What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.

I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    2·
    2 months ago

    Debian. I run Stable on servers and Unstable on desktops.
    Although I do think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch are actually better in some aspects, I find Tumbleweed too rough around the edges (it’s a derivative of Leap and that shows). And I just can’t be bothered to install and configure Arch anymore. Fedora and Ubuntu are too buggy on average, Mint is too “stable” for a desktop and I don’t use all the helpers that make it newbie-friendly. Slackware suffers from issues that were solved in the Linux world decades ago, and I dislike derivative distros on principle.

    I’ve probably tried around 30-40 distros and I always return to Debian.

      • superkret@feddit.org
        2·
        2 months ago

        Tumbleweed includes the YaST package manager with all the repository priority settings that make sense in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to use it.
        You can run zypper up which is a standard updating method in Leap, but the TW documentation tells you not to do that. More than half the zypper options make no sense in TW.
        That’s the stuff I mean by “derivative”. They built on a Leap base and modified it into a rolling release.
        If it was truly designed as a new, independent rolling release distro, they’d have taken those things out, packaged a different version of zypper or at least a different manpage.