One of the few things that differentiates the major distros is the package manager. I’ve been running void on my laptop for the last 3 years and love it. XBPS is super fast and easy to use. It has never left me with a broken system either. That said, I’ve got the itch to switch.
I am looking at rolling / up to date distros. I’m inclined to use CLI when available.
I’ve been considering Opensuse, but last time I used zypper it was painfully slow. Has it gotten any better?
I was thinking of trying Alpine, how is APK?
Not interested in *butu, but apt seemed okay.
What’s your favorite and how does it behave?
APK/Alpine is great! And the Edge repos are well stocked.
Chimera Linux seems to be using even newer apktools than Alpine, not sure what the deal with that is. But that distro is still in early stages with limited repos for now.
Pacman/makepkg/Arch is great too, and an obvious consideration for your usage, curiously omitted from your post.
Ah Chimera. I’ve been looking at that the last two days. I am really tempted to give it a shot. My laptop is mostly for playing around these days. Are you running it?
I forgot about Arch. I ran Manjaro for a year and didn’t have the best experience. 'Course I was pretty green on Linux then.
Not a global opinion here as many hardcore linux users will stand by Arch or Mint, but I always have preferred Debian. It’s what Ubuntu is based on, so it uses apt(itude), yet it’s not prebloated Ubuntu and much more true to adaptation and unedited software than Ubuntu has become… But in the end it’s more personal choice and taste, so usually requires a bunch of failed attempts to get one that fits, as every linux can basically do the same things, yet on some or other slightly different way… 😜
I just want to add that for Debian with a rolling, up-to-date experience, Siduction does that nicely.
Thanks, Sid hasn’t been on my radar. Ill go have a look. I happen to have a ZFS box up in rsync.net running Debian, and it’d be nice to learn more about CLI in the deb world.
If you plan on trying Alpine, be aware that it’s based on musl and busybox, rather than glibc and systemd, or whichever replacement you would usually go for. It’s great for reproducible containers, but not so much for a desktop system
Thanks for the heads up. That is something I’ve taken into consideration. I am curious how long I’d last on musl.
Hearing how you’ve been using Void before makes me think you may have experience with it already, given which stage1 bundle you were using
on the flip side, Drew DeVault is perfectly happy with Alpine on both desktop and server
Its frustrating because Alpine gave me the fastest desktop. I dropped Alpine because some apps requires Glibc extensions !
Stick to Void. Everything else will look slow. Haven’t moved since I started using it.
I run Void a netbook from 2012, I am always blown away when it resumes from sleep faster than I can open the lid. For the first day I thought maybe it wasn’t suspending and sleep was broken.
It’s soo good. It’s taught me most of what I know about Linux. And, without getting into a battle over inits, I just love the simplicity of runit.
Void was a great experience last time I used it. A minimal set of tools/software were installed(for some reason, I dislike ISOs/distros that fill everything from Libre Office to an FTP client in it; I will just download them if I want it), the package manager seemed pacy enough and system was fast. It is definitely one of the better distros I have tried.
I would recommend playing around with containers instead of doing a reinstall. Containers give a similar experience without so much work
LXC is killer. You can spin up containers that ‘feel’ exactly like a VM but with way less overhead.
