Ask HN: Which linux distro at home? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which linux distro at home?

3 pointsgazarullz4 comments

I am currently owning an amd fx 8350 + nvidia gtx 750 + 512gb ssd and 8gb ddr box.

After trying out ubuntu for a while I have the feeling that it is too bloated and it is coming with too much stuff out of the box, beside the fact that the daily updates are quite annoying. My feeling is that it will end up as windows in the long run (slow and bloated).

I am evaluating between debian and fedora (since are the ones I am familiar with) which one to use for my machine ?

View on HN

I'm a pretty committed Slackware user so I just wanted to throw that out there. If "bloat" is your concern (though that means different things to different people) it's a great distro.

No brittle, fragile mess of unit files symlinked to a billion places and interacting God knows how. No PAM nonsense (the last thing I want my authentication system to be is "flexible"). Maintainers who do almost no patching. A huge collection of Slackbuilds for stuff you want that isn't in the base system. And a very long release schedule. I realize for a lot of people all of those are reasons not to use Slackware, but if that's what you want (and there's still plenty of us who do) there's nothing that beats it short of rolling your own.

My choice is Antergos, an easy-to-install ArchLinux based distro. It is just a collection of cherry picked pkgs from Arch repositories, with fewer customization in comparison to Manjaro (also Arch-based). If you want a less "rolling" distro, Manjaro is a really good choice.

https://antergos.com/ https://manjaro.org/

Ubuntu default (desktop) is a huge iceberg with a lot of included stuff. I learned to avoid the 'main' disto file and go for the minimal-install a while ago (which is embarrassing for a former Slackware person? - just used to the smoothness of Ubuntu and Debian base); I use GNOME as the WM on Ubuntu.

tl;dr Base Ubuntu install strapped to bare-bones from the start, then adding bits as necessary. Bloat hopefully doesn't exist in 32MB.

I use Arch Linux and enjoy it a lot. It takes time to get comfortable, but after that... You will still have a lot of work, but sure you will not feel that your OS is bloated.

Between Debian and Fedora I used only Fedora and is a great distro, but Debian is very well considered too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com