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“This is america, why are there more than two choices”
The big advantage of Linux it’s fully customizable The big disadvantage of Linux, it’s fully customizable
deleted by creator
Proceeds to use it exclusively for browsing the web.
Exactly 69 upvotes - as it should be.:-P
How many are there?
It depends.
See, that’s not helpful. The right answer is to direct someone to this GitHub project:
https://github.com/FabioLolix/LinuxTimeline
The releases page contains a 3420x12488 PNG to provide a simple and concise answer.
I can see my OS from here!
“Simple and concise”
Doesn’t even have CachyOS. Smh
There are a few gaps. Seems it’s not being as diligently updated as once was.
There are even some old distros I failed to find on it.
… Didn’t there used to be a text-searchable svg version of it?
Idk. I was making a joke though. A history of Linux chart is functionally useless for actually choosing a distro.
A history of Linux chart is functionally useless for actually choosing a distro.
I’ve used that many times to help me go distro surfing. Very handy for discovery.
For a new person it’s useless. For anyone distro surfing why wouldn’t you just use distro Watch?
For a new person it’s useless. For anyone distro surfing why wouldn’t you just use distro Watch?
I disagree. Not useless. Shows the lineage of distros. Facilitates broader awareness. Handy education. Very well accompanies the likes of distrowatch, at a long glance showing the forest past being lost in the trees and slowly trying to work it out. Expedites the new (or soon to be) user to better know their way around, and perhaps help them go towards whichever branch they prefer or away from any they garner a dislike for, saving time. See past the whataboutism false-dichotomy? Why not both?
Huh? A new user is going to have trouble understanding the base difference between gnome and kde. Flooding them with information about the history of all these operating systems will do nothing except to scare them off even more.
If you know how to edit a comma-separated-value text file and how to submit a PR on GitHub, you could make the image larger.
I just have to assume you’re a troll at this point. That graphic is not helpful at all to anyone except those that care about the history of Linux. For everyone else it’s useless. I was making a joke about how one of the distros I use isn’t on there. I don’t know the history of my distro and honestly do not care. Any noob also would not care.
I see the one I like! :-)
i am not religious, but oh god…
That picture is also hosted on Wikimedia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg
Edit: just pasting the link now, making it into an embedded picture lagged and crashed voyager??
Either 2025 was a horrible year for linux or the image needs an update.
I always assumed webOS was Linux but I expected it to be a fork of Debian
WebOS was made by Palm Inc., one of the earliest and quite successful manufacturer of ‘personal digital assistant’ devices, aka smartphones without the phone part (and later with that too). They originally developed and licensed their own OS, PalmOS, but needed an upgrade for multitasking and such. webOS was thus intended for those PDA devices, and Debian would of course be a ridiculous choice for the task.
I have warm memories of PalmOS: i was snappy as heck with the 16 MHz CPU, but that’s largely because of the ‘single-tasking’ and quite limited app functionality.
EndeavourOS should be a continuation of Antergos, right?
All you need to know is that, whatever you pick, you made the wrong choice and you will be roasted if you ever attempt to explain your decision.
Unless you use Arch, then you have chosen correctly.
I use Fedora, but I frequent the Arch wiki often enough that I feel like an honorary Arch user.
The Gentoo wiki is pretty good too
Urgh! Why did you choose Arch? It is just the worst!
Actual reenactment:
You’re obviously not using NixOS. I clearly don’t even need to try to use such a subpar stateful system such as Arch, you absolute pleb.
Am I out-jerking you already?
I use NixOS, obviously.
I use NixOS btw
Screams in Debian…
You mispelt gentoo
Not true, you just become immune to the opposition.
Arch is utterly inferior because of its use of the Systemd “init” system, which is a bloated mess that completely disregards the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and shouldn’t be forgotten for its sins and heresy. “Arch Linux” (Really Arch Gnu/Linux, or more preferably Arch Gnu+Linux (Unless you consider that Gnu runs on top of Linux, in which case it’s Linux+Gnu)) cannot be taken seriously as a minimal do it yourself distro when it hinges on an software that has ties with RedHat, which has had a history of forcing their woke Wayland Display Server (Even though Xorg worked just fine, suspicious much?), as well as their DEI onto the entire Linux space - where politics shouldn’t play any role. A WOKE company like RedHat has no place in the open source community. If you want to be a true and righteous Linux user, I recommend Either Void Linux+Gnu (What manly men like myself use) or Gentoo.
