this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Hello, i am currently looking for a Linux distribution with these criteria:

-it should be more or less stable, comparable to Ubuntu with or without LTS // -it should not be related to IBM to any way (so no fedora/redhat) // -it should not feature snaps (no Ubuntu or KDE neon) // -KDE plasma should be installable manually (best case even installed by default) // -no DIY Distros //

I've been thinking about using an immutable distro, but if anyone can recommend something to me, I'd be very grateful //

Edit: I'm sorry for the bad formatting, for some reason it doesn't register spaces

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

Yeah go straight to the source.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Can you please like write the points in a list and not with these weird // in between? Lemmy uses markdown

- this (that space between line and text is important)
- is 
- a list

* this
* too
* forwhateverreason

``` before and after something : codeblock

*italic*

**bold**

***both***

[–] dco 41 points 10 months ago

Sounds like Debian is your answer.

[–] Para_lyzed 40 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Just to clarity the relationship between Red Hat, IBM, and Fedora, Fedora is only sponsored by Red Hat. They make all their own decisions, and while they receive financial support from Red Hat and Red Hat owns the Fedora trademark, their decisions and development are independent of Red Hat (and by extension IBM), with the single exception that they cannot risk violating the law (i.e. copyright infringement), else it risks Red Hat legal trouble (and Fedora would risk losing their sponsorship as a result). Red Hat benefits from Fedora's development by the community, given that Fedora is RHEL's upstream, hence why it continues to sponsor Fedora. But it isn't Red Hat that is in charge of Fedora's development, it's FESCo, which is entirely community elected, and does not stand for the interests of Red Hat, but rather for the interests of the community.

Eliminating Fedora from contention in that regard is essentially like eliminating Debian because you don't like Canonical, who makes Ubuntu, a downstream of Debian.

Add on top of that the fact that IBM and Red Hat are major contributors to the Linux kernel, and you absolutely cannot avoid connections to them while using Linux. I mean, that's quite frankly a ridiculous exclusion criteria in the context of Linux. If you're looking to avoid an operating system OWNED by Red Hat or IBM, then Fedora should not be included in that list. Neither of them have any say or pull in the development of Fedora, which is a completely community-driven project (no, owning the trademark doesn't change that fact; if Red Hat tried to take over, the Fedora community would simply fork the project, rebrand, and continue on their own). Besides, Red Hat has no interest in controlling Fedora, because it doesn't benefit them. Their only interest is in enterprise applications, which is not a good use case for Fedora. The only operating systems Red Hat actually has any control over are RHEL, CentOS, and any derivatives of those operating systems like Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, and such (though Red Hat's control over derivatives was only the result of those projects being downstream, not actual ownership).

So with that in mind, I'd recommend the Fedora KDE spin if you want a normal, stable, snap-free, no DIY required distro with KDE, or if you want the immutable version, Fedora Kinoite is what you'd be looking for. And Fedora has the major advantage over Debian-based distros of actually receiving package and kernel updates regularly, so you can stay up to date and enjoy new features, all while maintaining stability.

Fedora Kinoite is absolutely the best immutable distro fitting your criteria. Anything else will have a much smaller community and less support as a result. rpm-ostree has great documentation, and all of the Fedora Atomic Spins have a huge userbase available in case you ever have questions.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

Second that.

No matter if atomic or regular, Fedora has a good automatically preset rollback mechanism for when an update breaks something.

They also have good Wayland support, awesome new packages, BTRFS and more.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

This is a great comment because I didn't know this distinction. You've OKed Fedora for me when I thought I needed to boycott them because of RHEL's shenanigans.

[–] Dehydrated 34 points 10 months ago (9 children)

Opensuse Tumbleweed is pretty stable, even though it's a rolling release

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

Jumping on the OpenSUSE bandwagon. I use it daily, have been running the same install of Tumbleweed for years without issue. I'm using KDE Plasma which it let's you choose as part of the installation which fulfils that requirement for you as well.

If you're familiar with Redhat you'll feel at home on it. Zypper is the package manager instead of yum/dnf and works really well (particularly when coping with dependency issues.

I've worked with heaps of distros over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, old school Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, even a bit of Alpine and some BSD variants) and OpenSUSE is definitely my favourite for a workstation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I second opensuse, there is also a non-rolling release option, i think.

My tumbleweed has been exceptionally stable, updates without problem.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Getting the arch experience in software support (has a "community repo" as well) but in a stable way and there is never the need to use the terminal, if you don’t want)

Love it, recommend it.

