Hello Beautiful community!

I am a student/jr-level IT-guy who has used linux as a daily driver for 2 years now.

I chose Fedora because of it’s similarities to RHEL and RHEL-clone. It was also easy to set up with UEFI and LUKS/LVM, which I somewhat struggled to do on arch. Having wayland, GDM and XDG preconfigured also made starting configuration a lot easier.

When I used arch-based EOS, I usually took the “easy route” when configuring. Instead of using systemd, I just launched stuff on i3-config. Instead of compiling stuff myself I just installed it with aur. Instead of using LUKS or LVM I just had some encrypted directories.

Maybe it was because I was much more experienced when I started with fedora, or maybe it helped to have an already usable system when starting. Either way I feel I learned more using fedora than EOS, even if I heavily modified EOS as well.

However as I am now considering switching, I’d love to hear what experiences people have had with their distributions. Especially Nixos and Debian users, as those are what I’m considering myself.

How much configuration did it take to make the system usable? Are there some limitations with the repositories, distribution or OS in general? And importantly: have you learned something useful while working on your own system?

Did some distribution make you feel you were missing out on something important with your last distribution?

Have you had bad learning experiences with some distro? Have you switched away from distro for the same reason you installed it?

Would you suggest your distro for someone learning linux-admin skills? If you could go back, what distribution would you have used to 1) learning linux the first time 2) working in a jr-level position, still learning basic system administration, 3) when learning to code?

Thank you for your time and comments. I hope this post is general enough to be a worthwhile discussion.

  • z3braEnglish
    2•1 year ago
    1. Definitely Ubuntu, it’s the most user friendly for people coming from other OSes
    2. I’d say Ubuntu again, or maybe Debian. You built up skill and learnt the distro so you want to use something you know for work. On your personal computer, try other ones. I personally picked Arch at this time (around 2012), which helped me “understand” how the OS works, rather than simply use it. I reinstalled it quite a few times and broke the system a lot.
    3. Any distro with a simple package management system. My personal choice goes to crux, but it’s very barebones. NixOS or Gentoo would be fine too The point here is to learn how to build packages by building them yourself, and I feel like the “big” packages managers (apt, yum, dnf) are too complex for that. They also decorelate runtime libraries from headers files, which is a pain to work with as a développer IMO.

    But it’s just my personal experience, many new distro popped up since then. Also for reference, I’ve been using Linux for 12 years now, and I run Crux on my desktop, Ubuntu at work, and OpenBSD on my servers.