Linux - Distributions

Table of Contents

Distros are basically all the same nowadays anyway. The only meaningful differences are just the package managers - a random comment from youtube.

Should you pick a modern looking distribution?

In general, stay away from bland looking ones. Your computer should offer a sleek, refined, and visually cohesive experience. If not, you will not feel like using the computer. It can be off-putting.

Even though there is a small price to pay (resource intensiveness), I think it is worth it if the distribution is appealing to work with.

I am not sold on “minimalist workflow” distributions all that much. They make life boring.

Don’t know which distro you’re running?

If you’re not sure what Linux distribution you’re running, open a terminal window and run:

cat /etc/*release

Distro hopping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions

  1. Why do you spend so much time with distro hopping and trying new softwares?
  2. The ones you are using now work just fine.
  3. You don’t really need to find a better mousetrap.
  4. You would be better off spending time on something useful like learning new things or reading books or writing programs.
  5. Stop wasting time on things that do not matter.
  6. Stop distro hopping and limit the software that is installed on the computer to a bare minimum.
  7. One IDE and one text editor should do the job just fine. That is more than enough.

Things to remember when thinking about installing a distribution in a computer

  1. Take backup of previous OS, favorite wallpapers, files, etc.
  2. Where are the wallpapers that come with the distribution? /usr/share/backgrounds
  3. During the installation of a distribution, selecting nvidea graphics card seems to have bad effects on the installation. If we go with the alternative, which is “open source drivers”, the installation seems to be going smoothly.
  4. If you have never worked with a distribution (or a category of Linux) like OpenSUSE, use the graphical version of it first. Do not try to get started with it using terminal only approach (like WSL2). If you don’t know what you are getting into, things will be much more difficult on terminal.

Installation tip

  1. Always update the mirror list before starting Calamares installer.
  2. If not, the installation might stall in the middle. Or take ridiculously long periods of time.

Notes about my experiences with various Linux distributions

Arch Linux

Pros:

  1. The capabilities are many - pretty much everything Arch has to offer.
  2. It is terminal based - no GUIs for software installation.
  3. The set-up is a breeze.
  4. Since most distributions that use Arch Linux come with the latest versions of software out there, there will not be any compatibility issues.
    1. Things work out of the box right from the get go.
    2. This is in start contrast with some of the “stable” distribution families like Debian.

Cons:

  1. Dealing with packages can be a pain in the butt.
  2. If we do not upgrade the packages from time to time, we run into mysterious errors related to pacman.
  3. Every once in a while, we run into situations where we need to install a new package. And that wouldn’t work because the package cache is not valid - it is corrupt. We cannot fix it because of the mysterious errors. I found the experience to be painful.

Endeavour OS

Pros:

  1. This is the most minimally obtrusive, minimally opinionated Arch based distro that I used.
  2. It never gets in the way of what I try to do.
  3. Supports many different window managers.
    1. I used i3, KDE, LXQt all on the same installation of the OS.
    2. Switching between different window managers on the same installation of the OS is easy and seemless. It is great. See Linux - Desktop environments

Cons:

  1. See the Cons section for Arch Linux

Garuda Linux

I used this on the old Thinkpad for a few days. The UI is very very good.

How to set up and use Tiling Window manager in it? Garuda now supports Qtile, i3 for tiling window manager support.

Pros:

  1. A beautiful look and feel.
  2. The primary advantage I noticed when compared to the rest of the distributions based on Arch Linux is, they make sure that the software updates work before releasing them for everybody. So you can be confident that the software updates will always work (This is a major win compared to some of the other Arch based distros like ArcoLinux).

Cons:

  1. The one disadvantage is that it is very customized out of the box. So the size of the distribution is big.
  2. It is very resource intensive. A computer with 8GB of RAM felt slow with this distro. Probably, one of the side effects of all the magic software that comes with it. (Dragonized) KDE version is heavy with customizations. Not a good fit for old or slow computers.
  3. At one point, the experience with Qtile and i3 options was not great.
    1. With Qtile, I couldn’t get the live ISO bootup to work. It got stuck during the initial startup.
    2. With i3 version, I was able to install it successfully. But when I put it to suspend and wake it up again, all the programs that were previously open were closed. After waking up, the system is completely unresponsive and I had to reboot it.
    3. These are not permanent issues. Things seem to be getting better with time though. The other time I tried this with i3, it worked great.

Comparison between endeavourOS and Garuda Linux

  1. The configuration of endeavourOS seems better compared to the one from Garuda Linux.
  2. With Garuda Linux, the focus seems to be more on “beautification” rather than on functionality. When it comes to look and feel, Garuda blows endeavourOS out of the water.
  3. Garuda uses modern tools like kitty and alacritty for terminals, eos for replacing ls, etc. But, are they really all that better compared to xfce4-terminal and ls?
  4. Garuda reminds you if its been too long since a system upgrade.
    1. Is there a way to set up a custom notification in endeavour os? Maybe, display the number of days since last upgrade in terminal or in the status bar?

ArcoLinux

Disadvantages with ArcoLinux distributions:

  1. Sometimes, software updates will not work smoothly. I don’t know if it is related to ArchLinux or ArcoLinux but it can be frustrating. If we are not able to use hledger because the software updates are not working, that is a pathetic situation.
  2. Some of the software (config) that comes with it is not that great. (nano as the default text editor?) The distribution author’s preferences should not be forced on to the users.

Manjaro

  1. Generally not as popular as other Arch Linux based distributions. Users seem to have a lot of complaints about it.
  2. Not as many options (for window managers and desktop environments) as ArcoLinux.

