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I know I know, another "help me choose a distro" thread (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by KISSmyOS@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I'm wondering if a distro like the one I'm looking for even exists:

  • simple as in KISS and vanilla. This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much, as well as OpenSUSE, where systems administration relies on GUI tools too much and the package manager is even more complex.
  • fixed release (excludes everything Arch-based)

So from the major distros, only Fedora is left as an option, where I really don't know enough about it. Is it possible to do a minimal install of it? Is it built around a GUI app store? Does it rely on Flatpak like Ubuntu does with Snap?

Or are there other distros out there that I'm not aware of? Basically everything from the past 5 years I have no experience with. I've heard good things about NixOS, but it sounds weird as a daily driver.

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[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

What on God's green flat earth are these requirements??

What about apt do you find too complex? I guess what are you defining as 'complex"?

I'm terms of package management you'll be hard pressed to find anything that requires less work that apt, yum, zypper or their various GUIs.

Debian is the most vanilla distro you can get and you are excluding it out of the gate because of apt. So it would be helpful for all of us to understand your complexity issues with apt (and zypper).

It was my first distro and I miss it a lot. Simplicity and stability are main selling points

[–] wgs@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Talking for myself and not OP: What's complex about apt and yum is the package format per se. The cli is very straightforward and "just works", but whenever you want something that's not packaged and need to package it yourself, you gotta fasten your seatbelt and prepare for the complex task of creating an RPM or a DEB package.

I know there are tools to help with that, but I've created packages for many distros (Debian, CentOS, Alpine, Arch, Void and Crux), and rpm/deb are just way more complex to create than the alternatives.

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This guy gets it.

[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How often does that happen--where you need to package your own deb or it leaving orphan meta-packages that it doesn't remove? Or is this more of a 'curiosity' than hard requirement because I think ultimately the short answer to your question is: I dont think it exists as you've described it.

Fedora Silverblue seems like it might get close. It's immutable OS with flatpaks that sit on top. At least that's my understanding of it since I haven't used it myself. I have NixOS in a VM so I could learn it and NixOS is similar in that its immutable, but its definitely complex. Its also hard to use--which is a distinction you are making in this thread as well. So I am not sure its 'better' than any of those others in the grand scheme of things. In my limited experience with it as a pretty advanced linux user, it would probably be a solid daily driver after you spent 2 years tuning your config to your liking. But simple things will have your tripping over yourself.

It has the learning curve of vim and the expression language is a bit annoying since its a special unique thing you have to learn. Its not exactly hard but its not intuitive either and the documentation isn't super approachable even if everyone says its great.

One of those immutable OS's with flatpak on top would probably be the closet I think you can get to what you are asking.

[–] wgs@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) 
% pm -i | wc -l
55

That's how many software I packaged myself. They are installed to /usr/local using an alternative package manager because I couldn't be bothered with making an appropriate .deb.

And as to explain how this alternate workflow is less complex, here's how I go about installing a program:

% git clone git://git.z3bra.org/human ~/code/human
Cloning into '/home/z3bra/code/human'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 53, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (53/53), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (53/53), done.
remote: Total 53 (delta 28), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (53/53), 9.35 KiB | 195.00 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (28/28), done.
% cd $_
% pack
CC human.c
LD human
install -D -m 0755 human /tmp/tmp.rfnbLyIQOz/usr/local/bin/human
install -D -m 0644 human.1 /tmp/tmp.rfnbLyIQOz/usr/local/man/man1/human.1

        > /tmp/human@0.3.tbz

installed human (0.3)
% pm -i human
usr/
usr/local/
usr/local/bin/
usr/local/bin/human
usr/local/man/
usr/local/man/man1/
usr/local/man/man1/human.1
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[–] madmaurice@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If you say Debian's and OpenSUSE's package manager are too complex for you, I can tell you that NixOS' package manager is definitely not for you.

[–] Hyperreality@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hannah Montana Linux.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

if Hannah Montana Linux is to complicated, then Uwuntu

[–] kurcatovium@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

This is always correct.

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much

This isn't even remotely true.

Also going with Debian + GNOME Software + Flatpak isn't a bad ideia at all. Unlike Snaps, Flatpaks are fast you won't notice delays and waste 10GB of RAM for each application you want to use. And at the end of the day you get rock solid Debian + the latest and greatest software as Flatpaks without "deviation from upstream" and you also keep a clean system.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago

You've picked pretty stupid criteria, but if you're adamant on it, as another commenter said Slackware is probably one of the best options.

Fedora dances with Flatpak quite a bit, but you could double check if RHEL does (since that's what Fedora is based on).

Again, while Slackware (and possibly RHEL) fit your criteria, your criteria seems pretty silly, and you're likely to walk into bigger (and harder to solve) problems on more obscure platforms.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If apt is too complex for you, I don't know what to tell you...

