I am looking Linux distro recommendation for someone who has only used Ubuntu and wants something that will mostly "just work" out of the box

Submitted by voxpoplar in just_post (edited )

Canonical has done a lot of bullshit in the past and tried to push accounts and tracking in various ways but they seemed to have backed off for a while but after dealing with a bunch of package update issues this morning and then finally sorting them out and seeing "The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with 'esm-apps' enabled" and that you now need to create an account to get certain security updates I decided it was time to finally jump ship.

I do not want to learn how to compile a kernel, etc. I just want something that works well, I can customise a bit and doesn't try for force me into creating accounts or tracking me and that I can trust will continue to have security updates for the foreseeable future.

KDE for a Desktop would be good because I like KDE connect. Something equivalent to the Snap repos in Ubuntu would be nice but not a big deal if not. Of all the things people have given shit to Canonical for I think trying to do robust sandboxing large apps instead of everything going through the package manager was a good idea.

This would be for day to day desktop use. Web browsing, software development (VS Code), audio editing, watching videos, sometimes playing games. I have an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU.

Being able to encrypt the partition would be good too.

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twovests wrote

Pop!_OS is great, Ubuntu with nice features and none of the Canonical garbage.

Has an ISO with Nvidia drivers built in, supports full disk encryption at install, full access to the apt youre familiar woth, and a custom Gnome-based shell that Ive really grown to love

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flabberghaster wrote

People say "I use arch BTW" as a joke bragging about being a Linux expert but I have found it pretty easy to use. Idk your level of wanting to fuck around with installing it, it's not that hard to do if you have a little bit of experience and they even have the arch install script now (which I have not used, so I can't say how good it is) but once it is installed I have had very few problems with it ever breaking that were not directly my fault.

I run an encrypted root right now, it was pretty trivial to set up. The disk has two partitions, 500 megabytes for boot (which is way more than necessary) and the rest is a big LUKS volume atop which I have an LVM to split it into home and root volumes. You could also just run it directly off the Luke partition with no LVM, if you don't care about doing a separate home partition.

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twovests wrote

I'm curious, what does using Arch look like nowadays? How long does it take you to get from zero to working? Why did you start using it?

I've been using Linux for awhile but never dabbled in Arch. I'm curious, but I don't have much of a reason to try it

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flabberghaster wrote

I think I started using it around 2012 ish because I was tired of reinstalling Fedora every six months for a new release.

I would say it takes me between a half hour to an hour to install, assuming I have a second computer to look at the install guide, but I've done it a few times and could probably just do it without if I had to. Might take slightly longer if you've never done it, or it might be way faster, if you just used the arch install script they have now, I have not tried doing that.

As for day to day use, mostly you just sudo pacman install something and it usually just works. You choose what to install so you choose what to run. Then maintenance wise you just pacman update and that's usually all you need.

It used to be more unstable and things needed tinkering after an update but that's not really been a problem for me in a few years. Mostly it's just a Linux install that feels like any other, to me.

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Moonside wrote (edited )

Debian sounds like it would fit you pretty well. It's a precompiled distro that's package managed via apt. KDE works just fine on it and there's probably all sorts of small familiar things given Debian gave birth to Ubuntu.

I've found the stable version to be incredibly stable in the past and the testing release has a bit fresher set of packages if you're willing to a risk of occasional jank. If you willing to work a bit for fresher packages still you can find uptodate debian packages of popular software maintained some else than the Debian folks themselves, I used to use a bleeding edge daily version of Emacs myself and installed Spotify from their own repository.

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