I am so thankful to the people who develop and support these Linux distros . without Linux we would have unnecessary E waste computers filling up landfill sites . I migrated to Linux mint 3 years ago when support for my old imac was stopped . it still runs perfect today . Thank you Linux developers 😘
It's like Christmas listening to you. My first distribution was redhat 5.1, I believe. Back in 98sh. After a year or to switched to Debian and that's what I run today. I've always stuck 2 kde. I first discovered BeOs and had no idea what I was looking at.Listening to you takes me to my happy place. Free Software and Linux Club, back in the days of the LUGs. We had a visit from Richard Stalman, and others. 🎅
Nixos for me, I love the way it does things, having everything in one config file makes reinstalling for trying out different file systems a breeze, not worrying about breakages when updating, the ability to have different versions of the same software installed like having both stable and unstable installed, having a snapshot like feature for your OS without having to use the slower btrfs.
@@Namegoeshere-op9hg Its not really that hard, its easy to install now that it has a GUI installer, and once up and running its not that hard to figure out unless you want to do some obscure stuff.
@@JunkDevJunk NixOS is just a Nix package. (An absurdly customizable Nix package, but a Nix package nonetheless) More specifically, it's a Nix package that builds an activation script that, when run, sets everything up according to how you specified in the configuration. You can build it on any system with Nix, though running that activation script on non NixOS systems is likely to break things.
Some may ask, why Tumbleweed if it is last place? It doesn't seem to break. Arch broke sometimes and there were many updates that required "manual intervention" before or after and if you didn't read the news before updating, you could be down. openSUSE's openQA seems to prevent a lot of problems. Also, there is plenty that one can do to optimize their system. You are not forced to run it a certain way.
@@CyberGizmo Right now, they are not giving it a .ISO of its own. It just gets a month old Tumbleweed .ISO and you just don't enable the repos until you have edited them. They have a page dedicated to it and it's quite simple. I am running it in the kitchen which doesn't matter for downtime, but way over a month and there has been none. If one wants to search for it, it is case sensitive. Slowroll
@@CyberGizmo Endeavour in last place is shocking. On the other hand, fast rolling distros like Arch can be running slow and the next update can change it. Sometimes, even for the better. 🤣
Slackware and FreeBSD are so similar that I went with the former rather than the later a long time ago simply because the WiFi card in my new computer wasn't supported in FreeBSD yet. And then the habit just kinda stuck.
One of the main reasons why I like PopOS. They rollout kernel and mesa drivers fairly often but only after they go through testing for stability. It's a great OS for gaming and general use.
Hmm. huh… Aaaaahhhh. Debian for production. Arch (or Gentoo) for performance. One whopper of an overlook though is Proton. You don't have a game category. Oppsies. Funny thing, that proton was first developed on/for Debian, and is now coupled with Arch. Well, according to wikipedia. Awesome videos DJ Ware! Thank you!!
You're welcome, I do so many things with computers, I rarely have time to play any games, so I am no expert in that area...I could do a noob attempts gaming on linux video :)
@@CyberGizmo my first time playing a computer game was star trek on the teletype. Games got me interested in programming as a kid. Up to that point my interest were just in electronics.
As a grumpy old Slackware user my benchmark is "Does the system piss me off?". I don't care if another distro has 7% faster disk I/O. I don't care if another distro has more packages in their repository. I don't care if my apps are a couple of versions behind. I care about a complete lack of WTF moments. I want stuff to be done the same way it "has always been". And I will under no circumstances, what-so-ever, tolerate the distro talking back to me. If I say "shoot your brains out" the only acceptable response is "BANG!". If I said that by mistake, that's on me. The thing is that I perfectly understand this style of distro is not for everyone. People like to promote the distro they're running, and I think that's stupid. "One size fits nobody" and all that.
Hey I got a chuckle they other day, one of the techie youtubers said the package manager on slackware was really bad...I guess he has never actually used Slackware.
@@CyberGizmo The lack of dependency tracking is not a bug. It's a feature. The dependency information is actually in the .SlackBuild files if you need it.
