Homework.

College used linux because I did computer science.
Topic: concurrency. College then gave us a programming assignment that required adding a code library, which I had never done before or even heard of, and thus did not understand.
Since this was a library that was platform-specific, they had made one library for linux and one for windows.
Way too late I got the gist of it but still couldn’t install the library.
Since the question contained the linux directory structure I was convinced that the windows library was broken and every other college student finished this task in Linux.
Thus I installed Linux.
Ten years later I understood and finished the assignment.

I went from Sailfish, to Ubuntu phone, back to Sailfish,
then bought a Pinephone due to the war,
not knowing if the Finnish company would survive
before going back to Sailfish.

Pinephone, despite it being the most linux of phones, used up too much battery power.
Ubuntu phones were already miles better.

If it does ship it with UT and Fairphone doesn’t, then yes.

Have had both. Still have Sailfish because the phone is cheaper.
Also I thought Ubuntu Touch would be discontinued and I no longer use Ubuntu on my desktop,
but an Arch-based OS.
Best thing you can do is buy a phone that’s most compatible to the OS.

So Fairphone 5 or Pixel 3a for Ubuntu Touch,
and Jolla 2 for the Sailfish.

Do not buy Pine64.
Pine64 is unusable.

Honorary Human

It seems that RHEL has been based on Fedora for over twenty years now 😅.

I only used Fedora in college on shared college computers and that was over twenty years ago.
It was brand new back then as they switched over from Solaris.
I was under the impression back then that Fedora was a Red Hat Linux derative like Ubuntu was of Debian,
Ubuntu being the OS I was using at that time and the Linux Distro Timeline implies as such, however…

perhaps it was based on RHEL once upon a time, but it hasn’t been for a long time. Regardless, documentation on this event seems to be relatively sparse. As such, I wasn’t able to arrive at a definitive conclusion. Please feel free to complete my ‘research’ 😜!

Businesses weren’t too keen about Red Hat’s six month release cycle, as the short time interpolation was too disruptive for them.
Red Hat then decided to have a seperate OS with a long-term support cycle and call that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
At the same time, users were demanding a ‘Red Hat Community Edition’, so Fedora came into existance and that was then used as an upstream source for RHEL.

Sorry, I didn’t quite get this. Do you mean that *“container app”*s will not succeed in decentralizing efforts and instead have the opposite effect?

Yes. It’ll make some OSes more pointless. People will try out the distro in the distrobox, get what they need out of it and not bother installing it
or jump ship to the better one.

Perhaps you misunderstood me, but to be clear: Distrobox is basically available on every distro out there.

No, it’s clear.

Hmm…, I don’t quite understand why you think like that. There’s a lot that goes into making distros unique and deserving of their existence. Strictly limiting their appeal to the size of their respective (user) repos is honestly a disservice to the grandiose effort put out by our respected F(L)OSS developers.

It’s a defining feature for me.
I had to jump off Ubuntu and Parabola for this reason.
For Ubuntu I needed the latest version of some package and for Parabola it was certain packages that were non-free.
Distrobox did not exist back then.

NixOS sounds very interesting, but the moment I tried to install the distro- package manager I noticed aws packages and I have an aversion of anything remotely Amazon. Guix peaks my interest even more now that you’ve mentioned Distrobox.

I think I’ll take the jump.

CachyOS has been installable (at least) as early as November of 2021. Its GitHub page is even older, going as far back as October of 2021. Bazzite, on the other hand, is at least a year younger as it dates back to December of 2022.

Thank you for that info, but then why are so many advising Bazzite instead of CachyOS?
CachyOS is Arch-based, Bazzite is not.

Bazzite is based on Fedora Atomic. FYI, Fedora is not based on RHEL. Quite the opposite, actually, as Fedora is “upstream” of RHEL.

And thank you for that info.
So Red Hat decided to put Fedora in front and put RHEL in the back?
Red Hat used to be the base OS of Fedora, no?

Come out of your cave, fam. Distrobox has been out for years now. And, with it, everyone has access to every other repo (including the AUR). We’ve finally evolved.

Again, thank you for that info.

But I don’t think any container app would diversify distros or make Fedora distros more popular.
In fact, it probably will lead to AUR-based distros becoming even more popular,
because one will have access to all the other smaller repos,
as AUR becomes the standard.

I think you’re better off with CachyOS than Bazzite to be honest.
It’s Arch-based, comes with an installer with KDE Plasma as default and on top of that is optimized for performance and geared towards gaming.