Edit: this is satire, I clearly interact with these people far too often to have done this good of a job.
Edit: this is satire, I clearly interact with these people far too often to have done this good of a job.
Imagine if The Onion had to say this.
Your target audience understood, the people downvoting probably are Ubuntu users anway.
It says something about how sad of a state the world is in when I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
I mean, it’s both good and bad. The amount of downvotes mean there is a large subset of folks who no longer recognize the twisting of stallman’s rant. They are new to linux, and not super-serious-no-casuals-allowed penguin lovers. It’s bad because I would love if everyone coming to linux could be as into it as I am. People who are invested into a thing take a much deeper look at things, and can appreciate it’s soft and jagged parts and then properly make recommendations on how to change things.
There has beenI have noticed a marked increase in argumentum populum, argumentum ad lapidem and argumentum ad novitatem, with the influx of new users (in recent years), who seem to be coming to “Linux” like it’s another platform; another groupthink team to switch to [“PC vs Mac”], rather than Linux just being a kernel that has a license that qualifies it as having a Free Software philosophy, and the free software (free as in freedom) being the reason to use it.Like they’re still caught in, not just the fallacies and identity-attachment mass-formation malady, but also a consumerism and a dependence paradigm, rather than embracing the freedom to learn, to empower themselves and each other.
It’s daunting to think, many may not know they can look deeper into it, not merely just use the software, but also study it, and change it, and share their changes… like they don’t know how we got here.
Freedom forgotten is freedom lost.
The age of the account makes it even more nebulous
Lmao, I just made this account, yeah. It’s not my first Lemmy account. I made an account on lemmy.world back in 2023 I think (lost the account), and a PieFed account earlier this year, which I hardly used. I thought I could use a fresh start. (And sorry for the ambiguous satire)
I don’t think that’s on you. Like the person above said it’s more to do with how the world is rn
I had to read until “manly man” to confirm it was satire
Void Linux+Gnu
Uhh, it’s GNU SLASH Linux actually
Arch is utterly inferior because of its use of the Systemd “init” system, which is a bloated mess that completely disregards the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well, and shouldn’t be forgotten for its sins and heresy.
So… do arch without systemd. (And not listed there, because its live-installer iso comes with systemd, is parabola linux, which does let you install with any of many init systems).
Or as you say, any of many other distros that offer init-freedom.
Though I’m not entirely sure if I’m replying to an instance of poe’s law, intended to mock those of us who see things largely like you depicted. n_n Which is fun.
PS,
history of forcing their woke Wayland Display Server (Even though Xorg worked just fine, suspicious much?),
Yes. Actively inhibiting development of Xorg. The tighter they squeeze the more of us slip through their fingers. Now there’s XLibre (a Xorg fork, to continue (otherwise actively inhibited) patching and developing), and even Pheonix (a from-scratch implementation of the X11 protocol written in zig! ~ give it a couple years). Exciting times.
Frankly I’m not even keen on the idea of pulse audio either. Funny how all this “Lennartware”'s so contemptable… from Lennart Poettering, who then went to work for Microsoft. Funny eh? Funny how it’s almost like it’s following the same ruthless dastardly insidious method of unscrupulously building a monopoly, via “embrace, extend, extinguish”. Not a fan of pulseaudio, systemd, and wayland. Much prefer free software stays closer to being in human reach, so more of us can make use of the 4 freedoms of free software. So it’s not just “free software” in name only, but in practice too.
Sorry, my comment was satire, though I do daily drive Void Linux (and very much enjoy runit, and I’m looking to try openrc). Also I’m not really anti wayland, but I do dislike the squeezing of xorg development, as you mentioned. I’m pretty excited for the Phoenix project, as I’m a big fan of Zig myself, and I’m thinking of contributing. XLibre, I worry may be a lost cause with how many bridges I feel it’s maintainer has burned with so many people, but he’s also very committed so we’ll see.
OP is posting AI slop and plagiarizing other people’s work. Lead image seems a cyanide and happiness cartoon, but it’s a blatent ripoff, and they watermarked it with their own username to boot. And no communication out transparency around any of that as well
I love Lemmy. I hate AI posters.
