Ask HN: Most hassle-free Linux distro? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Most hassle-free Linux distro?

13 pointsbrundolf27 comments

Whenever I try and use Linux as a dev environment I find myself repeatedly distracted by small issues here and there that I have to take an hour to research and solve. Despite that, the idea of having a Unix dev environment on my desktop machine continues to hold appeal.

So, what's the most straightforward, "just-works" Linux distro out there today? Historically I've used Ubuntu which isn't terrible but never stops requiring a bit of fiddling here and there. I've heard good things about PopOS, Elementary, and Mint, but I've never tried to use any of them for real work.

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Having to tinker a bit is part and parcel with Linux in general, I find. And this is even more true if you are expecting a level of usability quality at parity with commercial OSes. My take is that you have to adjust your expectations and accept that you'll spend a few hours doing tweaks to address the things that annoy you. Once done however, you'll be left with a great operating system experience that you can just leave as-is.

That said, I've had a very positive experience with Linux Mint in conjunction with the MATE desktop. Most hardware-accelerated GUIs are slow on my old T500 which I use as a hobby machine, but MATE (being based on GNOME 2) runs well on the integrated graphics chip.

Barring that, Ubuntu is probably the most well-rounded for modern hardware. If you still encounter problems, try one of the LTS releases designed for stability.

One last comment, there will always be certain things in the Linux ecosystem that will never work the same way as other OSes (the XFCE "panels" bar comes to mind), and no amount of tweaking will leave you completely satisfied. Again, one learns to accept things and focus on the merits of Linux rather than it's weaknesses :)

Generally agreed. On XFCE panels, I've found settings that satisfy (in recent years). Once found, never need change over -years-. (It was KDE's 4.x mess that I gave up on.) XFCE's developers move -very- slowly, so once you've settled on the environment, it stays very consistent.

> My take is that you have to adjust your expectations and accept that you'll spend a few hours doing tweaks to address the things that annoy you. Once done however, you'll be left with a great operating system experience that you can just leave as-is.

I've kept one or another secondary Linux system on hand for most of the past 10 years; usually a VM or a dual-boot, usually Ubuntu (occasionally Fedora). What I've found is that each time I install an update - or more likely, install a new tool - there's a chance it will be blocked by something or cause a problem with something else, and I'll have to debug it for an hour or two before I can get back to what I was doing. So most of the time if I want to focus on a project I'll just end up using a MacBook, or if I really want to use my desktop machine I'll begrudgingly use Windows. I only use my Linux install when I really absolutely need to be on Linux (or when I really need to be on my desktop but also in a Unix environment). What I would like is for using Linux to be pleasant enough that I might reach for it as a default for some things. Thus far, that hasn't been the case.

> One last comment, there will always be certain things in the Linux ecosystem that will never work the same way as other OSes (the XFCE "panels" bar comes to mind), and no amount of tweaking will leave you completely satisfied

I'm not too worried about fine-tuning the user experience. I'm pretty flexible when it comes to that stuff. I just need things to work, consistently and without babysitting.

> What I've found is that each time I install an update - or more likely, install a new tool - there's a chance it will be blocked by something or cause a problem with something else, and I'll have to debug it for an hour or two before I can get back to what I was doing

Ah, I understand where you're coming from now. For myself, I can usually install most things I need directly from apt-get using the OS's built-in repositories. This route seems to take care of any dependency issues without manual intervention. Although if you're using third-party repos, or installing software outside a package manager context, I can see how that would increase the chance of niggles. My only remark there would be to focus on distros which emphasise a well-curated set of reliable packages out of the box, designed to be compatible with one another (LTS releases, or even BSD if you are open to it).

I would suggest Linux Mint. I have been using the same installation since 2015 without problems. I'm currently one version behind the latest and I only upgrade when its absolutely necessary (e.g. a new GPU doesn't have drivers). I do keep it updated too, due to the LTS nature of the distro. Its a very stable distro to use if you don't need bleeding edge software from the repos. I use it for all my stuff, including gaming (mostly Steam) and development.

Just something you need to know tho, these little issues/teaks you describe, I consider that they are part of the Linux experience and no distro will be completely free from them. Sometimes things will break and you'll have to fix them, that's not a problem, its just different from what people are used to on other Operating Systems (as things break differently). With time and experience using Linux their frequency will drop (you'll know what parts of the system are more prone to break and how to avoid it) or will be less annoying (you'll know how to fix stuff without losing hours searching on the net).

Good luck, I think its worth the time spent learning, as Linux gives you a great amount of power over the system and what you can do with it.

> what's the most straightforward, "just-works" Linux distro

For me this has been Fedora. Like you I used to use Ubuntu but it never felt anywhere nearly as polished as Fedora. It runs great on my Thinkpad and desktop, nearly everything taken care of during installation. I also like Gnome though, which I realize it not universal.

Go ahead and give the ones you've listed a spin in a VM. Pop!_OS seems to be pretty popular.

The Cinnamon flavor of Linux Mint seems to be very popular with reviews stating essentially the same thing as what you're looking for - it's mostly hassle free. MX Linux seems to also be popular for that very reason as well.

I can't personally attest to either of them, but I've been running Fedora KDE Spin on my work machines and I've never had any problems outside of those I've caused myself by tinkering. I firmly believe that if you just installed it and let it go, you'd pretty much get everything you needed after installing the RPM Fusion repo.

Ubuntu based distros are the least fiddly in my opinion. Large desktop userbase, and lots of relatively up-to-date packages.

