Distributions package stuff for you (.deb, .rpm), this takes care of sharing the dependencies, and generally has the best support from the distro, but generally operates with a lag and may not happen for smaller projects. Still, you want to use this for >95% of stuff as it is the most robust and stable.
For the rest, various delivery mechanisms exist. AppImage is the simplest: it just bundles a binary with its dependencies you can copy, download/update is manual. Flatpak/Snap are more advanced, with update mechanisms, “stores”, etc. Generally I go with Appimage for Darktable, and Flatpak for tiny utilities that have no packaged version.
(AUR is an Arch Linux specific lightweight package recipe framework.)
You are under no obligation to experiment with them, feel free to ignore them unless one of them catches your eye. For most people who want a “traditional” desktop, KDE may be the best bet.
I would recommend not even partitioning your home. IMO this is a remnant of the past and more or less useless nowadays. It leads to a lot more problems than it solves. Nothing worse than running out of space on your root partition or having to “baby” it
Firstly, there are the technical ones. Although KDE has always been the primary DE, it does provide others, both Gnome and at least one other requiring fewer resources. Although it is a rolling release, I have always found Tumbleweed to be stable, and I can only remember once when a vendor misconfiguration caused me problems. I also like YAST, which allows you to use a GUI rather than the command line to configure systems, and the fact that I have never had hardware that it has not been able to handle.
Secondly, there are social, and now political aspects.
I found Richard Stallman’s attitude towards KDE ideological rather than rational. It didn’t stop me trying Gnome, but I found it crude compared to KDE in the early days. I keep having a glance at it, but I still prefer KDE.
There are moves in Europe to improve its digital sovereignty, with a push for a European Linux OS. This would have KDE as the DE.
Concerning “how unified the linux ecosystem is”: I found this article comparing package managers interesting. The differences to the end user really are minute.
For me it’s the other way around… I prefer minimalism, then from time to stime I look at KDE and I think… this is ugly… I don’t like the windows style starter and system tray… I also will not put stuff on my dekstop… I prefer a nice photo to look at…
I have probably used this before, but I can’t be bothered going back and looking.
I am fond of a book by the philosopher J.L. Mackie called Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. The first sentence in the book is “There are no objective values”.
If you want to go back to David Hume, then something similar might be “you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’”. You might say, “Gnome is a minimalist DE, therefore you ought to use it”, whereas I might say “KDE is extremely configurable, therefore you ought to use it”.
These are value judgements, and there is no right answer.
I utter purely a preference. I am not saying that if you want minimalism you have to use Gnome, this is pure a subjective choice and opinion for what I like.
I have not told anyone what to do. Nor recommend anything. Just personal preferences.
Another one of my preferences is not to read too many philosophy books. So thank you for the reference, but I will pass on that one.
This is really the answer. Recommendations are difficult because they often project the desires of one person onto the needs of another. Someone can say “I dislike snaps,” but it’s hard to put it into practical terms that apply to everyone. The way they are organized with lots of virtual file systems gives me trouble, so it’s one reason I don’t have Ubuntu.
On the other hand, my mother’s computer uses the heck out of them. I know this because I put them there, on the KDE version of Ubuntu, and they’ve been great!
If I can’t even agree with myself, what hope do we have at consensus?
So hop around distros for a while, with good backups of your data. Every distro will have different pain points and different areas of “oh my, this is so easy!”
Even Arch can be that way, believe it or not.
I bet even NixOS could be that way, but they’re a little bit nuts over there.
Arch gets a bad rep for things outside of its control IMO, mainly people not reading the manual and then complaining about the distro instead of realizing the issue was their lack of knowledge. It’s okay to break stuff when you’re new, that’s how you learn, but don’t complain about it… For me it’s the most stable distro I have ever used. I just update every few days, update my flatpaks, and done. Once in a blue moon you’ll get an email from their list, warning about this or that package that needs manual intervention, but that’s about it. I have even stopped thinking about distros since my system is so stable and out of my way, just works.
Fedora with its akmods is just dreadful. Oh no! You didn’t wait enough time after updating, now your system is broken because your nvidia driver modules didn’t finish their compilation.
Arch recently has got a bad rep for its AUR packages being hacked and infected with malware. I know that AURs are not official, but the truth is that everybody use them, because the alternative is to build them from sources.
Now, I’m not sure how much safer Fedora or other distributions are, but that incident made me change my mind about trying Arch or Arch-derived distros again.
With the AUR you’re still building from source. The difference between the AUR and most other distro-provided repos is oversight, or in the case of the AUR, its the lack of oversight. The same applies to Ubuntu PPAs, it’s just random people making binaries.
Yep. It’s good to note that most packages affected were “orphans”, as in, they had no maintainer and most had nearly no users, if any. Obviously the AUR can no longer rely on the goodwill of people online and now needs a more trust based maintainer setup for the AUR, but I think the problem was overblown given the number of affected users. In fact, I don’t think a single person has come forward saying they installed one of the affected packages. At the end of day the issue was not AURs alone but once again an NPM issue since it was used to distribute the attack script.
Just an update to this thread: I have installed Fedora KDE Plasma on my old HP laptop.
I wish I could say it was smooth sailing, but it really wasn’t. The first problem I had was that the media check kept failing at 4.8% when trying to install the OS from my flash drive. Apparently this is a known issue and is something to do with Windows leaving file traces, but I ended up trying several workarounds until I could successfully install. I tried using BalenaEtcher, Fedora Media Writer, Rufus and then finally Ventoy, which worked.
It turns out I could probably have just skipped the media check and everything would have worked fine. But I first wanted to try and solve the issue. I also believe this is a Fedora-specific issue.
The next problem I had and still have is that the Fedora installation process did not play nicely with my SSD and HDD. I wanted to install the OS on the SSD and use the HDD for /home. Using mount point configurations, I went about the process of deleting and formatting partitions, but I couldn’t get the install wizard to recognize the HDD after deleting and reformatting it. It refused to refresh and allow me to create a new btrfs partition on it.
I ended up just deleting all partitions on all drives and installing everything on the SSD using the “use entire disk” option. This worked fine and automatically created all the relevant mount points successfully. But I still need to get the HDD to mount automatically and make it /home for all my data as it’s a 1TB drive as opposed to 128GB for the SSD.
It’s something I’ll return to when I have some time. But suffice to say, Linux installation still can cause a fair amount of headaches and would absolutely scare away many users. The answers are usually out there, but finding them can be a real chore.
I also tried a live session of ElementaryOS and found that quite a nice distro. Ultimately I decided it was a bit too Apple like for my tastes.
Yes, although I am not sure if using a HDD as your home is a good idea. I would mount it in /home/user/mount_dir but I would keep home in your SSD. The reason is that a ton of software makes use of your home directories(~/.config, ~/.cache) for local cache and configurations. Changing this to a HDD will make your entire PC feel slower since HDDs are still pretty slow latency wise when accessing random data, whereas SSDs excel at it. Every browser, software with a local db(darktable), etc, will suffer from it.
For me it’s the most stable distro I have ever used. I just update every few days, update my flatpaks, and done. Once in a blue moon you’ll get an email from their list, warning about this or that package that needs manual intervention, but that’s about it. I have even stopped thinking about distros since my system is so stable and out of my way, just works.
Appimage.