its various forks, especially CachyOS, so I mean if it works for you then why go immutable? there’s no right and wrong distro for a user, it’s whatever they prefer. Hell a buddy of mine uses Slackware and will never move from it.

I get it. I recently switched to NixOS from Arch and I absolutely love it. I would routinely go buck wild with Arch and eventually my system would just be populated with garbage or half assed things that I never bothered to fix. With Nix I don’t have that choice. If I fuck around with the config well then it’s not rebuilding and I need to actually fix it. It prevents me from breaking my system. If I do somehow many to break something then I can instantly roll back from the grub OR just retrieve a backup copy of my config which I keep on my server backup and my private git instance. Just have to git clone it.

So I was once one of those anti-immutable people but now I get it and i love it.

When I first moved to linux I used Mint for a week and then moved to something else. As always by EVERYONE it was suggested to me as a “starter” distro and I really wish people would stop doing that.

I, like you, had issues with it. Sound issues, Wifi issues, GPU issues, and doing personal research and digging the consensus was always “it’s an issue with Mint.” I was about to go back to Windows 11 cause I was like “none of this linux shit works”

THEN I decided to try a different distro, CachyOS, and suddenly the sound was fixed, the wifi didn’t randomly drop out, and my GPU worked flawlessly. I’ve distro hopped since then and those Mint/Ubuntu issues never came back.

Try something other than Mint. if you still have the issues go back to Windows.