Ikey has already left this project, if I understand correctly. Possibly due to issues in his personal life. The project seems to be going on ahead regardless, and his departure wasn’t as critical as when he left Solus. Solus themselves are waiting for the AerynOS tooling to mature and then they’ll migrate their distro to use those too.

AerynOS is still in alpha though, and not really ready for daily use. I’m glad to hear OP has had a positive experience, but the OS isn’t something I’d recommend for your average user yet.

Ever since VLC came on the scene it has been my go-to. Just a really functional player that plays almost anything I throw at it, and I like the UI well enough. For now I have no reason to use anything else. I’m not hating on other players, but VLC works for me.

How- How dare you‽

Sure, a WM will run fine and leaves you with more resources to work with. Your setup will still struggle running a modern browser.

Yeah, none are going to be fast. Browsing is going to be slow no matter what, unless you use something like lynx. The best I can give you is Falkon, but don’t open many tabs.

Well, for example, upgrading between releases is done by manually editing sources.list and some other steps, and there’s no easy tool for that. This is not difficult, exactly, but for people with little experience it’s a bit daunting. Debian in general isn’t the most new user friendly distro, in my experience. Distros like Mint and Ubuntu make the Debian experience slightly easier. Not that Debian is some esoteric system.

Well, what about just using Debian? It’s a bit hassle, maybe, but if you have prior Linux experience, you’ll be fine.

GNU Guix System is independent I think. Interesting distro, but not for the faint of heart.

There’s the Mandriva successors: Mageia, OpenMandriva Lx, PCLinuxOS and ROSA Linux. As far as I know, they are completely independent projects, even if they started as Mandriva forks.

It may be a lot to take in at first, but seems to me you’ve got it!

A repository (or repo) is a server that hosts program files for your distribution. Distributions host their own repositories from which you can install software with your package manager, like APT or DNF or others. If you only install software from your distribution’s repository, there’s likely no clashes with software versioning and dependencies, and the packages are about as reliable as they can be (which doesn’t mean there’s never malware). If you add third party repositories for software not available from your distribution’s repository, it’s more likely there will be issues, because the distribution doesn’t guarantee the packages work well together.

For example, Debian and Arch don’t retrieve and install their software from the same source. They have their own servers (repositories) hosting software compiled to work with their particular distro and to be used by their chosen package manager.

Flatpak (or Snap or Guix) is a separate package manager that handles it’s own dependencies and doesn’t clash with your distribution’s own software manager.

Does this help?

Very little. If I’m being honest with myself, I have a slight preference for how DOS/Windows handled mounting drives. I’ve never been a huge fan of the UNIX directory structure anyway. I’d like to see some sort of filesystem hierarchy reform for a clearer format.

But of course, using Linux is a relief in most ways. There’s no going back.

Since everyone already mentioned it, I recommend Debian.

Oh no, I pick a different distro for different needs. On my desktop I run openSUSE Tumbleweed for that rolling release goodness (and the occasional hiccup). It’s my main computer and I like to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

On my laptop and media PC I use Debian, because I don’t update those as often and “stale” software is fine, preferred even, and because I don’t want to troubleshoot updates on the run with my laptop. I also used Debian (well, Raspbian) on my Raspberry Pi, but I retired that one. In general, I prefer Debian for servers.

I also have a PinePhone with postmarketOS, but I rarely use that these days. Still, I just recently re-installed it to have a small Linux tablet computer just in case. pmOS is the best OS I’ve used on the PinePhone, though it can’t really fix the PP’s inherent issues.

Oh Kent, no. No Kent, no. Kent.

Perhaps Kent, being such an apparently difficult personality type, is just so lonely he has to think at least his chat bot loves him.

Kent is obviously a talented programmer, but that guy doesn’t seem to be right in the head.

One of the reasons I feel Debian isn’t quite new user friendly is definitely having to manually modify your sources list when there’s a new version release. It’s not exactly hard, but for a new user it can be intimidating. I do find it weird that Debian hasn’t created an automatic tool for that, unlike practically every other distro out there.

Debian is good, but sometimes its age shows.

For my desktop: openSUSE Tumbleweed/Slowroll. I like to keep my desktop as up-to-date as possible, and openSUSE is pretty good. Sure, there’s the occasional udev update that breaks inputs in the desktop environment, but that’s the other side of the coin.

For my laptop and other uses: Debian. The old reliable doesn’t mind if I don’t update as often, and unlike rolling releases, updates aren’t wont to break anything. In a pinch I could use it on the desktop too.

I have a cup of mate every morning, yes.

Mate is one of those desktops that I occasionally consider, and it’s definitely something I could see myself using. Mate is certainly a cool project and I hope it stays around. It reminds of my early days with GNOME - before the bad thing happened and darkness descended on that project.

I hope they get Wayland going eventually.

Is SteamOS even available for desktop PCs yet? I don’t think it is.

From the SteamOS page:

We expect most SteamOS users to get SteamOS preinstalled on a Steam Deck or device that incorporates SteamOS. The only devices officially supported on SteamOS right now are Steam Deck and Legion Go S. We are working on broadening support, and with the recent updates to Steam and SteamOS, compatibility with other AMD powered PC handhelds has been improved.

Until this changes, which I think is in the works, I recommend using some other popular distro.

Guix is a package manager you can install on most distros and works beside other package managers, similar to Snap and Flatpak. And it’s a distro.