Since I tried Mint on a couple of machines and not having ANY issues I haven't looked back. So far has worked on every new machine I put it on. I prefer to spend my time using the OS and not fixing things that are not working. Even upgrading the kernel is just so easy.
Linux mint cinnamon... Because it just works.. The only exception in my opinion, from my experience of using it since late 2010..... Is whenever Nemo file manager Has a temporary 5 to 12 2nd freeze. Whenever I am refreshing, my 16 TB. 7200 RPM Toshiba hard drive that is literally field to the brim. With blue ray movies that I am trying to shrink using Handbrake
For me, I keep coming back to fedora more often silver-blue these days. It's the distro that started out as the closest to my personal defaults, after a time I found things like snapper to be really important this is where silver blue caught my attention among other things and now with the ublue spins I've got a lot of excitement for its future. I run XFCE SB as on thin clients for my warehouse. I recently dabbled with Mint and Debian I would go back to those with flatpacks where it mattered if I wanted something more traditional
I have been SuSE/openSUSE user for over 20 years, as my primary OS for daily use, on desktops and laptops, except @office and @gaming. Tumbleweed is the best rolling for me, using nearly since day 1, currently it is on my latest EliteBook 835 G10 7840U/32GB/5G with 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD ... all is working out of box, including ambient light/5G/fingerprint, etc. Also have to mention that KDE/Plasma is my choice. Next best distro, if I ever had to switch would be Fedora, or Arch but man I wish it becomes much more user friendly starting with initial install.
If I was looking for a clean GNOME implementation, openSUSE Aeon, their atomic/immutable. It's probably a better fit for my laptop; not so much for my development workstation where I'm more inclined to run a dynamic tiling window manager for keyboard efficiency. But... I'm much more likely to run Void (with a musl rather than glibc userland, they offer both) and increasingly these days Chimera Linux (musl only and no GNU - they use bsdutils rather than coreutils). Both have a ports tree reminiscent of BSDs and feel comfortable for this long time (but former) FreeBSDer. My desktop OS is always a reflection of personal preferences. I run openSUSE MicroOS and containers on servers.
I know, hopefully they understand that too, but Desktop Environments can impact performance in ways which are strange. ohhhh!, I see what you meant, the title was wrong, I fixed it.
You know what I feel it's missing from the Linux YT space ? A guide for the intermediary - advanced. I mean, there's a lot of focus on things like "which distro is the most newbie-friendly?" or "which distro is the easiest to use" etcetc. I think it would be useful if somebody also made a video about "ok, after you pass the begginer phase, what would be best fitting for you ? If the learning curve and to an extent, ease of use are no longer a factor, what should somebody consider and why ? What could be the distro you settle for long term?". Also here it would also be nice to mention or take into account the things that can be reasonably easy be changed from the defaults. So if a distro by default comes with btrfs or with ext4 but you happen to like or want the other one and the distro offers an easy option to change, then it shouldn't be counted against that distro that it doesn't default to that FS. Or whatever other choice. I guess it would simply be too difficult of a video to make. But I think it would be useful to exist, as a peek into what's to come for the begginers who are already in linux already and could use help to see where to go next. Gentoo FTW!
Linux Mint for me, XFCE4 version for older machines, cinnamon if you want more bling. In my experience Mint just works better than any other distribution I've tried (tried maybe a dozen or so). I really like that I often have a choice between distribution packages or flatpacks for new applications. For some reason many Ubuntu based distributions have some issue with the package manager GUI. When I want to install new applications, searches or looking into categories just give empty lists with three dots. In Mint it just works properly, out of the box. IMO a distribution's package manager/GUI should work properly on a default install. I liked Mint so much I actually donated, first time I thought a distribution was worth it.
I like your point of view how you are talking about distributions. I saw some "Tier Lists" on Tube where people said this or that distribution is pointless. I think this is a very rude way to tell an opinion of something because they say pointless to a distribution which has a lot of work behind it. People should be more polite to each other, all in all they are all working for the Linux world, they are all pulling the same cart.
