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not him but same experience, from my previous comment: I would recommend: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS if you want: nice experience out of the b

not him but same experience, from my previous comment: I would recommend: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS if you want: nice experience out of the box I would recommend: Arch, Gentoo, Debian Net inst, Void if you want a base system and install things you want on top of it

BruceEel 6y ago
Thank you @all for the suggestions! I'm going to set aside some time to experiment with these and see how far I get.
- tsukurimashou 6y ago
  Nice, I would like to hear your experience with it once you do that
  - BruceEel 6y ago
    I shall post my findings.
  - BruceEel 6y ago
    Well, my head is spinning, but I've made a bit of progress. I thought I'd start by trying out a few of the ones you and others have characterized as user-friendly as well as one of the more bare-bones ones. The (hopelessly unscientific) test plan was: Challenge 1 - write live system ISO to USB drive and boot it on my 2015 MacBook Air (which, though old, still counts as exotic, I guess.) Challenge 2 - make sure display, network, trackpad and keyboard (+ intl. layout) work correctly. Be able to SFTP to my Mac Challenge 3 - with little to no docs reading (how is the package manager invoked from CLI?), use the terminal to set up the right environment for a couple of relatively portable hobby projects I've been recently working on (on Mac), compile and test them. This includes, among other things, installing clang or g++, SDL2, Wine (to run an ancient ARM assembler) and finding a usable GBA emulator. Limitations: A: 8GB RAM. More ambitious stuff (KVM macOS, VisualStudio Code) will have to wait for an actual install. B: Deliberately avoiding exposure to the docs is silly but I thought such an approach would give me an indication as to whether there exists a distro that uhm, "thinks like me". Candidates: Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, KDE Neon (which, if I'm not wrong, is Ubuntu LTS preconfigured as the latest KDE) and Void. Results: Challenge 1: unremarkable. All worked right off the bat except for Void, which made it as far as showing the mouse pointer but then froze. Challenge 2: well, boring ;) All distros were pretty much ready to use and required minimal tweaking. With the tweaking part ranging from effortless (Mint) to minor headscratching (Neon). Not sure whether /etc/X11/XF86Config still exists but I did not miss editing it today. Challange 3: more interesting: Neon: all worked as expected except some trial and error required to get Wine working: wine32 was required but it wasn't getting installed by default, apparently. (Not a whole lot easier on Mac anyway, with separate downloads & installs for Wine and XQuartz) Ubuntu: I failed as apt refused to acknowledge the existence of the packages I needed. This is weird as I believe Neon relies on the same package database. Though undoubtedly my fault, not reading the manual, it is perhaps a bit interesting that I could not readily find my way around the problem. Fedora: everything worked except for Wine, as the live system ran out memory (disk space) on installing it. Not a big deal, everything else worked very well. Aside: I'm an avid runner and "DNF" is not the most likeable of names for a program I have to use very frequently! j/k.. Mint: everything worked at take one. I know this isn't even scratching the surface of the surface but I think for now I'm going to go ahead and play more with Mint and Fedora after installing them on MB Air hardware or MB Pro VMware.... with a mind of getting back to KDE/Neon eventually.
    - tsukurimashou 6y ago
      interesting! Thanks for posting your feedback, I think mint is really great, I'm an ArchLinux user but I like having mint installed on some laptop, the installation is very straightforward and I feel it's way less bloated than Ubuntu for example. And pretty much everything worked out of the box with the laptops I've installed it on (mostly dell laptops). I haven't used Ubuntu much lately but I remember always having to add community repository to get some package I needed. (Also one of the reason I love Arch, a lot of packages there updated more quickly than most distro + the AUR for everything not present in official repo)
      - BruceEel 6y ago
        Aye, very happy to have found what look like really viable alternatives, this is promising. And if I manage to make the transition, I will eventually want to try out more sophisticated distro's like Arch, I am quite sure of that.
RockIslandLine 6y ago
Gentoo needs vastly better documentation to be useful.
- tsukurimashou 6y ago
  I would say that Archwiki covers a lot of things for a lot of distros, but yeah I would only recommend Gentoo to 'advanced' users, or if you really want to get into it the hard way.

