Hello, i am currently looking for a Linux distribution with these criteria:
-it should be more or less stable, comparable to Ubuntu with or without LTS // -it should not be related to IBM to any way (so no fedora/redhat) // -it should not feature snaps (no Ubuntu or KDE neon) // -KDE plasma should be installable manually (best case even installed by default) // -no DIY Distros //
I’ve been thinking about using an immutable distro, but if anyone can recommend something to me, I’d be very grateful //
Edit: I’m sorry for the bad formatting, for some reason it doesn’t register spaces
Debian
Yeah go straight to the source.
Or LMDE for a mix of stable foundation and some ease of life tweaks.
Can you please like write the points in a list and not with these weird // in between? Lemmy uses markdown
- this (that space between line and text is important) - is - a list * this * too * forwhateverreason``` before and after something : codeblock
*italic*
**bold**
***both***
Sounds like Debian is your answer.
Opensuse Tumbleweed is pretty stable, even though it’s a rolling release
Jumping on the OpenSUSE bandwagon. I use it daily, have been running the same install of Tumbleweed for years without issue. I’m using KDE Plasma which it let’s you choose as part of the installation which fulfils that requirement for you as well.
If you’re familiar with Redhat you’ll feel at home on it. Zypper is the package manager instead of yum/dnf and works really well (particularly when coping with dependency issues.
I’ve worked with heaps of distros over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, old school Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, even a bit of Alpine and some BSD variants) and OpenSUSE is definitely my favourite for a workstation.
I second opensuse, there is also a non-rolling release option, i think.
My tumbleweed has been exceptionally stable, updates without problem.
Getting the arch experience in software support (has a “community repo” as well) but in a stable way and there is never the need to use the terminal, if you don’t want)
Love it, recommend it.
For more stableness check out the slow rolling version or the immutable versions (both in “beta” state)
Stable as in reliable and not as in unchanging
Slowroll. You change to it from Tumbleweed and its not completely finished but should already just work.
I’ve been running Linux Mint Cinnamon for years. It’s the stablest, most dependable distro I’ve ever run. I’ve installed it, updated it and major-version-upgraded it many times on many machines and it never broke.
It’s basically Ubuntu with the features that make Ubuntu shite removed (basically Unity and snaps) and a no-nonsense, GTK-based Win95-like desktop environment tacked on.
I’ve been on mint for ages but when I updated my RAID this year it originally wouldn’t recognize it. I eventually got it recognized but it capped the 16TB drives at 999GB for some reason. For fun, I went up the chain to Ubuntu… Same thing
In frustration I went to Grandma’s house with Debian and it worked perfect out of the box. I’d spent hours researching it but the best I found was a potential RAID related bug (lvm, specifically, I think) introduced in Ubuntu that, of course, filtered into Mint. Even fdisk reported the physical drives as 999GB in Mint/Ubuntu.
I still don’t know the exact cause but I got it up and running so I’m a Debian guy now, I guess.
Granted, my use case isn’t super normal since I’m using a BIOS RAID1 (and we all know how fun BIOS RAID can be) with full disk encryption.
Worked out in the end but it made me sad to ditch Mint
can be a bug in your bios too
Yep, that’s why I made sure to include that “we all know how fun BIOS RAID is” bit.
It was fine with the previous 2TB RAID1, but that doesn’t mean anything.
Mint with KDE? this makes no sense. This would be Ubuntu, maybe with Kubuntu Backports. You should be able to remove ubuntu-specific stuff like snaps easily.
Came here to say this
Definitely Debian. Or Mint if you also like the cinnamon desktop (which is similar to KDE’s in terms of default look).
Cinnamon has no real Wayland support, along with all the fancy stuff like perfect fractional scaling, multi refresh rates, HDR support, and whatnot. At least Wayland support is important
They didn’t specify that requirement. For instance, I have zero need for any of that and therefore can keep on trucking on Xorg until Wayland reaches my DE of choice in a stable form.
Just to clarity the relationship between Red Hat, IBM, and Fedora, Fedora is only sponsored by Red Hat. They make all their own decisions, and while they receive financial support from Red Hat and Red Hat owns the Fedora trademark, their decisions and development are independent of Red Hat (and by extension IBM), with the single exception that they cannot risk violating the law (i.e. copyright infringement), else it risks Red Hat legal trouble (and Fedora would risk losing their sponsorship as a result). Red Hat benefits from Fedora’s development by the community, given that Fedora is RHEL’s upstream, hence why it continues to sponsor Fedora. But it isn’t Red Hat that is in charge of Fedora’s development, it’s FESCo, which is entirely community elected, and does not stand for the interests of Red Hat, but rather for the interests of the community.
Eliminating Fedora from contention in that regard is essentially like eliminating Debian because you don’t like Canonical, who makes Ubuntu, a downstream of Debian. And yes, Canonical sponsors Debian, so it is essentially a 1:1 comparison.
