What Makes a Linux Distro - Why Distribution doesn't matter - Chris Titus Tech
video description
Date: 2022-03-20
Related videos
Comments and reviews: 8
Michael
Can definitely recommend Mint Cinnamon for Linux newbies. Maybe Ubuntu Mate... but not as sure of Ubuntu for newbies these days. Solus is worth a try for a newbie and maybe Zorin as well.
Absolutely love the Plasma and Cinnamon desktops and Mate and Budgie are also quite nice. Deepin is nice, but different. Pantheon and Gnome maybe for Mac users.
Plasma seems to take a long time to 'load' at start up but is generally light. Neon is really low (just over 500Mb for me) but most Plasma desktops that I install these days are under 600Mb, which is around the same as Mate (and Budgie). Cinnamon generally comes in at around 700 - 800Mb for me. Xfce is usually around 450Mb for me. Gnome is higher though.
What 'I' would love to see, Chris, is someone (hint hint lol) installing a nice Plasma or Cinnamon desktop over another desktop environment, say over MX Linux Xfce. I've tried, but it still leaves a lot to be desired lol so clearly there are tricks to the trade :) I love MX but would much prefer it with a richer desktop environment... I'm just not good enough to (safely) achieve that :)
Great vid, Chris, I see they've managed to pick up all your 'errors' lol.
reply
Can definitely recommend Mint Cinnamon for Linux newbies. Maybe Ubuntu Mate... but not as sure of Ubuntu for newbies these days. Solus is worth a try for a newbie and maybe Zorin as well.
Absolutely love the Plasma and Cinnamon desktops and Mate and Budgie are also quite nice. Deepin is nice, but different. Pantheon and Gnome maybe for Mac users.
Plasma seems to take a long time to 'load' at start up but is generally light. Neon is really low (just over 500Mb for me) but most Plasma desktops that I install these days are under 600Mb, which is around the same as Mate (and Budgie). Cinnamon generally comes in at around 700 - 800Mb for me. Xfce is usually around 450Mb for me. Gnome is higher though.
What 'I' would love to see, Chris, is someone (hint hint lol) installing a nice Plasma or Cinnamon desktop over another desktop environment, say over MX Linux Xfce. I've tried, but it still leaves a lot to be desired lol so clearly there are tricks to the trade :) I love MX but would much prefer it with a richer desktop environment... I'm just not good enough to (safely) achieve that :)
Great vid, Chris, I see they've managed to pick up all your 'errors' lol.
reply
mercuriete
I think Gentoo deserves a mention in this video.
I think as well that distribution doesnt matter is for binary package based distribution not source package based distribution.
Gentoo sometimes is called a meta distribution because you can mimic any other distribution if you have time to mimic it.
For example I have my gentoo distribution almost equals to Kubuntu. Time to time I check the kubuntu-desktop metapackage in order to see if there are any program that I am missing so I can mimic an out of the box Kubuntu experience on Gentoo. Any other bloated service or program I just keep it out from being installed.
For example modem-manager is a service that contributes to the boot time in a bad way and this is only useful if you have bought a 3G/4G internet dongle. This is something that I don't have, so I just dont need to install it. All distributions but Arch install it and add it to the runlevel 3. Why on the hell I need all installed services on runlevel 3?
reply
I think Gentoo deserves a mention in this video.
I think as well that distribution doesnt matter is for binary package based distribution not source package based distribution.
Gentoo sometimes is called a meta distribution because you can mimic any other distribution if you have time to mimic it.
For example I have my gentoo distribution almost equals to Kubuntu. Time to time I check the kubuntu-desktop metapackage in order to see if there are any program that I am missing so I can mimic an out of the box Kubuntu experience on Gentoo. Any other bloated service or program I just keep it out from being installed.
For example modem-manager is a service that contributes to the boot time in a bad way and this is only useful if you have bought a 3G/4G internet dongle. This is something that I don't have, so I just dont need to install it. All distributions but Arch install it and add it to the runlevel 3. Why on the hell I need all installed services on runlevel 3?
reply
Joe
I had the exact same experience in reverse with apt and pacman. In Ubuntu and Mint I had updates kill my system after letting an update go for too long. I also had the same thing happen with PcLinuxOS years back. I can get slack with updates. Lately I am using Manjaro and so far (about 8 months in) it has been awesome and is definitely my favorite distro yet (tried dozens over the years). I let pacman go for almost two months and had over 1000 updates to do. I was worried due to past experience and had no backup software installed. Pacman wouldn't let me install anything (errors because of behind on updates) so I installed qt-fsarchiver from source and after backing up I found I was worried for nothing. It was smooth like butter. I now always backup before every update but have had no issues with pacman or with yay and the AUR. I hope it stays this way because I love how my system is set up now.
reply
I had the exact same experience in reverse with apt and pacman. In Ubuntu and Mint I had updates kill my system after letting an update go for too long. I also had the same thing happen with PcLinuxOS years back. I can get slack with updates. Lately I am using Manjaro and so far (about 8 months in) it has been awesome and is definitely my favorite distro yet (tried dozens over the years). I let pacman go for almost two months and had over 1000 updates to do. I was worried due to past experience and had no backup software installed. Pacman wouldn't let me install anything (errors because of behind on updates) so I installed qt-fsarchiver from source and after backing up I found I was worried for nothing. It was smooth like butter. I now always backup before every update but have had no issues with pacman or with yay and the AUR. I hope it stays this way because I love how my system is set up now.