Debian

Pros:

  1. Don’t know. Never got to use it for too long. I could never get it to work successfully.
  2. In the situations that I did manage to get it installed, I couldn’t install some of the other helpful tools (like emacs)

Cons:

  1. The amount of time I spent trying to get them to work is insane. Its a shame - because there are many amazing distributions out there based on Debian.
  2. When the lastest stable release of emacs is 30.2, the Parrot OS distribution came with emacs 28.x. I couldn’t get that specific version of emacs to work with my custom configuration for emacs (because org-roam works differently in that version compared to what I am used to in the more recent versions of emacs)
  3. I tried compiling emacs from source. When I did, I couldn’t work with repositiories that use org-roam because, the compiled version of emacs has a dependency on sqlite3 (for org-roam) and emacs coulnd’t find sqlite to work with. Whenever I make changes to org files in repositories that use org-roam, I get an error message in the “Messages” buffer. I have to close the “Message” buffer to continue working on the org files. Total pain in the butt.
  4. The amount of time that I had to spend on it was getting too much. I had to draw the line and quit trying to get it to work. Switch to other distributions where I am spending time on important items that I actually need to learn.

Verdict:

  1. I am staying away from it.

Parrot OS

Pros:

  1. The distro looked great. I was excited to try it. But in the end, I couldn’t get it to work.

Cons:

  1. See the Cons section for Debian.

Ubuntu

Pros:

  1. Good support and documentation available online. There are answers available for pretty much every question that we would potentially come across.

Cons:

  1. A lot of bloatware.
  2. For whatever reason, the flow doesn’t seem natural, probably because, the layout is quite unique to this OS.

Notes:

  1. How to install a browser in Ubuntu (WSL)?
  2. sudo apt install firefox
  3. It looks like the process to install Chrome is a little more involved compared to installing Firefox.

LinuxMint with Mate/Xfce

Pros:

  1. The set-up using a live ISO works right off the bat. One time, I spent an entire day trying to install Endeavour OS (Arch based). I had trouble doing that. At the end of that long day, I tried Linux Mint and it worked the very first time that I tried it.
  2. Good for everyone in the family - great for family members because of it’s ease of use. Great for me because of it’s stability.
  3. Not exactly light-weight - but it’s not bad either. Much better compared to other distributions, especially ones that run on KDE. But it is not totally bland. So, it is a fine balance.
  4. It does the job well - every single time.
  5. Debian stability is an added bonus.
  6. Native clients for many popular services
    1. ProtonVPN

Cons:

  1. I noticed that the browser is freezing the entire OS from time to time.
    1. https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/10m3888/linux_mint_freezing_from_low_memory_due_to_google/
    2. I did not spend too much time in trying to identify the reason for this
    3. I did see the error happen multiple times though
  2. If you can wrap your head around these facts, the distribution is great.
    1. not using a tiling window manager
    2. based off of Ubuntu and not Debian

Verdict:

  1. For me, moving away from tiling window manager to Linux Mint was a mistake.

Gotchas:

  1. If we do not configure the display manager, it can show the “Display” option every time we wake the computer up from suspend mode or when we unlock it. It can turn into a nuisance real quick. The way to fix it is, Display -> Advanced -> Create a profile from current settings -> Select “Automatically enable profiles when new display is connected” and “When new displays are connected:” to “Extend”

  2. Losing internet connection after using ‘SUSPEND’

    https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=276803

    Reason:

    The reason we may see this from time to time is because, it’s an issue only with recent versions of the 4.15 kernel series.

    Solution 1: You may want to turn OFF Power Management for your wifi adapter.

    Open a Terminal and enter: "iwconfig" (without the quotes).
Look at the output. You should see the name of your chip-set as well as the whether power management is off or on. If it doesn't say, it is probably off.

1. To turn off power management, edit /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf:
sudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf

[connection]
wifi.powersave = 3

2. Change the 3 to a 2.

3. Save.

4. Exit.

5. Reboot.

6. Then run:
iwconfig

and if it worked you should see Power Management:off.

    Solution 2:

    After you resume from suspend, run this in a terminal and see if your Internet connections starts working again:

    sudo modprobe -r sky2;sudo modprobe sky2

    If it works, run this (copy & paste it as a whole):

    sudo tee /lib/systemd/system-sleep/reset_network_driver <<'EOB'
#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
         pre)
        modprobe -r sky2
        ;;
         post)
        modprobe sky2
        ;;
esac
EOB

    followed by

    sudo chmod +x /lib/systemd/system-sleep/reset_network_driver

Fedora

The experience with xfce was not as smooth as the experience compared to Linux Mint.

The experience with KDE was not that great either. It came with something called KDE Plasma Mobile and I had a hard time doing basic things with it. I used it for about an hour to get to know that it is not for me.

Overall, it looks like sticking to Debian or Arch seems better compared to Fedora.

Interesting distributions to look at in the future

  1. Redcore Linux
    1. https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=redcore
    2. https://redcorelinux.org/
    3. https://wiki.redcorelinux.org/index.php/Main_Page

Experience with using virtual machine tools like VirtualBox and VMWareEngine in Windows 11

I tried both of them and the experience is terrible. The OS that I tried to install was Garuda Linux (i3 and qtile versions). But that shouldn’t matter. So I gave up on that effort and decided to stick to using WSL instead. The experience with WSL is good so far.

Things became much more better with Windows 11. Using Ubuntu with WSL2 in Windows 11 seems like a very good option - it lets us get the best of both worlds - Linux and Windows.

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