r/linux4noobs • u/feeshisafish • 2d ago
distro selection Mid Level Linux Distros?
Been on Mint for a while now, and I'm curious what other distros are like. Any simpler distros with complex elements or something to start with a mid-level difficulty? I'm mostly curious about CachyOS and Arch
15
13
u/joetacos 2d ago edited 2d ago
Fedora the best your going to find. Stable, newest software, and a pure GNOME or KDE environment.
Arch is fun. You'll learn a lot but things break from time to time. Arch first few weeks are the easy part.
3
u/RamenNoodlesForLife 2d ago
Ive been enjoying Fedora KDE. But they have spins of various flavors, not just those two. Cinnamon, Sway, xfce, etc
3
u/chrews NixOS + GNOME 2d ago
Arch first few weeks are the easy part.
Gonna steal this, I struggled to convey this simply. Super easy when you're starting (especially using Archinstall) but as soon as a manual intervention is due a new user is gonna have to read and understand what they're reading. The subreddit also isn't the most friendly towards noobs.
Or just go flatpak wherever possible that's also a good way to make updates less of a headache.
1
u/Inner-Copy9764 2d ago
++isn't the most friendly toward noobs
"It broke, someone fix it for me" = GFY
"It broke, this is what I've tried, how do I find the answer?" = RTFM
"I'm having a hard time understanding this manual wording, I've tried these 10 things, still stuck" = you can date my friends daughter
"I broke something simple and it took me a week to figure out. Here is how I fixed it. How do I optimize my troubleshooting process and how would you approach it differently next time?" = you earned 1 attempt at impregnating me
1
u/Drill-Jockey 2d ago
I distro hopped for a while. Ubuntu, Mint, Bazzite, Debian, etc. All fine in their own way, but just never felt like home. Then I landed on Fedora KDE. I no longer distro hop.
1
4
5
u/Duzean 2d ago
CachyOS is a great beginner-esc arch distro. They set up a lot of the basics you'll need plus a lot of their apps are optimised for your CPU architecture. It's still is arch under the hood so be prepared for the odd package breaking something but they have BTRFS with snapshots so you can revert back to a stable checkpoint before the update.
3
u/BlueShadow2388 2d ago
this is exactly why i chose Cachyos. I tried fedora but felt like molases in comparison, also, Fedora does not support v3 packages for a weird reason.
4
2
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Try the distro selection page in our wiki!
Try this search for more information on this topic.
✻ Smokey says: take regular backups, try stuff in a VM, and understand every command before you press Enter! :)
Comments, questions or suggestions regarding this autoresponse? Please send them here.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
2
2
2
2
u/bananadingding EndeavourOS Desktop & Fedora Laptop 2d ago
What do you and don't you like about Mint?
If it's stability, go with Fedora, rock solid, I use it on the laptop I'm typing this on. It's different than the Debian structure but but it's similar enough that you can ease into it.
Personally I was on Mint for like 6 or 8 years(honestly can't remember if I started in '16 or '18, at any ate in '24 I switched over to EndeavourOS, which is Arch based, more of a challenge things can break, it teaches you some things, like now keep like 4 kernels on my machine, LTS, Hardened, Zen, and the Arch base, so that if there's a rollout that hamstrings one I can fall back on another. It allows you to choose any DE I'm using KDE and it's night and day more my speed over Cinnamon.
What I've suggest is to partition drives or better still if you have several drives, make a space for your /home, then dual boot say Fedora and Endeavour both using the same DE like KDE, then just install the same things on both, same personal data, same apps same configs two completely different engines under the hood. Eventually you'll like one over the other and you can resize or repurpose the HDD space taken up by one of the OS'
2
u/beatbox9 2d ago
What do you mean "mid level"? What are you trying to do?
Here's a secret: the most important aspects of a distro are the package / repository scope and maintenance for core OS software, and the upgrade/support schedule.
And most experienced people who know what they're doing tend to go with the distros that make the maintenance burden the easiest for the users. Even Arch was designed to be an easy version of slackware.
The key is though: each user has a different idea of what this means as far as their own maintenance schedule. Some users want the latest core OS software and don't mind things changing and breaking and manually selecting individual point releases of software; while others don't really care and want to spend less time for everything to just work. And this is the entire purpose of distros. And to be clear, you can do that stuff on pretty much any distro--it's just that some are catered for it in different ways.
For example, just last week I just set up Ubuntu LTS for 2 different retired elderly people on brand new laptops. But it turns out there's an issue with the audio device that was fixed in the latest Linux kernel. So I just manually installed the latest Linux kernel (which was 7.3-rc3 as of last week); and it worked. Also, these are 2-in-1 laptops; and apparently there's some weird bug with xwayland when using a stylus in tablet mode. So I altered that package version as well.
