This is gonna be super far fetch, but hear me out.... Debian....
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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This gave me a good laugh
Just about any major distro.
There's so many distro's to choose from that can all be productive.
If the question is this short, my answer is too: Go try at least 10 and then come back to tell us what you liked and what not.
Without any further information it's like going into a forest and asking people to point out a tree. Unless you look for some specific tree all will do...
Edit: Fat fingers
Linux mint Debian edition or Opensuse tumbleweed.
Slow Internet/less updates, older, more tested software, slightly wider package availability: LMDE.
Faster Internet, more updates, very new (but well tested) software, needs slightly more technical knowledge sometimes: Opensuse tumbleweed.
I personally use Opensuse Slowroll, which is a slower rolling release experimental version of Opensuse tumbleweed.
Ok thx
+1 for debian.
No need to mess around with debian derivatives for whatever pointless extra widgets they have.
It's good enough for most stuff and has "allow nonfree drivers" choice which helps with annoying hardware problems of the past.
If you don't care about desktop env, you probably don't care about wayland vs xorg either.
So I'd try XFCE, simple, basic, lightweight, fast, probably not the most modern or flashy,
but you're getting to work faster.
Throw a dart and use whatever it lands on. If you don’t have any actual requirements, they’re all pretty okay.
Pretty much any distribution would meet that criteria.
Is just pick one and get going. If you run into problems, you'll now have more specific selection criteria and can make a more discerning choice of another distribution.
Given your initial "maybe Debian" just grab Debian stable and see where it takes you.
Check out MX (Debian + extra tools to make desktop use easier)
Depending on what you need for productivity, you'll most likely be fine with just using flatpak to install any fresh packages.
Linux Mint EDGE
You can use almost any distribution for productivity. First, what type of productivity are we speaking off? Secondly your hardware. Do you need the newest of the newest or are you one who want to stay at the same known version of operating system for as long as possible?
All kinds of productivity, office to programming. And I'm on AMD platform + I don't care about the newest, but want to have something maintained
Try Distrochooser: https://distrochooser.de/en/
Just to see what it gives to you and think and discuss about the suggestions.
I got Void Linux, which is exactly what I use. Neat.
(and Artix which I used before switching to Void)
Lol, top answer is Void LInux for me too. I'm not sure if they are weighted and if the top most is the best recommendation for me. I'm an EndeavourOS user and that is not suggested unfortunately. But Artix is second for me too. Maybe I should look closer to Void LInux too. I wouldn't change, just curious now. Maybe I'll test it in a virtual machine. :-)
Edit: BTW I did not click the option to avoid systemd. In fact, I don't mind systemd.
Can u explain me systemd?
systemd is a big collection of software to manage the system. In example to start services or commands to shutdown the pc. The problem for many is, that this one big collection of software is developed by people from a giant company who already has lot of other stuff in most LInux systems integrated. The argumentation is that this company has much power over the system. There are arguments for and against it and I don't want to get too much into it. Therefore some people create alternative versions of distibutions without these services they call bloat.
In short people don't like it either because of bloat or because it's all one giant collection of software or because the developers also work for Red Hat. There are maybe other reasons, but that is what I read mostly in forums/social media.
Here bunch of links you can read if you want.
-
- QA on Linode, 2. manpage, 3. Wikipedia, 4. Debian Wiki, 5. Arch Wiki, 6. Gentoo Wiki
I'm a long time Mint user. My Mint laptop is my daily drive and it served me well even with my not IT related job during the pandemic home office days.
And it's a 2nd gen i5 with 8 gb memory, it handled like a champ for 3d mechanical design.
i cant say enough about mint. its handled all the nonsense ive thrown at it and then some.
Mint is my go to desktop option. It usually does the job.
I don't usually worry about older packages. Most things run fine. I don't spend a lot of time trying to make my UI pretty. For me, the GUI is a place for terminals, web browsers, my IDE, and general tools, not some kind of whiz bang thing to tweak all the time.
Debian: good enough and stable. No worries > new features.
Use Debian or whatever your organization will support.
I've been on Debian 12 for almost a year. It's rock solid and its Gnome is on version 43, which is current enough. I've been watching reviews of 45 and 46 and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I installed Flatpak to get current apps and it works flawlessly. I'm expecting Debian 13 to come out sometime around Summer 2025, which doesn't feel too far away given my satisfaction with Debian 12.
I dumped ubuntu for debian 12 due to snaps, and i'm very happy so far. I run sway as my window manager. I guess we'll see how i feel in a year but i honestly can't think of any software i run that i'm simply fine with it not being the most recent. I'm even using the firefox-esr version that debian ships with and it's fine.
