Since i see so much linux talk on lemmy i got curious and watched a video about the common distros. How true is the information in this video? The person hardly describes why debian and arch are just better than every other distro. At least i’m definitely now curious about Mint or something for gaming.
It’s just clickbait like most of his videos, I never really liked Chriss’ videos, the tip of the iceberg was when he told people to disable kernel mitigation for a presumable performance boost (I tested it with disconnected network, it was like 2% on my machine), which is just plain dumb.
Use whatever distro you like, just know that you don’t have to distrohop for some program (DE or WM or whatever). I personally use endeavour, simply because I’ve used arch (and derivatives) for a while now and endeavour is just arch with sensible defaults and a lot of the configuration one would do anyway already done.
yeah i guess this one didnt scream clickbait as much as the other videos of his. I got some in my feed afterwards and quickly realised that this guy doesnt shy away from using clickbait titles.
What is DE or WM? Is it actually that easy to change distro? Dont you have to basically install everything again from scratch? I read somewhere that you can seperate your directories on your SSD so that you can just change the kernel but i dont know how easy or true that is
DE is desktop environment (like gnome, kde, xfce,…) And WM is window manager (like i3, sway, xmonad,…) Which is just a slim version of a de, they usually don’t include things like guis for settings, file managers, … and you just pick what you like and use that. The window manager is responsible for placing the windows in your workspace and most standalone wms are tiling, so they use your monitor space efficiently instead of putting floating windows all over the place. Basically the DE (or WM) is what you interact with most on your PC and a lot of beginners distrohop just to use a different DE when in reality you can just install the other de on your existing system, log out and select the new DE in your login screen.
The biggest differences between distros nowadays are their release cycles and their package managers (and the tepos they’re using, like Ubuntu and Debian both use apt, but have separate repos)
And no you can’t really change distro without reinstalling, you can change kernels tho, every distro will update their kernels from time to time and it’s just a matter of install the new package and reboot into the new kernel.
With separate directories you probably mean partitions, which I’d also say it’s advisable to have your /home partition separated from your / partition. That way if you ever have to reinstall or want to change distro you can just install into the root partition and afterwards add your old/home partition to /etc/fstab and keep all you’re user data and configuration
While I admit most of my arch reinstalls are mostly the same,I feel that archinstall script is genuinely good now with most defaults I need. The rest I can just add it in the installer extra packages or chroot post install (which is offered as a choice at the end).
I just could never bring myself to use distros that are technically the same distro with calamares slapped in top and whatnot. I mean ‘pacman -S {packages}’ is straightforward enough for me.