Debian and rhel based distros are pretty solid, but I find it's packages to be quite older, fine for a server OS, but a frustrating development experience for me.

Haven't used fedora much, but it's probably fine.

Could look into using chrome OS, zero fiddle for the basic user experience, and you can run sandboxed linux apps.

It's been a while since I've used Linux as a full-time development environment, my current job provides a mac, and on my personal laptop, I have embraced the fiddle and am using arch.

For me, I just spent the last week trying the latest Distros.

* Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon * Linux Mint 20 MATE * Manjaro Latest * Ubuntu 20.04 (Gnone) * Ubuntu 20.10 (Gnone) * Solus Bungie

I ended up with Linux Mint Cinnamon for one major reason. The rest all had weird issues with my Graphics on my ThinkPad P52 with has a Nvidia Q2000 Pro Mobile.

They all used the native Nvidia driver, but for some reason Linux Mint Cinnamon is the only one that works correctly with my Thunderbolt dock and two monitor setup.

As for usability, I found them all mostly the same though I did like the MATE's customizability a little more.

Good luck.

>Whenever I try and use Linux as a dev environment I find myself repeatedly distracted by small issues here and there that I have to take an hour to research and solve.

I'm not sure how realistic it is to be able to avoid this in any traditional linux distro.

If you truly, truly want a no-hassle distro, ChromeOS with crostini installed is probably the way to go.

Sidenote, i'm in a similar position but i went about it differently.

My conclusion is that any Linux OS will require fiddling; somewhere, somehow. So i embraced that idea, and am attempting to make my fiddling concrete, repeatable, documented, etc. My tool for this is NixOS.

That's a big leap, as i quickly fell into NixOS, Nix package language, Flakes (for concrete repeatable builds), and Home Manager (moving my dotfiles from Git).

The process took me a solid few days of confusion and frustration, but after that i've had a really nice experience. I can experiment with issues, like bluetooth drivers - and revert as needed, and document any forward progress.

I've reinstalled my OS once since embracing this model, due to a new hard drive, and it worked really nicely. It also pointed out any configuration i didn't track - like my XFCE configs, since those are not (yet) tracked by my Home Manager setup.

Food for thought :)

My preferred setup for over a decade has been Debian or CentOS with xmonad, so no desktop environment.

For me, xmonad has just clicked with my workflow. I typically use the command line, Chrome, SQLDeveloper (my workplace is an Oracle shop), and Emacs (usually attached to a Clojure repl).

Our server environment is all headless Linux with a couple of exceptions for exporting X over ssh for Java-based ETL tools. So the match between my dev env and our deployment env means I don't "context switch" when moving between them.

A benefit of the no-desktop-env approach is that I have found that I typically install the bare minimum of utilities, so there is less to go wrong. Even installing a big Nvidia blob for my GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER just worked.

If you find yourself happily using a small number of utilities in any Linux environment, you might find a similar setup rewarding.

I've been happy with Xubuntu for the last decade or so. For me, it's the right combination of lightweight and minimal DM, and easy to use package manager. On top of that tmux (via alacritty) and emacs and I'm good to go.

Even better, WSL2.

It 'just works'. No need to mess around or reboot it or get distracted by driver issues. It's a breath of fresh air for a development environment.

There's a huge number of things that don't "just work" on WSL. A quick search of site:github.com would confirm this.

That aside, plenty of people don't even use the command line and use linux for various other reasons. My dualboot laptop gets another hour of battery-only time, which is enough reason alone.

Whilst I have had problems with WSL, WSL2 is much better. Not run into anything which really causes an issue (if you can live with the reduced Linux<->Windows interoperability)

Definitely Ubuntu LTS if you don't mind running an old distro. However, updating Ubuntu can be problematic so if you want to stay up-to-date I'd recommend Arch Linux. There can be some hassle setting it up initially and the community is very RTFMy, but other than that, it's a very smooth distro.

I have tried a bunch other distros before, but nothing really stuck until I started using Solus a couple of years ago.

No major issues at all, a few packages that I haven't been able to get in the official package manager, but nothing I haven't been able to work around or find somewhere else.

I use Debian stable. After you've set it up once you can pretty much rest assured that it will be fine. I've used almost every major and some minor distros for a few months to a couple of years, but I've settled on Debian.

Debian stable.

Whatever project you have, figure how to install things per project and not system wide.

I use pyenv and pyenv virtualenv for python, rvm for ruby, nodenv for node. For node, figure how not to use -g.

Surprisingly an annoying one is PHP so I just have VMs that I use for it.

>Whatever project you have, figure how to install things per project and not system wide.

Is there a good tool for doing this? I'd really like to be able to create categories/tags for every package I explicitly install, especially since so many projects are like "to install this you first git clone blah, then run 'apt install ffmpeg libpng libYoureNeverUsingThisForAnythingElse libYoullForgetThisLibAndWontUninstallIt curl ninja libpurple' then make.

Don’t forget libcaca haha

Unfortunately, in those cases, containers and VM’s are probably the best choice.

For make, if it’s only make, you can specify the destination usually. I keep a .bin and .opt directories on my home for those.

Try Manjaro I have been using it for two years now and haven’t had any issues it’s easy to setup and uses Pacman package manager which is really easy to use

OpenSuse tumbleweed. Pretty cutting edge and very straightforward and usable. I dont think Ill use anything else.

PopOS or Debian (buster, which is the stable version)

Imho just stable debian with xfce

MX Linux

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