I've been on Pop_OS for a few weeks now myself. Switched from Garuda (Arch based distro) that I was and am a huge fan of after a switch in GPU's from an AMD card to Nvidia one. I''d used Pop in the past and thought it kinda meh, but having used and daily drove it for the last couple of weeks I gotta say it's solid.
Nice video, DJ! I would just point out that you can pretty easily upgrade the kernel in stable distros like Debian and RHEL/RHEL clones. Linux Mint even includes a GUI option for doing this (which makes me wonder how Edge is different). I know kernel upgrades would mean it's no longer the default OOB experience and could make your stable distro less stable, but folks shouldn't rule these distros out simply because the kernel is older.
Sure you can do that, but there are other system dependencies that might not know what to do with the new kernel, I remember one kernel update a long time ago which was out of sync with libc...that's never a fun experience. Sort of like watching your system self destruct after doing a 'sudo rm -rf /'. Good tip, though, thanks @bradm1507
@@CyberGizmo Yikes, that doesn't sound good lol. I've been fortunate not to have any issues, but might be a little more hesitant going forward. Thanks!
Well done presentation DJ. We are in the age of retirees who are on fixed pensions that were good before the inflation hit. Ero, no membrship for some of us. I do appreciate your professionalism and your well designed presentations.
For myself, I've currently chosen Nobara Linux as it works amazingly well for gaming. I realize there are a couple others out there that work well, but Nobara feels the most polished and easiest to use.
Surprised by the performance (or lack thereof) of EndavourOS. It will still be my go to, the Arch repos especially with the AUR on top are to bountiful, and being able to use the Arch Wiki without limitations is also very nice. But I wonder if it had something to do with the setup... You pinned a comment that you used ext4 for Fedora, did you do the same for EndavourOS? I believe that it does use BTRFS by default these days... Oh well. Not as if I don't use BTRFS anyways. And it sure feels snappy, though that might be due to my use of a ridiculously fast SSD.
Hi Samuel, I am concern about that as well, was going to do some analysis of that issue to find out what is going on with it, it should be much better than that. I didn't make any changes to the filesystem, so if it is BTRFS I think I will change it to ext4 and rerun and see how it places, BTRFS will definitely flood the kernel with copy-mem sysreqs
@@DCM777. When it comes to things such as boot times I'm absolutely with you, but in "regular" benchmarks such as FFMPEG I'd rather expect endavour to win over a "basic" arch installation. Endavour uses arch repos for packages, so fundamentally they have the same capabilities, but endavour might install more acceleration libraries than a bare arch installation. This is probably also a reason that popOS won. If you look at eg. The arch Wiki for zram, it references popOS as source for some recommended settings. So I guess popOS comes with zram by default, which I'd expect to help with some things, such as benchmarks with datasets exceeding system RAM. There probably isn't a benchmark that is helped by that in this test, but I am just using this as a representat for some optimizations that can help "bloated" Linux distros.
@@DCM777. Is that so? Assuming that I were to follow your oh so wise recommendation, how would I be able to tell that I gained enough wisdom to come back? Let's take your comment as an orientation for my lack of wisdom. I'd say that saying that BTRFS is faster than EXT4 is nonsense. It has a different performance profile. It will be faster in some situations, and slower in others. Take for example a swap file. Using BTRFS for that is it a good idea, not just for the life of your drive, but also for performance, since that is one big file that has a huge amount of changes over time, which hurts massively with the copy on write default of BTRFS. You needed to either disable a quite fundamental feature of BTRFS or it will destroy your drive and be quite abut slower. Second example, you've got a fast SSD that doesn't accelerates compression, you've set up a BTRFS with compression - the default - and an uncompressible file (any compressed file is, assuming perfect compression, no longer compressible. Eg photos, or videos are compressed). BTRFS is gonna be worse here, since it burns cpu time on compression. Please, tell me your wisdom, what have I missed? Since BTRFS is apparently faster than exf4 in an unqualified way, I clearly did. Please, choose any one of these to refute. If you don't, I sure know which person I will assume to talk nonsense.
