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AMD graphics gives you more choices. I quite like Pop!OS despite the stupid name. Ubuntu without some of the cruft and Nvidia card support is good, not that y

AMD graphics gives you more choices. I quite like Pop!OS despite the stupid name. Ubuntu without some of the cruft and Nvidia card support is good, not that you need it. Debian is what I usually reach for though. If you are doing development work on that laptop, debian is pretty hard to beat. Edit: as others mentioned, download the debian installer with non-free firmware, otherwise its a bit painful on most laptops.

lawgimenez 4y ago
I've heard about Pop!OS, looks heavy though with all the fancy UI/icons/assets, etc.
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  Yes, its a bit gimmickey. But the install experience is good. It plays nice with secure boot too. I've been running it on an Acer Nitro 5 with Nvidia graphics and its been really solid with all my dev tools on it (vscode, android studio, jetbrains, .NET, node, python etc)
- usrn 4y ago
  No matter which distro you pick the DE is trivial to change; just install a new one and select it the next time you log in. If you want something super light you can even just use a WM like FVWM or CWM. The main criteria for a distro you should have are: 1) Is the libc (and other libraries) compatible with my software? (closed software will need (possibly 32 bit) Glibc which excludes eg. Alpine.) 2) Are the packages I want available and up to date? 3) Do the attitudes of the maintainers seem good? (they shield you from nasty software and determine a lot about how the distro works.) 4) Do I like the configuration of things that are harder to change (package manager, init system, hotplug deamon, display manager, standard root dirs etc.) Note that in general supported devices don't really change between distros. That depends on the kernel (which they all share) firmware (which they all mostly share) and mesa (which they all mostly share.) Nvidia might be the only exception since they tend to not publish driver sources.
  - warrenm 4y ago
    >2) Are the packages I want available and up to date? This is the only factor that you might want to consider (ultimately, it's what pushed me from RHEL/CentOS to Ubuntu ... fresher PHP packages for a handful of websites I or friends run on my webservers) If it's a desktop distro, they're all going to be "available and up to date" (that - or you've got a dead distro) :)
  - warrenm 4y ago
    >4) Do I like the configuration of things that are harder to change (package manager, init system, hotplug deamon, display manager, standard root dirs etc.) Gotta say - if you're worried about the package manager, init system, hotplug daemon, standard root directories, etc ... you should be building your own distro from scratch :) None of those things matter from a technical standpoint (I know - people miss init.d, but I have yet to hear a real reason as to WHY they miss it (beyond the, "well in MY day we walked uphill on broken glass in the snow both ways - and we LIKED it!" responses)) You're not even going to see differences in standard root directories unless you're looking for /etc/httpd and you need to go to /etc/apache2 instead (I've been running Ubuntu on my servers for a few years, and still manage to try to cd into the RHEL/CentOS structure sometimes ... but that's easy enough to correct when you get the error message reminding you you're not on Red Hat anymore) - but how often are you really monkeying around where the specific directory structure even matters?
    - usrn 4y ago
      Some of the defaults for systemd can be pretty annoying. Killing tmux when you end your session is something Pop OS still does for example. SysV init kind of sucked but I think OpenRC is legitimately better than SystemD. Each new version of SystemD brings new brokenness that you don't necessarily expect, the result is a broken platform. >You won't even see the structure of the root directories The software you use will though. If you're running non-free software it will probably depend on a specific structure. But yeah I build my own distro because I can't stand the opinions other distro maintainers have.
      - 4y ago

lawgimenez 4y ago

I've heard about Pop!OS, looks heavy though with all the fancy UI/icons/assets, etc.

smackeyacky 4y ago
Yes, its a bit gimmickey. But the install experience is good. It plays nice with secure boot too. I've been running it on an Acer Nitro 5 with Nvidia graphics and its been really solid with all my dev tools on it (vscode, android studio, jetbrains, .NET, node, python etc)
usrn 4y ago
No matter which distro you pick the DE is trivial to change; just install a new one and select it the next time you log in. If you want something super light you can even just use a WM like FVWM or CWM. The main criteria for a distro you should have are: 1) Is the libc (and other libraries) compatible with my software? (closed software will need (possibly 32 bit) Glibc which excludes eg. Alpine.) 2) Are the packages I want available and up to date? 3) Do the attitudes of the maintainers seem good? (they shield you from nasty software and determine a lot about how the distro works.) 4) Do I like the configuration of things that are harder to change (package manager, init system, hotplug deamon, display manager, standard root dirs etc.) Note that in general supported devices don't really change between distros. That depends on the kernel (which they all share) firmware (which they all mostly share) and mesa (which they all mostly share.) Nvidia might be the only exception since they tend to not publish driver sources.
- warrenm 4y ago
  >2) Are the packages I want available and up to date? This is the only factor that you might want to consider (ultimately, it's what pushed me from RHEL/CentOS to Ubuntu ... fresher PHP packages for a handful of websites I or friends run on my webservers) If it's a desktop distro, they're all going to be "available and up to date" (that - or you've got a dead distro) :)
- warrenm 4y ago
  >4) Do I like the configuration of things that are harder to change (package manager, init system, hotplug deamon, display manager, standard root dirs etc.) Gotta say - if you're worried about the package manager, init system, hotplug daemon, standard root directories, etc ... you should be building your own distro from scratch :) None of those things matter from a technical standpoint (I know - people miss init.d, but I have yet to hear a real reason as to WHY they miss it (beyond the, "well in MY day we walked uphill on broken glass in the snow both ways - and we LIKED it!" responses)) You're not even going to see differences in standard root directories unless you're looking for /etc/httpd and you need to go to /etc/apache2 instead (I've been running Ubuntu on my servers for a few years, and still manage to try to cd into the RHEL/CentOS structure sometimes ... but that's easy enough to correct when you get the error message reminding you you're not on Red Hat anymore) - but how often are you really monkeying around where the specific directory structure even matters?
  - usrn 4y ago
    Some of the defaults for systemd can be pretty annoying. Killing tmux when you end your session is something Pop OS still does for example. SysV init kind of sucked but I think OpenRC is legitimately better than SystemD. Each new version of SystemD brings new brokenness that you don't necessarily expect, the result is a broken platform. >You won't even see the structure of the root directories The software you use will though. If you're running non-free software it will probably depend on a specific structure. But yeah I build my own distro because I can't stand the opinions other distro maintainers have.
    - 4y ago