Since i see so much linux talk on lemmy i got curious and watched a video about the common distros. How true is the information in this video? The person hardly describes why debian and arch are just better than every other distro. At least i’m definitely now curious about Mint or something for gaming.

  • Mambert@beehaw.org
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    8 months ago

    One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.

    You can have any desktop you want on any distro. But some customizations are redone in some distros. In terms of programs you want to run, they pretty much all work on any distro. If a distro is “better for gaming” it usually just means the programs are pre-installed.

    People talk about arch and Debian as the best because they have the least customizations, allowing you to install and customize as you wish.

    Linux users are mostly tinkerers, they like their customizations their way. I’m in that boat. The less I have to remove to get my customization working, the better. Just give me a black screen and a white blinking cursor, I know how to do the rest from there.

    • alt@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.

      This is true for the traditional model in which the package manager is the main differentiator between distros. Therefore Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE etc and their derivatives (which make up about 90% of the distros found on DistroWatch) are indeed mostly the same.

      But the likes of Gentoo and NixOS etc don’t quite fit the bill. Granted, a new user should only very rarely (if ever) start their Linux journeys on any of these advanced distros.

      • Mambert@beehaw.org
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        8 months ago

        Yeah, you look at how there are a handful of package managers, and hundreds of distros, they’re pretty much all the “same”

        But yes gentoo and NixOS do things the most differently. But even on those you can game on them.

        I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.

        • alt@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.

          Thank you for being thoughtful! I just wanted to add some nuance with my previous comment.

    • zingo@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Just give me a black screen and a white blinking cursor, I know how to do the rest from there.

      That’s exactly what happens on opensuse when I log into to Wayland. Kwin also crashes 100 % of the time. I’m using a 1050ti.

      So my default is always x11.

      Can you shed a little light how to fix the Wayland issue.

      Thank you.

      Edit. I misread your post. Its not the command line but the GUI. Also its a black screen with a mouse cursor followed by a kwin crash.

      • Mambert@beehaw.org
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        7 months ago

        I’ve never used Wayland, x11 is fine for me.

        I have also had issues with Wayland, but I have heard issues with Nvidia cards and Wayland.