Do you have an idea why Mint scored low in the GLmark2 test. *Actually I don't know what that test does, but Mint (my favorite OS) looked to score much better in the other tests - see *. Thanks.
GARUDA - an Arch distro was playing with some months back & thought this would be a cool, slick & easy experience as a 1st distro. Blend looked like a way to try em all, I haven't messed with it... My dailys aren't as fun with RHEL, Ubuntu, Oracle is (RHEL), & Alpine.
There might be an update OS step missing before running the performance tests. Why? Because my Ububtu 22.04 LTS is now running 6.2 kernel and not 5-dot-something as DJWare mentioned. And I didn't do anything on purpose for that, was just running regular apt update & upgrade. But I loved the idea of benchmarking distros on your own hardware, it gives some interesting insights
I WANT to use Arch btw, but I keep coming back to Pop OS. It performs well, has tiling and sensible keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and I can use GNOME extensions such as Focus that do not work in GNOME 45+ to rice it. When Pop switches to COSMIC, I'll lose those extensions, unfortunately.
Have you tried Manjaro ? I first tried Tumbleweed, then switched. It's friendlier than Arch and more reliable while still having access to the AUR and many Arch packages.
Moved to Arch 20 years ago. probably installed it on more than 250 computers & VMs I've lost count of how many computers I've had, but it's always been roughly the same. pacman export of installed package names on the old system copy the home directory then pacman install of the packages on the list. I still have the same Openbox config from that era and use it from time to time.
For me I love any Linux desktop that allows me to invoke sound when I code in the terminal. In that regard, Plasma is the devil! I don't use any fancy IDE, with bells and whistles. Bash does everything I want!
yeah I grew up in that time period, you could have any desktop color you wanted as long as it was gun metal gray, and your terminal screen could be any color you wanted as long as it was in green (later amber)
The non-kde one with 1-line panel. KDE issue for me: it uses so much memory. Ubuntu: a left panel + a top panel: a waste of screen estate. OpenBox + tint2 or Hyprland + waybar suite me (both use 1.6GB of ram in cachyos), but all the themes, configurations for hyprland + waybar that I've seen until now waste a lot of screen space. So, finally, as I don't have much energy and time to configure hyprland and waybar, I come back to Windows 11 with a 2-line bottom panel :(
Look, DJ, I really do appreciate you doing all of this and giving us real information. I'm looking to choose a new desktop OS so this helps a lot! BUT....(always a but)....We cannot see your screen. When you bring up the web browser, and it's not "zoomed," we cannot see (well) the graphs and text along with them. AND when we try to zoom it, the text is unreadable. Some of us are old and cannot see as well as we would like too. :) Could you fix this in the future? It would help many of your viewers. Keep up doing the great videos!
One time I was using random() function in xinitrc from 5 DEs and lots of WMs. Every login I had a different candy flavour. I bet you can do something similar with distro itself, but it has to be virtualized in some form.
Thanks DJ, few surprises here I guess. Very surprised with POP_OS performance (good) and very dissapointed with OpenSuse. But it seems to be correct, when I did simillar tests OpenSuse Thumbleweed vs Leap, somehow Leap always does slightly better. But with so many variations in hardware, you can never assume that this or that distribution will perform as good on different types of hardware. Thanks again. Still hoping for studio tour and your hardware setup tour, look your audience is mostly geeks, I run everything from old Celeron 1GHz with MS-DOS, Core2Duo Windows XP, i3 with Windows 7, i5 Windows 10, i3 with Debian 9, i5 Ubuntu 22.04, i3 OpenSuse Leap, RPi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS. We just curious what's in your cupboards ;-)
well I guess I better do a studio tour then, it will be short, the video is mostly what you see on the videos...just need to swing the camera around the other way for a bit. BTW welcome and thanks for the confirmation on openSuse.
Fedora was one of the four which did not complete all the tests successfully, when you calculate a geomean across 43 tests, an incomplete counts as a zero score for that particular result.