BruceEel 6y ago

Thank you @all for the suggestions! I'm going to set aside some time to experiment with these and see how far I get.

tsukurimashou 6y ago
Nice, I would like to hear your experience with it once you do that
- BruceEel 6y ago
  I shall post my findings.
- BruceEel 6y ago
  Well, my head is spinning, but I've made a bit of progress. I thought I'd start by trying out a few of the ones you and others have characterized as user-friendly as well as one of the more bare-bones ones. The (hopelessly unscientific) test plan was: Challenge 1 - write live system ISO to USB drive and boot it on my 2015 MacBook Air (which, though old, still counts as exotic, I guess.) Challenge 2 - make sure display, network, trackpad and keyboard (+ intl. layout) work correctly. Be able to SFTP to my Mac Challenge 3 - with little to no docs reading (how is the package manager invoked from CLI?), use the terminal to set up the right environment for a couple of relatively portable hobby projects I've been recently working on (on Mac), compile and test them. This includes, among other things, installing clang or g++, SDL2, Wine (to run an ancient ARM assembler) and finding a usable GBA emulator. Limitations: A: 8GB RAM. More ambitious stuff (KVM macOS, VisualStudio Code) will have to wait for an actual install. B: Deliberately avoiding exposure to the docs is silly but I thought such an approach would give me an indication as to whether there exists a distro that uhm, "thinks like me". Candidates: Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, KDE Neon (which, if I'm not wrong, is Ubuntu LTS preconfigured as the latest KDE) and Void. Results: Challenge 1: unremarkable. All worked right off the bat except for Void, which made it as far as showing the mouse pointer but then froze. Challenge 2: well, boring ;) All distros were pretty much ready to use and required minimal tweaking. With the tweaking part ranging from effortless (Mint) to minor headscratching (Neon). Not sure whether /etc/X11/XF86Config still exists but I did not miss editing it today. Challange 3: more interesting: Neon: all worked as expected except some trial and error required to get Wine working: wine32 was required but it wasn't getting installed by default, apparently. (Not a whole lot easier on Mac anyway, with separate downloads & installs for Wine and XQuartz) Ubuntu: I failed as apt refused to acknowledge the existence of the packages I needed. This is weird as I believe Neon relies on the same package database. Though undoubtedly my fault, not reading the manual, it is perhaps a bit interesting that I could not readily find my way around the problem. Fedora: everything worked except for Wine, as the live system ran out memory (disk space) on installing it. Not a big deal, everything else worked very well. Aside: I'm an avid runner and "DNF" is not the most likeable of names for a program I have to use very frequently! j/k.. Mint: everything worked at take one. I know this isn't even scratching the surface of the surface but I think for now I'm going to go ahead and play more with Mint and Fedora after installing them on MB Air hardware or MB Pro VMware.... with a mind of getting back to KDE/Neon eventually.
  - tsukurimashou 6y ago
    interesting! Thanks for posting your feedback, I think mint is really great, I'm an ArchLinux user but I like having mint installed on some laptop, the installation is very straightforward and I feel it's way less bloated than Ubuntu for example. And pretty much everything worked out of the box with the laptops I've installed it on (mostly dell laptops). I haven't used Ubuntu much lately but I remember always having to add community repository to get some package I needed. (Also one of the reason I love Arch, a lot of packages there updated more quickly than most distro + the AUR for everything not present in official repo)
    - BruceEel 6y ago
      Aye, very happy to have found what look like really viable alternatives, this is promising. And if I manage to make the transition, I will eventually want to try out more sophisticated distro's like Arch, I am quite sure of that.

RockIslandLine 6y ago

Gentoo needs vastly better documentation to be useful.

tsukurimashou 6y ago
I would say that Archwiki covers a lot of things for a lot of distros, but yeah I would only recommend Gentoo to 'advanced' users, or if you really want to get into it the hard way.