I made the same recommendation. Sadly the “latest” version in 64 bit only. Unsurprising as it is Debian based.
The older release is still available and still supported though. It would be a great option though the clock is ticking on it of course.
The most “batteries included” distro that is I can think of that is not Debian based is Adelie.
DSL is just AntiX with a curated list of software in a CD image. Just go with AntiX if you want to go that route.
Another option to consider is Q4OS Trinity. Trinity is essentially the KDE 3 desktop which is still surprisingly good and very light on resources.
All of these, including MX Linux, are Debian based and have access to the full Debian repos.
A potential issue with all these Debian based distros though is that Debian itself has moved away from 32 bit in Debian 13. It is hard to say how long these others will stay the course.
Adelie Linux is another one people forget about and certainly worth giving a spin. It is not Debian based.
Tiny Core will be the “fastest” as it runs out of RAM but of course that leaves you even less RAM for other things (like a browser). So it depends on your use case.
Are you sure CachyOS has 32 bit support?
Yes, it is gorgeous
Agreed. That does not change what I said though.
For me, “baloo” is the worst offender.
Also, great to see another btop fan. I use it a lot.
No argument.
I do not see much chance of a middle-man though and the alternative means much less adoption.
My issue is not with Kent’s strong technical opinions. I like those. Well, except that abusing other people as cover for his inability to follow the rules is not cool.
Linus can be a dick but he is typically making technical arguments at least (and usually quite good ones). Kent likes to play the “engineering” card but the drama is always about process, not technology, and he is the one being called out. So trying to pretend he is defending better engineering just makes the behaviour worse.
NVIDIA were breaking the rules (legally even). They have come around.
More big endiian in the kernel for no reason is a negative.
Not sure about the Intel engineer. Linus can be a jerk though so not assuming he was right if I do not know the situation.
And, while I like old hardware, the first x86-64 chips shipped in 2003. So, this is not exactly a Windows 11 situation.
Hardware older than that is going to struggle with modern browsers. A PC from that era would probably have less than 1 GB of RAM and perhaps a max RAM well under 4 GB (the theoretical limit). Using older software versions is probably best anyway.
Ironically, I think it may be because of Skia. So Google.
The replies here make me so mad at Kent Overstreet.
I love bcachefs and was using it on quite a few systems. When it was in the mainline kernel, interest was building. I feel like we could have been just a few months from experimental coming off and adoption skyrocketing.
Then Kent got it pulled from the kernel (so not interested in the “fighting for users” misdirection). Now, as evidenced by the comments here, most users will not touch it.
I needed it in the kernel so I have been migrating away too but it breaks my heart.
I am sure somebody will use it, maybe even more than the small number that have historically. And Kent will probably tell himself that is ok.
It sucks.
Now, I did not write a COW filesystem. So I guess I am getting what I am owed (nothing). That does not dull the sting much though.
It was quite good for a while but I feel like it has crept up again. It is over 1.5G at start for me these days.
It used to be under a gig.
It makes a difference when you only have 8G on a laptop.
Niri is a scrolling tiler. You do not even have to scroll if you really don’t want to.
Niri is absolutely the best tier for a laptop with a smaller screen. It provides all the benefits of tiling without the tiny, cramped windows that tiling tends to result in.
On other tilers, you end up using workspaces for single apps to avoid splitting the screen.
See my other post. EndeavourOS works out of the box on MacBooks before 2019. This is with vanilla EOS.
For 2019 and 2020 Intel MacBooks, there is a T2 version of EndeavourOS that includes a custom kernel that again makes everything work after a fresh install. You can just use the package manager after that and it all keeps working, even across kernel updates.
What year?
I have several Mac laptops running Linux with hardware from 2012 to 2020. I find that EndeavourOS works best and WiFi works out of the box.
It uses the wl drivers generally (NOT b43) with DKMS so the module is automatically rebuilt when you upgrade the kernel. You can just upgrade the kernel using the package manager and it “just works” when you reboot. I have been using Linux on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air systems for years and never had a problem (2012, 2013, 2017, 2020). Also iMacs back to 2008.