EndeavourOS fanboys will go crazy now! Lol! :P My favourite distro's are Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora, Debian & Manjaro. I would loved to see how Manjaro performs in these tests, something tells me that it would perform better than EndeavourOS.
I am a Fedora user. But to view mp4 files, I have to boot to Manjaro. And I noted that Manjaro has the look and feel that I have with Fedora 39. I also take the time to help out the Fedora developers by beta testing new releases. Do you do a lot of /etc/fstab manipulation or updates? I wrote a software that validates every /etc/fstab table, with string validation. The program reformats the fields into neat columns, The /etc/fstab equivalent that is produced can be used to replace the existing fstab table. Interested in a complementary copy? I am the author, and I make it available gpl3.
OpenSuSe and Fedora has no HW accelerated H264/H265 support out of the box for legal reasons but it can be enabled via extra repos after install. OpenSuse is also running BTRFS by default so I/O will be lower. Only mentioning it, I know this was an out of box test and that's fair. :) Looking forward to the NIX people coming in and complain about it getting left out. ;) (Just kidding).
Oh i am sure they will, but each test takes 4 hours and I;ve got 40 hours in already, so doing all 600 is a meer 6000 hours or 250 days or 8 months, and by that time there will be at least two new releases of the distros and 4 releases of the kernel....I could make a career out of this. LOL
I do like my BTRFS snapshots. They have saved me from myself more than once. I'll give up a little speed for that. 😀 Besides, the openSUSE guys were the ones that got the sub-volumes all set up and working. Coming from Arch/btrfs/Timeshift, it did take a bit of adaptation, but now I will take Snapper any day of the week.
KDE-- on most any distro-- was my "goto"-- until they f....d it up with this last update.. NO tiling-- but I found the tiling part- just haven't got it to work. I DON"T DO key crap... and WON"T-- that's BS on a gui distro!!
@@CyberGizmo Most breaks occur right after kernel releases. Effects most socket/thread-based programs. For instance, screensaver constantly gives trouble on any WM after kernel updates.
These are all problematic, I'm always cussing my system,whichever one I'm running. Of course, they'd probably work better if an idiot wasn't running them.
One thing, I did set Fedora up with an ext4 filesystem
In openSUSE too - or did you use the default btrfs there?
Love the beard. Looking like a wise open sourcerer.🧙♂
I thought the very same, don't shave it off please.
You always need to respect your Unix gray beards
I am so thankful to the people who develop and support these Linux distros . without Linux we would have unnecessary E waste computers filling up landfill sites . I migrated to Linux mint 3 years ago when support for my old imac was stopped . it still runs perfect today . Thank you Linux developers 😘
Yes!
Equally, imagine time wasted (worldwide) on each reboot right after driver/system updates with windows trash.
It's like Christmas listening to you. My first distribution was redhat 5.1, I believe. Back in 98sh. After a year or to switched to Debian and that's what I run today. I've always stuck 2 kde. I first discovered BeOs and had no idea what I was looking at.Listening to you takes me to my happy place. Free Software and Linux Club, back in the days of the LUGs. We had a visit from Richard Stalman, and others. 🎅
Happy holidays! LOL. thanks @sRoGoRs!
LoL I can imagine him saying "HoHoHo, I'm DJWare"
Nixos for me, I love the way it does things, having everything in one config file makes reinstalling for trying out different file systems a breeze, not worrying about breakages when updating, the ability to have different versions of the same software installed like having both stable and unstable installed, having a snapshot like feature for your OS without having to use the slower btrfs.
Someday I hope to have the skills to do this. Ideal setup, imho.
@@Namegoeshere-op9hg Its not really that hard, its easy to install now that it has a GUI installer, and once up and running its not that hard to figure out unless you want to do some obscure stuff.
Nix is a config file or a package manager at Best. Not a Linux distro.
@@JunkDevJunk Nixos uses the linux kernel, it uses gnu software, it uses a package manager, so it is a linux distro.
@@JunkDevJunk NixOS is just a Nix package. (An absurdly customizable Nix package, but a Nix package nonetheless) More specifically, it's a Nix package that builds an activation script that, when run, sets everything up according to how you specified in the configuration. You can build it on any system with Nix, though running that activation script on non NixOS systems is likely to break things.
