[GTALUG] From Slackware to which distro?

[Giles Orr]

On Wed, 27 Apr 2022 at 00:37, William Park via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> I've been running Slackware since forever.  It's time to grow up and see
> the world.  Which distro would you recommend that I move to?  Yes, I
> know it's personal, and reasons will be varied and educational.
>
> - Ubuntu -- OK.  I use it at work in VM and in WSL (Windows Subsystem
> for Linux).  For me, Mint is another flavour, just like Kubuntu,
> Xubuntu, etc.
>
> - Oracle -- I use it at work too.  Was CentOS, but switched to Oracle
> because they said delivering end-of-life OS is bad marketing.
>
> - Fedora -- OK.  Doesn't seem to have its equivalent in Ubuntu side.
>
> - OpenSUSE -- Difficult to pin down.  It uses RPM but in their own way.
> It has rolling release (Tumbleweed) and versioned release (Leap).
>
> - Arch -- no.  I don't need/want to learn what they are trying to teach.
>   I run Slackware, so I already know all that.
>
> Thanks for any feedback.
> William

Something I tend to forget about is the GUI: like Chris, I install
whatever distro, then install OpenBox (which isn't very flexible, but
suits my way of working), drop in my own configuration file, and I'm
ready to go.  Many people are extremely picky about their GUIs: if
that's you, my advice isn't much use on that.  I'm extremely picky
about the setup of my terminal - but that can be easily managed in
almost any Linux distro in existence.

I use Debian most of the time, and Fedora on the machines that Debian
can't handle.  This is generally because Debian can be a bit slow with
the newest hardware drivers.  Both have extensive package repositories
and it's very rare for me to have to step outside those to get things
done.  I don't like Fedora's six month release cycle - and I
particularly don't like that they drop their old releases three months
after a new one comes out.  Debian's slower release cycle means you
can get stuck with older software, but they're great about
back-porting security fixes and "stable" is indeed very stable.  I
also prefer 'apt' to 'dnf' as a package manager, but in practice that
hasn't made a lot of difference (although I got to say ... they could
both learn a lot from the impressive speed of Arch's package manager
'pacman' ...).

I personally avoid Devuan: during SystemD's initial year or two of
existence, it was indeed a horror show.  But now that they've forced
users of multiple distros to find the problems with it, it's been well
debugged.  As Lennart says, it's now better than the old Init system.
(Debian and Fedora both use SystemD.)

I also have to agree that you'll save yourself some grief using
whatever distro(s) you're made to use at work.  Even if you don't love
that distro: using it at home gives you more familiarity, and less
work overall.

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com