For more stableness check out the slow rolling version or the immutable versions (both in "beta" state)

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I've been running Linux Mint Cinnamon for years. It's the stablest, most dependable distro I've ever run. I've installed it, updated it and major-version-upgraded it many times on many machines and it never broke.

It's basically Ubuntu with the features that make Ubuntu shite removed (basically Unity and snaps) and a no-nonsense, GTK-based Win95-like desktop environment tacked on.

[–] clif 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I've been on mint for ages but when I updated my RAID this year it originally wouldn't recognize it. I eventually got it recognized but it capped the 16TB drives at 999GB for some reason. For fun, I went up the chain to Ubuntu... Same thing

In frustration I went to Grandma's house with Debian and it worked perfect out of the box. I'd spent hours researching it but the best I found was a potential RAID related bug (lvm, specifically, I think) introduced in Ubuntu that, of course, filtered into Mint. Even fdisk reported the physical drives as 999GB in Mint/Ubuntu.

I still don't know the exact cause but I got it up and running so I'm a Debian guy now, I guess.

Granted, my use case isn't super normal since I'm using a BIOS RAID1 (and we all know how fun BIOS RAID can be) with full disk encryption.

Worked out in the end but it made me sad to ditch Mint

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

-it should be more or less stable, comparable to Ubuntu with or without LTS

Ubuntu was based on Debian, which touts its stability

-it should not be related to IBM to any way (so no fedora/redhat)

Debian has no afiliation to IBM, they're not even loosely part of each others' "partners" programs

-it should not feature snaps (no Ubuntu or KDE neon)

Debian doesn't use snaps (welcome to the greener side of the fence btw, fuck snaps)

-KDE plasma should be installable manually (best case even installed by default)

Debian uses KDE as one of it's default install options when installing the OS, and it can be installed later with tasksel (or by just getting all the packages if you want to do it the hard way)

-no DIY Distros

Debian has a barebones headless option, but the installer defaults (which come with the whole DE and oyher convenienve packages) are pretty user-friendly

In summary, I have no fucking clue what OS you should use.

P.S. newlines on lemmy are either done by using two spaces at the end of a line
and then pressing enter
(make sure your phone doesn't autocorrect/one of the spaces away like mine does) or by pressing

Enter twice (without the double spaces), so there's a

blank line in between

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (13 children)

Definitely Debian. Or Mint if you also like the cinnamon desktop (which is similar to KDE's in terms of default look).

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago

Opensuse. It comes in different flavors including tumbleweed (rolling but tested), slowroll (slower rolling), leap (stable), and micro / leap micro (immutable). It is not owned or funded by redhat although it does use rpm. Its installer is the best I have ever seen for managing software before installation and will let you select KDE.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (9 children)

Of course debian.

However pure debian needs some love before you can use it.

If you want to use steam. Enable 32 bit arch.

If you want to use flatpak. You need to install it and add the default repo.

To install kde plasma you need only a single apt command.

I personally run debian-testing/Trixie.

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[–] AlijahTheMediocre 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I never understood the IBM/Redhat hate being directed at Fedora. Imagine being against using Debian because of the Ubuntu Amazon fiasco that happened years back.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You can't avoid IBM/RedHat - they contribute to the kernel and many, many other parts of Linux eg systemd. I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.

That said, voidlinux is an independent distro without systemd or snaps based on runit for init and xbps for package management. It's also a STABLE rolling release.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.

Pretty sure what they meant is no distros where you have to manually curate and possibly even build every sodding package, like Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, and maybe to an extent Arch. I presume they want a disto that flashes to a live USB, walks through a wizard, and boots up out of the box fully functional in minutes, no fuss required.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Debian testing or nixos

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Get a Debian and break it a leg.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Linux Mint is hands down the most stable linux distro out there and has been for years. zero tinkering needed. everything just runs no questions asked.

My only grief with Mint is the most recent update where they changed the software centee and now it's slowed to a crawl. Why they would do this is anyones guess.

I'm recommending MX until such time that Mint sort their crap out - unfortunately I doubt they will, seeing as this change of software center was to resolve some other issues they (but not is end users) though they had.

MX is basically debian but with a lot of improvements. Sure it might have a bit of a learning curve for those primarily used to Ubuntu based systems, but it beats running any of the other Ubuntu distros by miles since they all struggle with the crap Ubuntu puts on top of Debian.

