I think it's time for a new OS on the "Distro Tester"

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Currently running vanilla Arch on the old machine. Installed it because I had a need to better understand how Arch worked. Getting bored with it now, time to tinker with something else. There are a couple options…
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  1. Recently realized that, while I have installed vanilla Debian to ARM, I’ve never done so on x86. Maybe Debian Testing?
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  2. My very first Linux distro was Redhat back in the 90’s. Haven’t installed it since (Although I did run SuSE for a while and really liked it). Maybe it’s time to give Fedora a shot (with Gnome desktop because I’ve not used that in a while either)?
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    What to do…
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I think Fedora is good once you get used to it. I use it pretty regularly. dnf has many features I wish pacman had.

That being said, if you feel like exploring on your test machine, why not try something totally different.

  • Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite(ostree-based)
  • Nixos - Declarative and radically different
  • Void - systemd-free with interesting package management tools
  • Gentoo - Everything built from source
  • GhostBSD - It isn’t Linux, but it is still worth trying
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I would like to try Alpine Linux some time soon:

Alpine Linux is an independent, non-commercial, general purpose Linux distribution designed for power users who appreciate security, simplicity and resource efficiency.

https://www.alpinelinux.org/about/

For power users…ehhh… :thinking:

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It is tough on a desktop because it is built with musl. You will be limited in what software you can run.

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I have considered Gentoo…that one’s been around for a long time. Actually, I think we have a winner here, Gentoo it is :slight_smile:

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Yes, you are right. But just thought as a fun experiment. Perhaps eventually a headless setup on a Raspberry Pi. I’ll just have a look at it in a VM first.

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I’ve always thought pacman could have a little more functionality, but never quite knew specifically how. What have you considered from dnf that pacman doesn’t have, but wish it did exactly?

@JKMooney If you’re curious to try the Debian Testing branch, you should try SparkyLinux.

https://sparkylinux.org
https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sparky

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There are lots of things but a few that I often wish for are:

  • The ability to search only package names(It can be done with grep)
  • Support for wildcards
  • Built-in history tracking with limited rollback ability(Probably a bit tricky on a rolling release)
  • Transactions

That being said, dnf is missing things too. They are just different things.

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Thanks for answering with a few options! Without letting this go to far off the topic, I will just say that having a built-in tracking history with rollback capabilities would be very impressive and convenient to say the least.

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Lol if you really wanna power user distro you could be a chad LFS user lol. Seriously though, Alpine is a good distro, and even with Endeavor I do keep it on a bootable usb with persistence. You do you based on you though.

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Right, LFS. Just need to build up some power of usage before :sweat_smile:. In a couple of years time perhaps.

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Also give artix openrc a try before switching :+1:

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Fair enough. It certainly isn’t for everyone. Good luck if you ever do work with it though

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I’m perfectly happy with Arch/EOS, I don’t need at this moment anything else.

That said, I do plan on trying Gentoo on real hardware, eventually. Also, I’m curious about Void Linux. First, however, I might give Artix a try, just to get some experience with running a systemdless distro.

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Me as well. EOS has earned it’s place on the machine I depend on. I just happen to have an old PC that I like to “tinker” with. It allows me to try a disto on bare metal as opposed to a virtual machine.

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First run though the documentation. Looks pretty well laid out. Guess I’ll have to go with OpenRC to get the full “Gentoo” experience. :wink:

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Had a “plumbing emergency” this weekend so, plans got a bit derailed. However, I have confirmed the minimal iso will work with my old Netgear USB WiFi (otherwise, I’d have had to relocate the old computer to where I have an ethernet cable). Although, upon going into the documentation in more detail this morning, it looks like all I really need from that iso is the parted utility unless I wanted to do a complete disk wipe. While that was the original plan, I’m kind of intrigued by the idea that I can use any boot iso or an existing Linux install to install Gentoo. I’ve got plenty of disk space so, I think I’ll use the existing Arch install to install Gentoo and update Grub accordingly.

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Very Interesting!!! I had not heard of NixOS, just took a look & am downloading the iso to give it a testdrive. Played with Gentoo many years ago, liked it–may try it again.

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if you want to have a fun adventure get an encrypted gentoo install going

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mmmm…just looked at NixOS. I think that I’ll clear a spare drive & install it…looks interesting