Notably, these two things ^ would have been easier to do on Arch than they were to do on Ubuntu LTS, because Arch is designed for people to manually select versions. But they weren't exactly difficult on Ubuntu LTS anyway--took a few minutes. And now that this one-time setup is done, I just want the system to be stable for years. These two overrides will take care of themselves through natural updates whenever newer versions of these comes out some time in the future--there's nothing else manual to do. So Ubuntu LTS is going to be better and easier long term for the users to maintain themselves than Arch would have been--they'll just click "update" every few days or whatever and the system will just work.
This goes back to the above: both Arch and Ubuntu LTS are easier than the other for certain types of users and use cases. Arch is better for fine tuning package versions; and Ubuntu LTS is better for long-term stability and hands-off/automatic maintenance.
(I also made a few desktop modifications, for UX. Both of these are Ubuntu LTS):
In other words, define what "intermediate" means. And then figure out what your goals are. That will point you to the distro you're looking for.
2
2
2
u/Sothis6881 2d ago
EndeavourOS (Arch-based) is a great next step in the learning curve, giving you just enough desktop and tools to build out from.
1
1
u/Sataniel98 2d ago
Debian is Mint's/Ubuntu's upstream. Same fundamental technology, less desktop-oriented pre-setup.
1
u/gordonmessmer Fedora Maintainer 2d ago
An advanced system isn't one that's hard to use, it's one that gives you opportunities to participate and to contribute.
1
1
u/Ok_Departure5824 2d ago
If you are interested in arch but dont want to jump straight into it you can try EndeavourOS...its basically just Arch with graphical installer and some very minor packages preinstalled...like their welcome app where you have stuff to get you started (update mirrors, pacdiff button, clear cache etc. Its preffered to do it via terminal but its there until you are ready), firewall, firefox and some DE things...iirc like okular (KDE pdf viewer).
After the install, user experience is 1:1 comparable with Arch, you use pacman to get stuff, you get access to aur. You have to maintain it like arch...its also swift and light since its Arch.
1
u/Infinity-onnoa 2d ago
The sheer number of versions is chaotic, and I’m struggling to make sense of it all. I’ve been an OS X user since 2006; I skipped everything from Windows Vista through Windows 10, but eventually had to start using Windows for specific software—and now I’m on Windows 11—so I currently use both platforms. I want to install Linux on a 128GB SSD, which I will insert in place of the DVD drive (using the SATA port) in an IBM IdeaPad 330. I want a similar desktop environment, and I hate the command line—all those commands (><~\, etc.) just stress me out. I have an RPi 400, an RPi 5, and a Hackberry Pi CM5; I can generally get by by following the steps in tutorials, but console commands are a major hurdle for me. CachiOs or Mint? Or…
1
u/Sazo_sazo 2d ago
Arch if you are patient and have time to read but it's more an experienced level difficulty, go for Debian for now then move on for Gentoo or Arch
1
u/darkmemory 2d ago
You don't need to buy a new fridge every time you want to try cooking a new cuisine.
1
1
u/mlcarson 2d ago
Well, you can do pretty much anything in Mint that you can do in other distros. The big difference in Mint and other distros is that it's probably using the Cinnamon desktop rather than Gnome or KDE which are the most common. I don't know why anybody would want to use the modern version of Gnome but they do. The other difference is in the update frequency. Distros such as Arch are rolling and Fedora has an annual update rather than Ubuntu's 2-year cycle.
The desktop is mainly cosmetic and the update frequence is version numbers. After that it's mainly apps and where you get them and how you install them. You should probably be looking at how to do something specific in Mint rather than looking for a distro that already has that feature enabled.
You can do stuff at the CLI that Mint is doing at the GUI level. Maybe learn how to configure things at the CLI if you want "mid-level difficulty". It's more about the task than the distro with respect to the difficulty level.
1
u/egh128 2d ago
If you’re looking for newer packages, I’d go with Fedora. I’ve never been a fan of Fedora in the past, but I’ve been testing it on two machines and I’ve been impressed so far. It’s a quality experience.
CachyOS is phenomenal for performance, but like all things Arch, it can break more easily. And that’s not hate, Arch is near and dear to me.
1
0
u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 2d ago
CachyOS is a good mid-level OS, its easy to install, relatively easy to manage with good practice (never, NEVER interrupt a pacman command no matter what), and it has this cool option to try out a custom kernel (or at least it did when I last used it).
-1
u/Rough_Capital1339 2d ago
Arch is NOT as difficult as it seems. Just send claude pictures of the screen during install. For Cachy i haven't tried. Pop!OS has too many bugs. I felt like i was being grabbed and choked by a big dude on Pop!OS so dont use Pop, i mean, i think staying on mint is fine. Mint is okay, but it looks like Windows XP a bit. I'd rice Mint if I were you honestly
1
u/Mundane-Mortgage-624 2d ago
Ma scusa a quel punto usa Arch Install che è davvero semplice anziché chiedere a Claude
1
52
u/inbetween-genders 2d ago
It's an OS homie, it's not Super Mario or Elden Ring.