reply
Micha-
You say weird things about pacman. I use Manjaro for over 3 years and I never had problems like you described. No special maintenance. Just update mirrors once for few months and clean pacman cache (downloaded and installed packages) occasionally and you're good to go. I was also able to quit update during download phase and the next time pacman resumes download, cool. If the breakage was during the update phase, pacman usually fixes the problem with the next run. There are situations when it can fail fatally when the whole system crash during the update, but that situation is incredibly rare. Manjaro is on 3 computers from 3 years and it happened only once on a very old, slow laptop. So for me, pacman is super stable, clear, quick package manager. Definitely a favorite. Apt is second. Rest... not friendly and usable enough for me.
reply
You say weird things about pacman. I use Manjaro for over 3 years and I never had problems like you described. No special maintenance. Just update mirrors once for few months and clean pacman cache (downloaded and installed packages) occasionally and you're good to go. I was also able to quit update during download phase and the next time pacman resumes download, cool. If the breakage was during the update phase, pacman usually fixes the problem with the next run. There are situations when it can fail fatally when the whole system crash during the update, but that situation is incredibly rare. Manjaro is on 3 computers from 3 years and it happened only once on a very old, slow laptop. So for me, pacman is super stable, clear, quick package manager. Definitely a favorite. Apt is second. Rest... not friendly and usable enough for me.
reply
Ymi_Yugy
You completly forgot to mention release model.
You experience using debian stretch will be completely different from let's say Arch unstable.
Do you have modern hardware then LTS distributions might be a challenge.
Another thing to consider is getting help if you encounter a problem.
Using Ubuntu you can get lot's of help for beginners, if you use Arch you have is absolutely awesome Wiki at you disposal. But if you opt for Solus or Gentoo.
Another question is: Does this distribution offer the software and the version of it I want. Otherwise you will be stuck compiling it yourself and you lose all advantages that a package manager can provide.
So distribution matters alot.
reply
You completly forgot to mention release model.
You experience using debian stretch will be completely different from let's say Arch unstable.
Do you have modern hardware then LTS distributions might be a challenge.
Another thing to consider is getting help if you encounter a problem.
Using Ubuntu you can get lot's of help for beginners, if you use Arch you have is absolutely awesome Wiki at you disposal. But if you opt for Solus or Gentoo.
Another question is: Does this distribution offer the software and the version of it I want. Otherwise you will be stuck compiling it yourself and you lose all advantages that a package manager can provide.
So distribution matters alot.
reply
it_industry
I'm a GNOME user I've used GNOME since GNOME 1. I hated the Ubuntu Unity, I almost left Ubuntu because of Unity but then I installed Kubuntu with KDE and I like that. When GNOME 3 came out I didn't like it's app menu out of the box because if you use a lot of software it gets kind of clunky so I installed dash to panel with the ark menu. So no I have the feature of GNOME with a launcher menu similar to KDE so I have the best of both worlds.
Ohh and by the way Wayland doesn't seem to play nice with AMD. My laptop had an AMD Radeon integrated gpu and it didn't play nice with Wayland either, I didn't even try it on my gaming because that is an AMD card as well. Wayland has a long way to go
reply
I'm a GNOME user I've used GNOME since GNOME 1. I hated the Ubuntu Unity, I almost left Ubuntu because of Unity but then I installed Kubuntu with KDE and I like that. When GNOME 3 came out I didn't like it's app menu out of the box because if you use a lot of software it gets kind of clunky so I installed dash to panel with the ark menu. So no I have the feature of GNOME with a launcher menu similar to KDE so I have the best of both worlds.
Ohh and by the way Wayland doesn't seem to play nice with AMD. My laptop had an AMD Radeon integrated gpu and it didn't play nice with Wayland either, I didn't even try it on my gaming because that is an AMD card as well. Wayland has a long way to go
reply
Gabriel
I love your content, but I must point a couple out things out:
Firstly, I use LUKS as a filesystem, and it works great!
Secondly, and most importantly, Linux is not an operating system. Linux is just a kernel. GNU is the operating system. Hence, we call it GNU+Linux.
I'm sorry if I annoyed you or sounded condescending, this issue just really gets to me.
Again, I love your content.
Thank you.
reply
I love your content, but I must point a couple out things out:
Firstly, I use LUKS as a filesystem, and it works great!
Secondly, and most importantly, Linux is not an operating system. Linux is just a kernel. GNU is the operating system. Hence, we call it GNU+Linux.
I'm sorry if I annoyed you or sounded condescending, this issue just really gets to me.
Again, I love your content.
Thank you.
reply
James
That initial DVD or pen-drive with the Distro on it is so important to get people on to Linux. If it don't look good, we've lost them, possibly forever. Sure you can make the changes afterward, but the first impression is what -closes the sale.- Oh if we could only hire a marketing department to get this off the ground. Somebody please put together a quality ISO. Mint is the best so far ....
reply
That initial DVD or pen-drive with the Distro on it is so important to get people on to Linux. If it don't look good, we've lost them, possibly forever. Sure you can make the changes afterward, but the first impression is what -closes the sale.- Oh if we could only hire a marketing department to get this off the ground. Somebody please put together a quality ISO. Mint is the best so far ....
reply
Add a review, comment
Other channel videos