Add on top of that the fact that IBM and Red Hat are major contributors to the Linux kernel, and you absolutely cannot avoid connections to them while using Linux. I mean, that’s quite frankly a ridiculous exclusion criteria in the context of Linux. If you’re looking to avoid an operating system OWNED by Red Hat or IBM, then Fedora should not be included in that list. Neither of them have any say or pull in the development of Fedora, which is a completely community-driven project (no, owning the trademark doesn’t change that fact; if Red Hat tried to take over, the Fedora community would simply fork the project, rebrand, and continue on their own). Besides, Red Hat has no interest in controlling Fedora, because it doesn’t benefit them. Their only interest is in enterprise applications, which is not a good use case for Fedora. The only operating systems Red Hat actually has any control over are RHEL, CentOS, and any derivatives of those operating systems like Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, and such (though Red Hat’s control over derivatives was only the result of those projects being downstream, not actual ownership).
So with that in mind, I’d recommend the Fedora KDE spin if you want a normal, stable, snap-free, no DIY required distro with KDE, or if you want the immutable version, Fedora Kinoite is what you’d be looking for. And Fedora has the major advantage over Debian-based distros of actually receiving package and kernel updates regularly, so you can stay up to date and enjoy new features, all while maintaining stability.
Fedora Kinoite is absolutely the best immutable distro fitting your criteria. Anything else will have a much smaller community and less support as a result. rpm-ostree has great documentation, and all of the Fedora Atomic Spins have a huge userbase available in case you ever have questions.
Second that.
No matter if atomic or regular, Fedora has a good automatically preset rollback mechanism for when an update breaks something.
They also have good Wayland support, awesome new packages, BTRFS and more.
This is a great comment because I didn’t know this distinction. You’ve OKed Fedora for me when I thought I needed to boycott them because of RHEL’s shenanigans.
Of course debian.
However pure debian needs some love before you can use it.
If you want to use steam. Enable 32 bit arch.
If you want to use flatpak. You need to install it and add the default repo.
To install kde plasma you need only a single apt command.
I personally run debian-testing/Trixie.
I dont get Debian. It is so manual, everything needs to be done manually. They default to ext4 which is old as balls, their updates are not automatic (and apt-automatic is painfully complicated to configure) even though on a stable distro you can easily differentiate between security and feature updates.
Everything that might be nicely preconfigured on Opensuse or Fedora is manual on Debian.
And… you get years old packages, without any of the fixes the developers added in the past.
As a semi-rolling Distro Opensuse Slowroll sounds nice. I think it already works, you change repos in Tumbleweed and thats it.
You can’t avoid IBM/RedHat - they contribute to the kernel and many, many other parts of Linux eg systemd. I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.
That said, voidlinux is an independent distro without systemd or snaps based on runit for init and xbps for package management. It’s also a STABLE rolling release.
I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.
Pretty sure what they meant is no distros where you have to manually curate and possibly even build every sodding package, like Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, and maybe to an extent Arch. I presume they want a disto that flashes to a live USB, walks through a wizard, and boots up out of the box fully functional in minutes, no fuss required.
> You can’t avoid IBM/RedHat
Let’s just leave it at that, we can’t avoid code published by them, it is everywhere. Both of those are subject and clear collaborators with agencies of the state that protects their existence.
It is 100s of times better than MS, ok, yes, it is. Still, “we” have a long way to go, away from “them”.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Most stable rolling, in my opinion.
Even compared to Slowroll?
Slowroll is still experimental.
I think you should go with OpenSuse
Debian testing or nixos
Linux Mint is hands down the most stable linux distro out there and has been for years. zero tinkering needed. everything just runs no questions asked.
My only grief with Mint is the most recent update where they changed the software centee and now it’s slowed to a crawl. Why they would do this is anyones guess.
I’m recommending MX until such time that Mint sort their crap out - unfortunately I doubt they will, seeing as this change of software center was to resolve some other issues they (but not is end users) though they had.
MX is basically debian but with a lot of improvements. Sure it might have a bit of a learning curve for those primarily used to Ubuntu based systems, but it beats running any of the other Ubuntu distros by miles since they all struggle with the crap Ubuntu puts on top of Debian.
Manjaro is another great option if you don’t want to deal with debian based stuff, and KDE is the default DE with most stuff under reasonable control. You can also use all the Arch resources if you ever run into trouble so it’s a lot less of a headache than what I’ve experienced running OpenSUSE (i want to love OpenSUSE but I just can’t).
Linux mint is just Ubuntu with opinionated Ubuntu crap removed. Is there Linux Mint with KDE?
Have you tried Mint? It’s super stable. It’s the least DIY distro ever. You CAN use snaps, but why would anyone want to? I believe there’s an image that comes with KDE, but Cinnamon is a great desktop.
people will read stable and instantly comment debian
Jokes aside, given that you said in a comment that it’s for non-tech-savvy people, I’d say Linux Mint, partially just because it will look familiar if they’ve seen any Windows PC.
They mentioned KDE