Debian sid
Honestly if OP just wants straight up productivity, I'd go with stable. They won't have to deal with constant updates and have a stable user experience for some time. They can use flatpak to have the latest and greatest productivity software if they need. But my guess is that one or one and a half year old LibreOffice/Inkscape/Gimp will be more than sufficient.
I'm gaming on Debian stable just fine. I don't get what everyone's thing with bleeding edge software all the time is. To me, "bleeding edge" means "higher chance for something to break and blow up in your face".
I'll wait until the bleeding edge distro users got hit with all the bugs first. My preferences were just justified by the recent xz backdoor stuff.
Debian stable will not work well on very new hardware. Other than that it is solid
Seems to work just fine on my 2022 Gigabyte brand mobo with a 12-core AM5 socket Ryzen and Nvidia 3070ti GPU. Maybe it has trouble on things like laptops, which often have weird shit put in by their manufacturers? Or are you defining "very new" as "just released this month"?
When I got my 30XX GPU around when they released, the drivers for it were buggy (on Windows too but especially Ubuntu). Since about 6 months after the cards came out, it’s been fine.
I just built a amd 7600 system in January 2024 and had no issues. Not sure that counts as very new but it was for me!
I wouldn't classify debian sid as bleeding edge, it is still on plasma 5.27 for example or firefox esr 115.9. I would try it first before saying certain things, or classifying it. There is a middle ground between Archlinux and Debian stable, and sid I think is a great compromise
I disagree with Debian because it has old packages and you will constantly have issues that are already fixed in the new versions. Specially if you run Plasma desktop or anything where lots of bugs are fixed constantly.
I think you will not have a great experience with Debian to be honest, but that being said, I have only ran it once for a few weeks. It was very frustrating for me to not have modern versions of software.
One guy below in the comments says he is happy with Gnome 43 which was released 18 months ago I believe. That's what I'm talking about. You will lack almost two years of new features, bug fixes and improvements.
All this because people believe it's more stable. But it's not more stable at all, it's just old already fixed bugs instead of new bugs.
You can get more updated packages by running debian testing, which is quite stable. Debian also is more stable. Security patches are still brought to the main release, making it secure. The stability comes from the lack of a lot of new updates which come with a lot of new bugs.
Linux Mint is the best IMHO, if you just want a worry free experience, in terms of what you might need and find it in gui form.
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). It is going to work with little or no configuration after install.
Thx
Pretty much anything stable and mainstream. Think Pop os, Fedora or Linux Mint
The distro that comes to mind is LMDE ( Linux Mint on Debian ). The Mint team adds some polish, a better out-of-the-box experience, and some nice desktop tools ( productivity ). In addition, Mint will keep the desktop environment ( Cinnamon ) up to date which counters probably the biggest issue with Debian which is that the software versions get old.
I use EndeavourOS ( a version of Arch ) because, for me, having up to date packages led to higher productivity and greater stability. When I used Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or others, I was adding 3rd-party repos, PPAs, and compiling stuff outside the package manager. This always led to a mess over time.
These days, the choice of distro matters less as these problems can be handled other ways. Flatpak allows you to install newer GUI apps ( either newer versions or stuff missing from your repos ). This does not work for command-line stuff or the desktop itself. So, Flatpak compliments LMDE which keeps the desktop up-to-date.
A problem I had with distros like Debian and RHEL was that the dev tools get too out of date. These days, that is easily countered by something like Distrobox. Sandboxing the dev environment has other advantages and, if you muck it up it does not impact your system overall. Multiple dev environments can be handy too as the toolchains favoured by different languages can conflict. If you are not familiar with Distrobox, it uses containers ( like Docker ) but it feels like a much better integrated extension of the host system.
If you use Distrobox, you really do not have to use Flatpak if you do not want to. You can essentially layer on the package selection of any other distro on top of your base system.
I have considered this setup myself, Debian as a base with Distrobox on top to access the Arch packages repos and the AUR. LMDE would make sense for me for the same reasons I have to you. Probably the only reason I have not pulled the trigger yet is that, around the time I had this idea, VanillaOS announced their switch to Debian. Vanilla looks like they had much the same idea but are building it into the core concept of the distro. It has not really stabilized yet though.
Open SUSE have good hardware support out of the box and better than Arch personally
I find it weird that you do not care for DE since it affects your workflow, but anyway. My take is if you need the latest packages go for Arch if you have the time, Manjaro if you do not and finally Debian for rock solid stability.
Manjaro is a terrible recommendation for stability
Who recommended that? I recomended Arch or Manjaro for latest packages and debian for stable packages.
In fact I care about the DE but I already know the ones that I'm interested in 😃
Debian or mint
Ubuntu probably. It will never break.