• Ephera
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    4 years ago

    openSUSE. I mostly like it for its automatic filesystem snapshots. Or rather, I get anxious using other distros, because I feel like they could break at any point.

    It also offers a really good KDE experience, solid package management and YaST, which is a system settings GUI.

    • SFloss (they/them)
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      4 years ago

      I really wanted to give openSUSE Tumbleweed a try not too long ago because of how nice of a distro it looks like, plus having access to OBS looks great. I just worry about it being too bloated with packages that I wouldn’t really want. Also, Gecko Linux is based on openSUSE and has some small extra features. You should look into it!

      • Ephera
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        4 years ago

        As for GeckoLinux, yeah, it can be nice for newcomers.

        Personally, I don’t need most of its changes (e.g. I don’t even have any proprietary or patent-encumbered packages knowingly installed), so for me it’s simpler to get to my preferred system via vanilla openSUSE, but yeah, many people might prefer GeckoLinux instead.

      • Ephera
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        4 years ago

        Oh, worry not, because it is most definitely bloated beyond repair. The standard installation takes 40GB. A big chunk of that is for the btrfs snapshots, but yeah, they’re also quite the opposite of thrifty when it comes to the number of packages they hand out.

        I mean, I don’t want to sell this as an advantage, but it did kind of “cure” me. I used to care for the number of packages, but now that I could at best chip a few MB away at 40GB, I’ve given up that battle and my life has in no way become worse.
        In fact, I’d say it has become slightly better, because I don’t anymore have to figure out which optional dependencies I’m missing – basically all of them get pulled in when I’m installing an application – and I have had situations where I was without internet, but the many pre-installed applications (that I never need) had the features that I needed.

        I mean, there is legitimate use-cases where fewer packages are nice, and I will say that openSUSE Tumbleweed loves to push out updates for thousands of packages every few weeks, so without a fast internet connection the number of packages will be painful, but yeah, usually it’s a lot less big of a deal than people make it out to be.

    • fra
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      4 years ago

      +1 for OpenSUSE. I tried to give Fedora a go, but dnf is really slow when compared to zypper so I went back to OpenSUSE.

        • Ephera
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          4 years ago

          Probably because it’s written in Python, which is a mind-bogglingly slow language.

          You can do things like rewrite individual performance critical methods in C or Rust, but only if there are identifiable performance critical methods.
          If it’s just a general slowness across the code, you would pretty much have to rewrite the whole thing in another language to fix that.

    • Quadle4OP
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      4 years ago

      You can use a backup app for any distro.

      • Ephera
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        4 years ago

        Well, 1) I’m a lazy bastard and setting something like that up sounds like work, and 2) snapshots are still nice by themselves. If I break my OS, I’m back to a working state in five minutes, even if I’m out and about with my laptop.

        • SFloss (they/them)
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          4 years ago

          Timeshift is actually super simple to set up and works nicely, but yes I imagine having snapshots built into the OS must be much more seamless.

          • Ephera
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            4 years ago

            Yeah, I literally do nothing for my snapshots until the moment that I need them.

            Obviously doing a little work for it isn’t the end of the world, but I like not having to think of it and not being able to fuck up, because I’m literally not involved.