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Which distro do you use? I've run a mac and Linux laptop and the Linux setup keeps sending me back to Mac.



It's more about the DE than the distro in my experience. Gnome is budget Mac, but KDE and XFCE are chefs kiss


Please try a distro [0] maintained by a company making their own Linux laptops.

[0] https://pop.system76.com/


I set up Mint for a friend a few years ago and it took me about an hour never having done it before. What did you find difficult about it?


NixOS, for me. I deal with a lot of wild development environments, so flakes + direnv has probably saved me hundreds of hours and a few system reinstalls.

Nix is also availible for Mac, but I'll warn you that it may ruin Macports and brew for you forever.


can confirm. nix + home-manager has been the configuration and dotfiles solution i’d been searching for.

it’s not flawless, but its strengths outweigh the weaknesses.

i still need homebrew for casks, but that’s fine.


I run Fedora these days. Ubuntu is the worst.


Always has been unless you're an "email and eBay" sort of user.


Really? I always found Ubuntu to be fantastic. All the third party packages you want just existed for it, loads of bundled stuff, PPAs, plus all the stuff from Debian. And you could pay them not a lot of cash to give you support for it too.


it's fantastic if you're on an LTS version about 2 years after it's released. Again, if you're a email & ebay user you won't notice, because even the in-between non-LTS releases work fine for that.

When you start wanting to replicate experiments, or run software you find on github, then you will learn the pain of ubuntu 20.04. or 22.04. Otherwise you can have the fun experience of most linuxes in the mid to late 90s where you are compiling arbitrary libraries to bootstrap some other library so you can find out where the package you actually want to compile's make file fails at.

Give me a rolling release distro or a source based distro any day.

ninja: all of this should be read as me saying:

"Why yes, i do in fact have several machines and VMs of ubuntu server installs, ranging all the way from 16.04 to 24.04; because that's the only way i can guarantee i can run any software posted on the internet."




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