I posted this on Saidit and will post it here again:
The Immutables: Fedora 39. You brought up a couple of immutable distros, one of those is covered in that video. Those are very interesting because it's more normie-friendly. You have to tinker so much with regular GNU/Linux, that's why rollback support is so important. I haven't quite tried these out yet and I'm not sure how they work. What do you do when you have to write to something under /var? Hopefully these distros are appealing to advanced users as well.
Gravi wrote: ↑Tue Nov 21, 2023 5:34 pm
There are so many, I sometimes question, is it good that there are that many or is it bad? I would wager it is more on the good side since the more the better, more choice is always good, no? Many projects are abandoned or weakly supported, but many are kept alive.
You make a good point here. The existence of so wide a variety of GNU/Linux distros makes naming it more complicated, which frustrates its promotion. If you say that you recommend Linux, and specifically distro x or y that they've never heard of, you will already get puzzled looks. With Windows or macOS you just install the latest version, there's nothing to think about there, and it mostly comes preinstalled. You really do have to think about which distro you pick because there are a lot that I really can't recommend because of their rough edges.
The matter is further complicated by the controversy around whether to include GNU in the name. Doing so does justice to that project and the free software movement in general, which is really where it started, but saying "GNU/Linux" out loud is really pretentious and confuses people. If you just call it GNU, normies won't know what you're talking about. If you then reveal that it's really just what they know as Linux but you have ideological reasons for saying GNU, you're showing your autism. Simply saying Linux is also confusing. Android uses the Linux kernel, but people don't think about that when you say Linux. The userland is what the end user is familiar with and what naming should be based on. I thought it was about an operating system. This has been a real frustration for me. How can I take an OS seriously if I don't even know what to name it?
I have an idea for how this can be fixed. It'd be great if an exceptionally user-friendly distro would arise which leaves out GNU and Linux in the branding altogether and which gets so big that it's seen as a contender for Windows and macOS unto itself. Let's call it Archbuntu. It doesn't call itself a distribution of Linux, but instead it's "powered by GNU and Linux". That way you can skip over all the controversy. But it must not break, and it must be able to run all GNU/Linux programs by itself. Appimages and Flatpaks help because of their universality. BlendOS almost suffices as a candidate for this but it's really unprofessional that their support is on Discord and there's hardly any documentation. I find the immutable versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE more promising in those regards. But do let me know about your experience with it. Perhaps you can post a review here after you've tried it out.
I went off on a limb, I know this thread is about personal choice but I had to get these ideas out. I installed Slackware on my PC, which has been a pleasant surprise. I'm not the type of person to do everything manually, but I like the idea of installing a bunch of programs and libraries so that you don't need to install additional dependencies for every new package you install. Plus it's stable as a rock and conservative in replacing the innards of the system. There's no systemd!
I'm in a different house right now using a computer that isn't my own, so I installed antix to a USB stick to boot from that.
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