There are four main flavors
- Debian - For every day
- Red Hat - For work
- Arch - To tinker and learn
- OpenSuSe - To German
Well I’ve been using openSuse for a while and habe noch keine German influence gesehen.
habe noch keine German influence gesehen
haven’t seen any German influence yet.
Got it.
also …
Debian - for when you want to wait two years
Alternatively: when you want to not worry for two years.
The popular Debian based distros are up to date. That said, core Debian stable is indeed boring, but sometimes boring and stable is what you need.
yeah no hate for debian here
I use Kubuntu LTS for that exact reason. Even though I am an experienced Linux user for over 20 years, I don’t have time to fuck around fixing my PC when something goes wrong. It’s stable and it works. And, yes I game on my PC and it’s doing just fine with my 3070 RTX NVidia card with the drivers provided by Ubuntu through their 3rd party driver system. No hassle, no crashing, just me using my computer doing the things I need to do.
Yep, perfect for my server. Literally has never gone down.
Its not even stable though😭 I spent 6 hours fixing my networking on my debian 13 stable server, after it randomly got 90 percent packet loss with no explanation
What was the issue?
no clue, fixed it by configuring my network using nmcli instead of ifupdown or nmtui
Driver issue? That or DNS somehow.
Definitely a brick of an operating system, boring as hell, but reliable and has been that way since ancient times.
Before the dawn of history
Look upon my server uptime and despair
Also the additional flavours of
- Nix – whole OS determined by 1 file
- Gentoo – Arch but it takes longer
- Alpine – small and simple
- Slackware? – for old people
- Void?? – like Alpine but not small and simple
- LFS??? – like Gentoo but takes longer
- AOSP??? – not even really Linux anymore
Gentoo really has nothing to do with arch. Gentoo in my opinion is more like Debian with compiling and rolling release.
And what about Fedora? Last I checked it was wildly popular.
Gentoo is just frequently cited as the “next step up” from Arch and also funny.
And Fedora is bucketed into the Red Hat flavour.
Gentoo – Arch but it takes longer
Supports full binary versions since december 2023.
Slackware? – for old people
Aka people who know what they’re doing and what they want, noted.
Yes, that’s pretty much what I said but more accurate and less funny
I’ve always wondered what the use case for Gentoo-but-binary is. I’m sure there is one, I just can’t think of one.
Adding a binary package host allows Portage to install cryptographically signed, compiled packages. In many cases, adding a binary package host will greatly decrease the mean time to package installation and adds much benefit when running Gentoo on older, slower, or low power systems.
Lazy people who wanna pretend they run gentoo? Dunno either…
Nix – whole OS determined by 1 file
* Can be determined by 1 file. Or one file and a
.lockfile. Or even more files. Your pick, really.You also have a hardware-configuration.nix by default but shhhhh…
- Void - the most BSD Linux (according to BSD people)
the most BSD Linux
Try CRUX.
(Or KISS/Carbs, Side, Parch, Aeryn, Shebang, … and there are other new ones I’ve forgot the name of, that have either BSD userland or BSD style ports packaging systems).
I don’t know which is “the most BSD Linux”, but I suspect “BSD people” may not be the most familiar with the distroverse, having their own things to tend to.
…having their own things to tend to.
“NetBSD!” “No, OpenBSD!” “No, FreeBSD!”
Slackware
Holy sneaky AI image, Batman!
Choice is good when you can make an informed choice. Choice is bad if you are forced to make a decisions where you have no idea of the consequences.
Worst when the newcomers chose Arch because they’ve heard is very configurable.
Then complain that Linux is hard.
There are many correct distro choices (except Ubuntu), but the only correct desktop environment is KDE Plasma.
If Cosmic keeps evolving, it could win me over.
People go about it backwards when recommending/choosing. Beginners should be encouraged pick the desktop environment first (my KDE preference excluded the universal recommendation of Mint). Then the next decision should be stability vs fast updates (potential instability); and then ease of finding support for the inevitable problems they run into (beginners might find it easiest to find support for Debian based distros). Then you’ll have a handful of options left and it really makes no difference which of those are picked.
That being said, I had constant problems when I was starting and the distro with which I managed to get there best start was OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Yet my most downvoted comment ever on Lemmy is suggesting Tumbleweed to beginners.
