What do you consider to be the “Goldilocks” distro? the one that balances ease of install and use, up-to-date, stability, speed, etc… You get the idea.

I’m not a newb, these last few years I’ve lived in the Debian and derivatives side of things, but I’ve used RH, Slackware, Puppy :), and older stuff, like mandrake/mandriva and others. Never tried Suse or Arch, and while Nix looks appealing, I need something to put in production rapidly. I have tried Kinoite in a VM, but I couldn’t install something (which I can’t remember), and that turned me off.

Oh I’m on Mint right now, because lazy, but it’s acting up with a couple of VMs, which I need, I really don’t have the time or desire to maybe spend two days troubleshooting, and I’m a bit fed up with out of date pkgs.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    1·
    3 months ago

    Debian. I run Stable on servers and Unstable on desktops.
    Although I do think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch are actually better in some aspects, I find Tumbleweed too rough around the edges (it’s a derivative of Leap and that shows). And I just can’t be bothered to install and configure Arch anymore. Fedora and Ubuntu are too buggy on average, Mint is too “stable” for a desktop and I don’t use all the helpers that make it newbie-friendly. Slackware suffers from issues that were solved in the Linux world decades ago, and I dislike derivative distros on principle.

    I’ve probably tried around 30-40 distros and I always return to Debian.

  • Badabinski@kbin.earth
    1·
    3 months ago

    For me, it’s Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it’s Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it’s always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it’s fast because it doesn’t enable many things by default, and it’s honestly been the most reliable distro I’ve ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.

    I personally feel like Arch’s unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like paru) and merge your pacnews then you’ll likely have a rock solid system.

    Again, this is all just my opinion. It’s easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won’t recommend it to you, but I’ll happily say how much I’ve come to enjoy using it.

  • gramgan@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 months ago

    NixOS. Declarative system management is just so unbelievably simple and reliable that I couldn’t ever see myself going back to a traditional Linux system.

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      NixOS is too different and poorly documented for me to call it the true goldilocks distro, but man am I loving it

  • RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    For me that would be Fedora (preferably KDE). I currently am on Aurora (Kinoite fork), but that’s because I value stability very highly (except for immutable and Debian nothing is stable enough).

    • RageLtd@lemmy.world
      1·
      3 months ago

      Not OP, but can you sell me on Aurora? Every time I’ve tried any of the Fedora Immutable distros they just feel slow and awkward. I have a few tools that need rpm-ostree installs and fighting with flatpak permissions is the bane of my existence

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Great question. Right up there with “what’s the best movie” or “which meal should I order”. Maybe you want to ask which editor is the best too?

    • Mr_Blott@feddit.uk
      0·
      3 months ago

      The question starts with “What do you consider…”

      You sound like the type to reply in threads where someone’s asking about a problem they’re having with Windows and say “I don’t have this problem because I use Linux (snort)”