Linux

I really really enjoyed this video. Matt is great, every video of his is a different type of gold, great content.

As for the distros:

Mint (my first distro, favourite beginner distro; when I tried using it a few months ago, however, the facade was stripped: it's not good for my use case anymore and that's fine)

Zorin

All the *buntus, but especially Kubuntu for some reason

Arch (I say that as a bit of an Arch fanboy)

NixOS (I say that as a NixOS user)

Most, if not all of the Arch-based distros (literally just Arch with an installer, some preinstalled stuff, and extra repos, except Manjaro which is a failure, but that's a different topic)

I haven't really heard anyone speak highly on Elementary OS or Solus so I don't exactly agree about them being overrated.

Extra (that will piss off a lot of power users, also rant and story time): Void Linux. It just feels like it's weird for the sake of being weird. And a lot of times I tried to get river working, to no avail, and that is literally my greatest issue with Void, as well as the fa t it tries to be like Arch, but more stable. Don't het me wrong, that's literally the type of distro I want to run, but I just find it to be a bit of a mess for some reason. Arch has always besn smooth sailing, with Archinstall or via a manula install, while with Void I felt like I was fighting the system to make it do what I want it to. So yeah, Void. Love the "Enter the Void" marketing, and the idea, as well as the logo. The installer was fine, xbps felt like a million characters to type which I hated, and I had a hard time getting river and sddm working properly. Runit was weird but I could get used to it if it actually worked well. The main issue I was having was that at first, the river session did not appear. I fixed that, but then I couldn't het sddm enabled on Void because it didn't have a service file for runit! Cue me trying to get that set up for an hour or two, until I gave up and moved on to Tumbleweed (where zypper broke on me and I had to depend on Yast to manage packages, sighs). And then I gave up on Tumbleweed, went to Arch, where things were ok, but I didn't really want a rolling relese so when NixOS 23.05 launched, I jumped ship and have been there since. It's a bit crazy to me that this system has been on my laptop since the start of June, but it does all of what I need in a good way, and that's without even taking advantage of the full capabilities of NixOS. I only use Home manaher to set my gtk and icon themes, and have not even touched flakes yet.

I'm very critical of all the immutable distrubtions - as an old timer in tech I've seen so many things come and go. I'm also curious, ofcourse, and already tried out a VM with NixOS and everything seemed fine. But I'm going to wait it out before something like that becomes my main driver, I have a job to do (development, systems, stuff) and I cannot afford to say "sorry little to no progress today, my OS needs tinkering".

(Feel free to tell me I'm wrong :-) I love to tinker with new stuff).

Fedora is highly overrated.

I realized Arch was overrated when I got a brand new 7900 XT and it didn't work on Arch at all because their LLVM was a version behind. It was up-to-date on Fedora and even Ubuntu, but not Arch. Then there was the whole broken grub thing. Bleeding edge and unstable I get, but you can't be unstable and also behind. You can run Arch in any distro with distrobox, I don't see why you wouldn't just do that.

Ubuntu has ads in the terminal when you update. Runs a highly modified GNOME that doesn't play well with some extensions. Snaps by default (although maybe not that bad now that they seem to launch a bit quicker). Unfortunately so many things only have Ubuntu support if they have Linux support at all, it's such a shame.

Arch is for sweaty fanboy memes, not workflow

My list overrated list additions:

• Ubuntu: They break shit, it’s half baked, snaps, and Canonical is really into vendor lock in.

• Arch: I really have better things to do then baby sit my install.

• RHEL: Containers were created for reasons, and one of them was RHEL.

• Any Linux without systemd or glibc: Mistakes were made, and then different mistakes were made trying to prove systemd made mistakes. Musl based Linux distros are going to have compatibility problems, so I might as well run a different OS. The BSDs are *nix-like systems without glibc with a history and larger communities.

IMHO NixOS, which is what I'm using (full disclosure), is heavily underrated. His subposition was based on an hour of use "a long time ago", which leads me to believe he doesn't fully grasp the versatility of NixOS - or rather the "nix package manager", which is more of a scriptable deployment tool.

What I can do with a dotfile and a single command equates to many more steps in any other given distros. I can recreate a system simply by running said dotfiles on another install, or indeed convert it to a VM image if I wanted to.

So it's like if you took ansible, the aur and added the ability to configure everything from services, packages, filesystems, modules, virtualization, kernel's, users, from a JSON-like dotfile consisting of booleans, arrays, strings and even functions.

It is however overtly complex, there's a disconnect between old nix ("stable") and new nix (flakes, "unstable", experimental but mainstream in the NixOS community) and the documentation needs work, which is what has been funded and is being worked on now.

Thought I'd just chime in, because this guy's take seems glib, uninformed and dismissive...

...though I agree in regards to elementary and solus though.