If you have a T2 chip system, you need a special kernel and apple an wifi/bluetooth firmware blob. In most distros you have to extract the firmware from macOS yourself but it is available in the AUR so there is a special T2 addition of EndeavourOS that makes everything work out of the box. These are the 2019 or 2020 systems I think.
Great to see them get them get back on track. PopOS has been a holding pattern for a very long time.
While this is an LTS release, they also say they will release 26.04 LTS in May (just 5 months after 24.04). So, clearly this is a bit of a final beta for that release, at least from a COSMIC desktop point of view.
They are already shipping hardware with the new COSMIC, so things are usable now. I have no doubt though that there will be a lot of improvement over the next six months before 26.04 comes out.
It will be really interesting to see where things go after 26.04 when they are not having to invest everything into just getting to the starting line. Will they continue to pour all this effort into COSMIC? It has a lot of potential.
I have had multiple systems with no updates for a year.
The biggest pain is always that the keyring is out of date and it does not want to install packages signed with newer keys. Once you have dealt with that once or twice, it is quick and easy to resolve and the rest of the update generally just works.
I agree with you completely. I am sure you deal with these minor issues quickly and barely notice them half the time.
But users of other distros would find it intolerable to have to deal with these small tweaks on any given day. “My computer is a tool” they will say and “it just needs to work”.
Fair enough. But then they turn around and fight bugs and limitations that were solved for Arch users months or even years ago.
And they fight to install software not in the repos, often making their overall system less reliable in the process.
I prefer the stability of Arch over the stability of Debian thank you.
The problem is that “stable” means two different things in Linux.
It can mean “reliable” as in it does not crash. I think that is what most of us think of.
However, It more often mean “static” or “unchanging”.
Take Debian Stable. It is “stable” because the software versions rarely change outside of security updates. This does not mean it does not crash. It does not mean it does not have bugs. It means you can depend on it to behave tomorrow like it does today. Design problem not the software installed? They are not getting fixed. As an example, you will see that the people saying Wayland does not work are almost always Debian users because they are using software from 2 - 3 years ago. Debian 13 has improved things but the NVIDIA drivers are from 2 years ago even now. And if KDE has fixed a lot of bugs, that does not mean Debian gets those updates.
Arch on the other hand updates its packages constantly to the latest to very recent versions. The behaviour of your Arch system changes all the time as new versions of software are installed. You may like this or you may not but this is “unstable” using Debian’s definition.
From the point of view of robustness, Arch users often have a better experience than Debian users. Things more often “just work” due either to new features or because issues have been resolved in recent versions. Rapidly developing software, let’s take Wayland or NVIDIA again, will often work dramatically better on Arch. However, every update has the potential to break something. And so, on Arch, you are certainly more likely to encounter breakage. Often these problems are very short-lived with fixes appearing quickly. This means that, even if something did break, many Arch users will not even know.
Anyway, this is my take Arch vs Debian:
So, it all depends on what we mean by stable
Mint has two kernels: a “stable” one and a “hardware enhanced” one (HWE). The HWE kernel is newer to improve support for newer hardware.
Many distros allow you to pick from multiple kernels.
Yes, all Linux kernels come from kernel.org
That said, kernel.org maintains not only a latest but also multiple “stable” kernels that maintained versions of previous kernels. There are usually about a half-dozen kernel versions to choose from.
One you have code from kernel.org, you can change the configuration to get kernels with slightly different capabilities and strengths.
Finally, you can patch the code you get from kernel.org to add or remove whatever you want. For example, you may add in filesystem support or drivers missing in the mainline kernel.
So, in the end, any given Linux distro may have a Linux kernel slightly different from what other distros use. You can probably run any Linux distro on the kernel from any other Linux distro though. In fact, this is what you are doing when you run something like Docker or Kubernetes.
Debian has stopped 32 but in Debian 13. He is talking about Debian 12 which is still supported.
The Debian 12 based version of Q4OS has committed to supporting 32 bit through 2028.