I think starting with the DE is solid advice. I remember using Ubuntu with Unity many, many moons ago and being put off by the DE, which ultimately delayed my move to desktop Linux. Then I tried Kubuntu and was like, ah, I didn’t know it could be this good. Finally, I tried Mint with Cinnamon and was hooked.
KDE is good for a first go at Linux. I started with SUSE, ages ago, which was nice enough.
But by now, I’m just more of a gnome fan. I don’t know how that will change if I dig deeper into window management logic, but right now, it just works for me.
Edit it is so perfectly fitting for the Linux community to respond with mostly criticisms and negations to these flowcharts I shared without a single negative commenter actually suggesting a different similar helpful resource for newbies to Linux who feel overwhelmed or adding something productive and helpful to the conversation.
Do better y’all.
You can’t condescend these resources and pretend with a handwave like there are better ones out there, you gotta prove it. If you are going to pick apart these charts then you gotta make a new chart or link me to a better one, I don’t care about your condescending minor criticisms of the specifics of the flowcharts, that is irrelevant input unless you are going to edit a flowchart and make a new one or add something else productive.
I feel like I am inside a meme making fun of Linux users right now lol.
https://piefed.blahaj.zone/post/347408
https://lemmy.ca/post/53099450
I appreciate the effort put into this but if answering yes to “are you new to Linux?” leads to the follow up question “apt or rpm?” then there’s a problem.
Exactly. One is a package format and/or local package utility, and the other is a frontend to do downloads and updates for that local package utility.
Should be “rpm or dpkg” — assuming that we’re excluding the other options — and then if someone chooses RPM, you can start talking about the frontend:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager
Front ends
Several front-ends to RPM ease the process of obtaining and installing RPMs from repositories and help in resolving their dependencies. These include:
- yum used in Fedora Linux, CentOS 5 and above, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and above, Scientific Linux, Yellow Dog Linux and Oracle Linux
- DNF, introduced in Fedora Linux 18 (default since 22), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, AlmaLinux 8, and CentOS Linux 8.
- up2date used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS 3 and 4, and Oracle Linux
- Zypper used in Mer (and thus Sailfish OS), MeeGo,[16] openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise
- urpmi used in Mandriva Linux, ROSA Linux and Mageia
- apt-rpm, a port of Debian’s Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) used in Ark Linux,[17] PCLinuxOS and ALT Linux
- Smart Package Manager, used in Unity Linux, available for many distributions including Fedora Linux.
- rpmquery, a command-line utility available in (for example) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- libzypp, for Sailfish OS
Then for
dpkg, you can choose from amongaptitude,apt,apt-get/apt-query/etc, graphical frontend options likesynapticthat one may want to use in parallel with the TUI-based frontends, etc.Sure, but my point was that someone new to Linux can only answer that question with “what the fuck are those”
You’ve completely missed the point. If you’re new to Linux you have no clue what those are and shouldn’t care.
I hate myself but I don’t Gentoo hate myself.
Been there, done that. Eventually got fed up with having to wait 30 minutes to several hours to install (build) something just to try it out, not like it and then delete it.
gentoo for small computing power?? no offense, but that’s bonkers 😹
gentoo for small computing power?? no offense, but that’s bonkers 😹
Why?
Surely if you’ve low computing power, you want to make the best of it… Gentoo can help with that.
Tight compile flags, choosing USE flags carefully to be minimal and snug to meet needs, can make a very very lean efficient-running crisp-feeling system for when you’re using it.
Or, if your concern is more about the package install time, just use the official binhost [the
-goption onemergecommands is your friend], and minimise USE flag changes, and then it’s as fast as any other distro with precompiled binary packages.With the caveat that you’d better cross-compile for the target (low resources) environment unless you’re cold and it’s a long weekend.
Lots of pro-Ubuntu propaganda in those flow charts. At this point, Ubuntu of any flavor shouldn’t be recommended to anyone. There are always better alternatives.
I was going to say something similar. Ubuntu as a server in 202x is… well it’s certainly a choice you could make…
I judge distro chooser flowcharts by whether they correctly point me to Slackware. These both pass.
These are magnificent. Now I can turn off my brain lol.
Redox is UNIX-like, not a BSD flavor. The kernel, init, userland, etc. aren’t BSD related.
LOL.
That’s so broken and biased.
NixOS btw.
No kidding.
Top one is bonkers, would not recommend using it except for meme purposes.
ah, classic hangup. you’re looking for Debian with KDE