Manjaro is another great option if you don't want to deal with debian based stuff, and KDE is the default DE with most stuff under reasonable control. You can also use all the Arch resources if you ever run into trouble so it's a lot less of a headache than what I've experienced running OpenSUSE (i want to love OpenSUSE but I just can't).

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Have you tried Mint? It's super stable. It's the least DIY distro ever. You CAN use snaps, but why would anyone want to? I believe there's an image that comes with KDE, but Cinnamon is a great desktop.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (3 children)

people will read stable and instantly comment debian

Jokes aside, given that you said in a comment that it's for non-tech-savvy people, I'd say Linux Mint, partially just because it will look familiar if they've seen any Windows PC.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

OpenSUSE is good. If corporate scares you off, there's OpenMandriva Lx or Mageia.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

don't shit on my kde neon like that :(

kde neon doesn't come with snap packages, it only supports it so that the user can install snap apps if they want to.

it's a great distro and i highly recommend it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I've been using it for the past year and can confirm, snap is an option but not forced on you like the *buntu family. It even comes with Flatpak and Flathub installed by default (and does not force that on you either). You have freedom of choice.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

OpenSuse seems like it would meet your needs. OpenSuse Kalpa might be one to look into since it's immutable and features KDE Plasma

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Most stable rolling, in my opinion.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (4 children)

I would recommend Fedora Kinoite.
Yes, you said no RedHat stuff, but Fedora is 100% community run.

Especially when you use the Kinoite-build from universal-blue.org, everything should work ootb and is very reliable, while also being semi-stable in terms of update frequency

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Debian? Just make sure you use backports, containers or flatpak if you want newer software.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What does a DIY distro mean? Is typing archinstall out of the question?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (10 children)

With diy distro I meant arch, gentoo, and nixOS The distro is meant to run on a PC which is mainly used by non tech sawwy people. And even tho I will be doing all administration tasks on it, I would like it to be as easy to manage themselves as possible, so they become familiar with Linux more.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

The distro is meant to run on a PC which is mainly used by non tech sawwy people. [...], so they become familiar with Linux more.

In this case I always suggest trying out Linux Mint. It is not "too heavy" and not "too specific/niche". It's a good all-purpose distribution for desktops/laptops where basic maintenance can be performed by the user.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

If it will be used by non-tech savvy people, why do you care about snap and IBM? Do the people care about that?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

OpenSUSE. snapshots build in. nVidia hosts its own Leap or Tumbleweed GPU repo you can add for trouble fee GPU use. GUI for almoat all config tasks you might normally do at the CLI. Stable...and rollbacks ahould you make a mistake

[–] qaz 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

OpenSUSE TW

it should be more or less stable, comparable to Ubuntu with or without LTS

It’s very stable and I’ve never had issues

it should not be related to IBM to any way (so no fedora/redhat)

It’s supported

no DIY Distros

It’s developed by SUSE.

it should not feature snaps (no Ubuntu or KDE neon)

It uses flatpaks

KDE plasma should be installable manually (best case even installed by default)

OpenSUSE is one of the few distributions that uses KDE Plasma by default.

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[–] aairey 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I read this as:
Looking for a Half-Life Linux distro

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

what does half stable mean?
stable os with fresh applications?

if thats what you are looking for,
maybe debian with flatpacks for fresher softwares?

or if you also dont like flatpack, maybe
debian with nix

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Opensuse Slowroll

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

There are only 3 options I can immediately think of, for you:

Debian

OpenSUSE (Leap)

Slackware

They are ordered from most to least likely to recommend for your criteria i.e I recommend Debian, alternatively Leap, and if you don't like either you can try Slackware, but Slackware is closer to a DIY distro.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Mint LMDE Kde flavor

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Regarding your post formatting, you need to put a space between the bullet point and the first character of the line:

  • Like this (hit view source/view markdown on my comment to see)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)
  • yet another vote for Debian
  • or if you’re going immutable (“atomic” is a better name) then wait for Vanilla OS’s Orchid to be released (currently in Beta) – a little more user-friendly than NixOS (although that will depend on the documentation)
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

When you start getting super specific about which distro you want, I think you should start looking towards a DIY distro.

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