this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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I've been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and "move on to something else" once I got comfortable with the OS.

I'm comfortable now, but I don't really see any reason to move on. What would the benefits be of jumping to something else? Mint has great documentation and an active community that has answers to any questions I've ever had, and I'm reluctant to ditch that. On the other hand, when I scroll through forums, Distro Hopping seems to be such a big part of the "Linux experience."

What am I missing?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

No harm enjoying a distro and being stable.

I’m a fan of Arch and derivatives but I need better odds of shit just working. Been running Mankato on desktop for some time to get both stable ish packages and also AUR as/where needed.

For servers, it’s Debian all the way for me. Ubuntu does some things I don’t personally love - no offense to the distro, it’s well constructed - and the recent ish changes in the RPM world didn’t sit well with me - strictly personal opinion.

Anything in a container generally runs on whatever the image was built with. It’s only a minimal pain to port simple dockerfiles, but when you get into multiple linked containers, that risks edge case bugs down the road.

Honestly, between the lot of it, I use a pretty representative sample - I think alpine on desktop would be kind of pointless to say the least, doesn’t mean I’m going to forego any container built on it.

Use case is a huge factor here, as is ability to grok multiple distros concurrently. I find that easy, but plenty of people don’t. For them, maybe rebuilding that image makes more sense.

Linux is all about doing what works for you and your use case.

FWIW, pacman doesn’t resonate nearly as well as pamac does with me. Probably because I haven’t had to dive deep into it. All about what works for an individual. If that’s stability on an Ubuntu derivative, great - Linux is Linux, in that context.