I’ve happily been a Fedora user for many years now, but RHEL’s recent choice to put their source code behind a paywall has me pondering ethical considerations of my distro choice.
It’s my understanding that this doesn’t have a direct impact on Fedora, and I feel confident that it will continue to be a great distro for the foreseeable future, but I want the commercial/enterprise/corporate influence on the distro I run to be as minimal as possible. For it to be as free as possible.
With that in mind, what distros would everyone recommend?
I only have recent-ish experience with Fedora, Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu. I don’t really know much about any others.
Ideally, I’d like it to fit within these boxes as well:
- Reasonable release cycle time. Debian as an example tends to be too stale by it’s nature. Edit for clarification: doesn’t have to be bleeding edge, just don’t want to fight with outdated dependencies if I’m compiling something from source. I feel distros generally ride this line well, but I’ve run into a handful of times in the past with Debian.
- Doesn’t try too hard to be user friendly. Obsfucating system internals, forcing a specific DE on you, that kind of thing.
- Not overly time consuming to maintain. Arch would be an example of that in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, Arch is awesome. But maintaining a rolling release and a bunch of AUR’s gets tiresome.
- Doesn’t try to force you to use a flatpaks, snaps, etc.
Seeing it all written out, that’s pretty picky. And maybe this unicorn distro doesn’t exist. But on the other hand, maybe it does.
A final thought. I know Debian has a testing branch. Anyone have any experience using that as a daily driver? Is it viable?
OpenSUSE checks everything except the part about enterprise influence. Mint maybe? I don’t know much about it though.
Yeah, I was going to suggest the same. Probably one of the best rolling distros that is low maintenance.
I think your “doesn’t try to hard to be user friendly” and “not overly time consuming to maintain” are at odds with each other.
Most major distros may have a preferred DE that they focus most on, but also have releases with other options, or you can simply install what you want yourself. Don’t let the DE paint you into a corner.
From what I’ve been hearing about Debian 12, the slow release cycle isn’t as much of an issue now that flatpak is an option. It doesn’t force you into it (it’s not there out of the box), but it can allow you to have updated applications without worrying about the headaches of something like Arch with a rolling release. It’s also kind of a blank canvas to do what you want, not Arch blank, but usable out of the box, then you can go from there. Debian has 30 years of history and is independent, so it seems fairly safer to bet on. Most other distros you’ll probably look at are going to be offspring of Debian or Arch, which all seem to rise and fall in popularity over time, while those base distros keep going strong.
I’d recommend Mint, because, from my experience, it’s pretty stable, UX is designed so terminal usage can be kept to a minimum (but you can still prioritize it if you want), support from programs is overall good, and it ditches snap. But worth noting that, if you need cutting edge features, Mint is not for you, as it seems to be the new Debian, where updates are traded off for stability.
Maiby opensuse Tumbleweed is something that might intrest you. Although it is company tied.
OpenMandriva recently released a rolling release version of their distro. It’s a small project, but I’m personally looking at it as an alternative for Fedora.
Looks promising! Seems to check all the boxes. I think I’ll try it first. I’ll give it a spin in a VM, get a feel for it. Thanks!
I hope it works out!
What distro forces you in to a DE?
Mint has been pretty good for me. They didn’t follow along with Ubuntu and snap everything, but if you don’t want to touch anything Ubuntu there’s a version based on debian directly.
I don’t have a specific example, just seemed like something a user friendly distro might do.
I’ll look further in to that Debian based Mint. Thanks for the the recommendation!
Debian Sid fits the bill with flying colours. I’m personally sticking with Bookworm though, I enjoy stability and slower upgrades.
Debian Sid is even more unstable than Arch, though. I’d never recommend it for anyone who doesn’t want to be routinely maintaining their system.
It’s been a few years since I last used Sid, but I don’t remember it being that unstable. I’ve never spent much time with Arch to make that comparison though, so I can’t really judge on that.
Sid is pretty reliable if you pay attention to what you’re updating.
If someone wants a more user friendly option, Siduction is a Debian Sid based distro which tries to keep things smooth.
Sounds interesting. Gonna check it out
Your second, third and fourth points eliminate many distros such as Ubuntu. And many of the distros out there are based on Debian.
Debian isn’t really stale. It is currently running kernel 6.1.10 which is not a long way from 6.1.39 (longterm, and that only came out 2 days ago). Stable gets constant updates. Testing is also generally very stable. The only thing that stops testing moving into stable is what are considered Release Critical bug count. All documented here: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ftparchives#testing
Also while Debian 12 is LTS, it won’t stop 13 from coming out and it doesn’t stop you from upgrading to 13 (although you may lose LTS if they decide that 13 will not be LTS).
Debian is about as open as you can get, certainly does not infringe on your 2, 3 and 4th points.
Only other thing is what you are doing with your Linux, this might make a difference (you say daily driver, but doing what? Just office stuff, or heavy video editing, etc)
I’m sure the arch people will be here soon to say snarky things, but…
I’ve used Manjaro (stable) on my desktop for about 5 years and have no reason to leave. Updates are about once a month, other than security patches to browsers that for zero-days. It’s still arch at it’s core, but it’s less upkeep.
Maybe I don’t know what I’m missing, but I feel like I’m in a pretty similar situation as you.
Manjaro has been absolutely lovely for me as well. The only breaking updates for the past few years were because of the bugdie desktop, but fault seems to be with budgie.
MX Linux has served me well. I used Ubuntu. Get fed up of snaps quickly and changed to MX Linux.
I second this, I’m using MX on various machine, netbook 32 bits, laptop 64 bits, powerful AMD with AHS version, etc, with Xfce. MX rules.
Another Debian Testing user here, I’ve been running it for I-can’t-remember-how-long and genuinely can’t recall the last time there was a showstopper. My use case is very standard though, no gaming or running servers or heavy development. Recently rolled up to Trixie with no issues whatsoever
My go to is always linux mint. It always work every time I install.
I like Solus. Rolling, stable, independent.
Solus, Rolling, stable, dead… soon to be hopefully revived
It never went away. A new ISO is out too! Give it a try.
When it comes to Debian, you might find yourself getting more up-to-date software with the backports repo, particularly when it comes to the kernel. It’s not a large selection of packages, but there’s some useful stuff in there.
You can also use apt pinning, but that requires maintenance and makes it fairly easy to break everything.
Good idea might be to keep Timeshift on a decent schedule and if you mess something up, run through an older snapshot.
Alternatively, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good rolling release that has full integration with btrfs, so mess up an update and just boot into an old snapshot. Can also choose any DE (that’s in their repos, at least) on installation. It doesn’t require much maintenance at all. Very unlikely to break regardless.
OpenSUSE Leap seems to be your best choice. It does not have the time consumption of being rolling release, but has a good release cadence. It is also an RPM distro, that should make things feel at least a little bit more familiar.