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like you're confusing "hard to use" with "complex".
Apt is extremely complex under the hood, which shows when you try to build a package for it, or install a package with many dependencies then remove it again, leaving traces behind, or when you break your system by using different front-ends (apt, apt-get, aptitude, synaptic) which are all included in the default installation, but handle dependencies differently.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

Most modern package managers have that level of complexity tho... That dependency tracking can take a lot of computation.

Maybe a notable exception would be Slackware package manager, but you won't find what you'd expect from modern package manager (e.g. dependency resolving, autoremove package).

I find building packages with Gentoo to be much simpler than with Debian. Probably this is due to the fact that Gentoo users would regularly build their packages, unlike Debian.

I also learned Debian automatically generate dependency list by scanning the binaries of each package to see what dynamic libs it links. Bet that does add to the complexity by much.

[–] CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

On OpenSuse, sudo zypper install package-name

Not too complex if you ask me.

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[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Slackware. It'll take a bit of getting used to but it meets your criteria.

[–] kraniax@lemmy.wtf 4 points 1 year ago

I was going to say the same

[–] monobot@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I have the same recommendation, try slack out it really feets.

But I think it will be like Genie fullfiling your wishes - you don't really know what you are looking for, but it might really suit you.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How is apt too complex? And which is simple then?

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[–] monobot@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Slackware is obvious choice, exactly what you are looking for.

It was my first distro and I miss it a lot. Simplicity and stability are main selling points.

[–] hodor@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven't used it myself, and admittedly am entirely unfamiliar, but a buddy put popos on something recently and was talking about how smooth and simple it was. Might be worth a gander.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

PopOS is Debian based, which has apt as a package manager (OP no likey likey).

[–] hodor@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Slackware is the solution then clearly.

[–] Contort3860@links.hackliberty.org 5 points 1 year ago

OpenSUSE allows minimal installs. Should be possible to go with Leap or the new Slowroll and extend it without all the GUI tools to make your fixed release, KISS system.

[–] doomkernel@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's the complex part about "apt" or "zypper"?

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[–] UprisingVoltage@feddit.it 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Linux mint

[–] madmaurice@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same package manager as Debian, isn't it? Which OP said is too complex.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's also GUI package manager, if you want to use that.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Which he also mentioned he doesn't like to depend on.

[–] flying_gel@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

After a hiatus in Mac and windows land, I came back into Linux a with similar wishlist.

It's quite a diversion, but I actually went with FreeBSD. Now it's not Linux but with the separation of base system and packages, you get a stable base that is released at a pretty fixed consistent schedule.

For packages you can pick from quarterly or weekly update schedule, so you can have a stable base OS with bleeding edge software. The binary package manager is easy to use, but if you want more control you can opt for building from source as well.

The init system is BSD based so all main config goes into a single rc.conf file, very easy to understand and work with.

Most mainstream applications such as Firefox, postgresql, nginx etc are just a pkg install away and it natively supports zfs (even as root fs) which was one of the reasons I got really interested in it 10 years ago.

Of course, there is software, especially some younger projects that don't support FreeBSD. So while there are thousands of packages available, some Linux only applications won't work.

Personally, I would pick FreeBSD any time that the software I require supports it. I only run Linux (settled on pop is for now) if the software I need requires it.

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you for one of the few helpful answers in this thread.

[–] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

Mac OSX

[–] HumanPerson@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Have you tried macos? Seriously though, in Debian you just type 'sudo apt install program,' that is about as simple as it gets. Also opensuse allows you to not install yast with like 2 clicks in the installer, and all the GUI tools are just wrappers for terminal tools that they also include. I am not saying this to be insulting, but I honestly don't think you know enough about Linux to know what you are looking for. If you do want to try Linux, just try a beginner distro like mint.

Edit: upon reading some comments, I see that you mean apt is complicated under the hood, not difficult to use. You could try gentoo if you don't mind long installs. It compiles from source so that is about as simple as package management gets.

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[–] Dotdev@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

Void linux with its xbps package manager might match with your requirements.

Then solus with its eopkg package manager which I might wait like next year to try it.

[–] ultra@feddit.ro 2 points 1 year ago

NixOS as a daily driver is really good

[–] Andy@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Alpine Linux!

[–] LainOfTheWired@lemy.lol 2 points 1 year ago

It doesn't quite fit your fixed release requirement, but have you checked out void? It's like arch, but has no systemd and it's more stable then arch

[–] Yuki@kutsuya.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just... What? Just stick with Windows

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is exactly the absolute opposite of what I want. Neither simple nor fixed release in any meaningful sense.

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[–] BigBlackCockroach@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I am 100% serious when I say pick one off of this list: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

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