The only reason people are recommending Bazzite
is because CachyOS is only a year old, while Bazzite is two years old,
unless someone can prove me otherwise.
In any case Bazzite is RHEL-based, so it won’t have the AUR or pacman,
which are the two things that set Arch-based Operating Systems apart from the rest of the pack.
AUR and pacman are superior to all other repositories and package managers.

27% with Android at 44.5%.

Linux Mint?

Arch is better because…

• pacman, seriously, I don’t hear enough of how great pacman is.
  Being able to search easily for files within a package is a godsend when some app refuses to work giving you an error message “lib_obscure.so.1 cannot be found”.
  I haven’t had such issues in a long time, but when I do, I don’t have to worry about doing a ten hour search, if I’m lucky, for where this obscure library file is supposed to be located and in what package it should be part of.
• rolling release. Non-rolling Ubuntu half-year releases have broken my OS in the past around 33% of the time. And lots of apps in the past had essential updates I needed, but required me to wait 5 months for the OS to catch up.
• AUR. Some apps can’t be found anywhere but AUR.
• Their wiki is the best of all Linuxes

The “cult” is mostly gushing over AUR.

No, Gentoo is the hardest.

the wiki and forums are the best of any distro

If you don’t participate in it that is.
If you veer only a little off of their strict rules,
then Arch forum will ban you and they won’t allow you to even read the forum.

Unity would be the first example, and although Unity was actually a good DE,
it was too bloated and almost non-modifiable.

People jumped ship to Linux Mint that had its priorities straight.

Mir and Snap were bigger issues though
as Wayland and Flatpak were great replacements for
X11 and AppImage and did not need another competitor.

But the privacy issues were the straw that broke the camel’s back.
People left windows for linux so they wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of nonsense.

I actually jumped when Ubuntu jumped to Gnome 3.
Gnome 3 was too bloated for me and it looked ugly.

I decided to see what Arch Linux was about
and eventually settled for Manjaro Linux.
Arch + Xfce for the win.

• Apps not available in distro repositories
• Apps with dependency conflicts

Boomers = 1950-1964
Gen X = 1965-1979
Gen Y = 1980-1994
Gen Z = 1995-2009
Gen α = 2010-2025

So ages

18-29 30-44 45-59 60+

Georg Hub, is that you?

As long as you don’t use any of the windows and use the front door like my pet penguin, I won’t mind.
And there’s a kernel of truth in there and by that I don’t mean the kernel of an apple.

Maybe the decent folks have moved to derivative OSes?
So while techie absolutists stayed at Debian/Arch/RHEL,
the commons folks have gone to Linux Mint/Cachy OS/Fedora?

Can I tell you off from Arch Linux?

There are around three Linux families to choose a derivative Linux OS from,
some are more obscure ones and then some really obscure ones.
Choose one of the Linux family OSes and choose the most popular derivative of that one.
So for example Aurora is a derivative of Fedora, which is a derivative of RHEL (derivative-(in)ception).

The reasons to choose derative OSes and not one of the basic main three is that:

1. The Linux derative OSes have bells and whistles build on top of the parent OS. This is especially true for the extremely bare bones Arch Linux, that will throw you back into 1985.
2. And this is most important… community support! You will at some point have issues and a forum where developers and experienced users can help you out are a godsend. Derivatives tend to have better community support than the bare bone ones. I’ve experienced this with the Arch Linux community. I’m not sure if Debian or RHEL communities would haved fared better, but to me this community felt like having a conversation with a real life Sheldon Cooper. I am really thankful for the excellent expert level help I did get there, but I will not go there back again. And I don’t know if I even can, because the last time I was there, I got banned for a third time.
   I’ve had great experiences on the Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Manjaro communities. Other communities from less popular Linux OSes have been too small in my experience to get help on time.

For Debian, the most popular one right now is Linux Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu (derivative-(in)ception). It used to be Ubuntu, but Ubuntu tends to take big moves and risks that don’t always pay off.
Linux Mint I consider to be the safe option for beginners.
Debian is known for stability.

For Redhat it’s Fedora. I haven’t used it that much.
Redhat is known for good security.

For Arch it’s Endeavour OS and recently Cachy OS.
It used to be Manjaro, but they fumbled a lot on security issues.
Arch is known for having the best documentation,
and the largest amount of software available,
especially made by fellow users,
and if I may add myself, having the best package manager.

I still use Manjaro myself, because I don’t feel enough need to switch to a new one,
and I like the community there.