Good morning Mr. Ware.
Tumbleweed for me, but I am testing SlowRoll on a second PC and I am very impressed. I hope they release it soon.
I hope so too! I want to give it a test
Some may ask, why Tumbleweed if it is last place? It doesn't seem to break. Arch broke sometimes and there were many updates that required "manual intervention" before or after and if you didn't read the news before updating, you could be down. openSUSE's openQA seems to prevent a lot of problems. Also, there is plenty that one can do to optimize their system. You are not forced to run it a certain way.
@@act.13.41 its not in last place, i was surprised to see endeavour OS was.
@@CyberGizmo Right now, they are not giving it a .ISO of its own. It just gets a month old Tumbleweed .ISO and you just don't enable the repos until you have edited them. They have a page dedicated to it and it's quite simple.
I am running it in the kitchen which doesn't matter for downtime, but way over a month and there has been none.
If one wants to search for it, it is case sensitive. Slowroll
@@CyberGizmo Endeavour in last place is shocking. On the other hand, fast rolling distros like Arch can be running slow and the next update can change it. Sometimes, even for the better. 🤣
DJ Ware: "Comparing 10 Popular Linux Distros: Which One Rules Your Desktop?"
Me, looking left, then right: "Uh, FreeBSD"
Ok ok, point taken will see what kind of a comparison I can come up with that bridges that one
Slackware and FreeBSD are so similar that I went with the former rather than the later a long time ago simply because the WiFi card in my new computer wasn't supported in FreeBSD yet. And then the habit just kinda stuck.
@@andersjjensen Correct; because both don't use 'systemd' crap. Just because of that I switched over FreeBSD.
Not sure if anybody is talking about it, but it looks like Damn Small Linux is making a comeback.
Nice to hear, thanks for the tip @RK-kn1ud
One of the main reasons why I like PopOS. They rollout kernel and mesa drivers fairly often but only after they go through testing for stability. It's a great OS for gaming and general use.
My favorite person on RUclips! Always love your videos, sir!
Thank you Sir, I appreciate your kind words and encourgement!
Finally a tier list that explains its tiers and is oriented towards use cases.
But it's not a tier list, but a category list. Here there's no order between them, there's no good or bad, which would be in a tier list.
I still feel at home with openSuse leap and Plasma, but I've spent the last 30 days with Fedora and I'm impressed.
Another great DJ video!
Hmm. huh… Aaaaahhhh. Debian for production. Arch (or Gentoo) for performance. One whopper of an overlook though is Proton. You don't have a game category. Oppsies. Funny thing, that proton was first developed on/for Debian, and is now coupled with Arch. Well, according to wikipedia. Awesome videos DJ Ware! Thank you!!
You're welcome, I do so many things with computers, I rarely have time to play any games, so I am no expert in that area...I could do a noob attempts gaming on linux video :)
Proton was developed on/for Ubuntu but Canonical wanted to drop 32-bit support so Valve moved to Arch because Steam needs 32-bit support to function.
@@CyberGizmo my first time playing a computer game was star trek on the teletype. Games got me interested in programming as a kid. Up to that point my interest were just in electronics.
As a grumpy old Slackware user my benchmark is "Does the system piss me off?". I don't care if another distro has 7% faster disk I/O. I don't care if another distro has more packages in their repository. I don't care if my apps are a couple of versions behind.
I care about a complete lack of WTF moments. I want stuff to be done the same way it "has always been". And I will under no circumstances, what-so-ever, tolerate the distro talking back to me. If I say "shoot your brains out" the only acceptable response is "BANG!". If I said that by mistake, that's on me.
The thing is that I perfectly understand this style of distro is not for everyone. People like to promote the distro they're running, and I think that's stupid. "One size fits nobody" and all that.
Hey I got a chuckle they other day, one of the techie youtubers said the package manager on slackware was really bad...I guess he has never actually used Slackware.
@@CyberGizmo The lack of dependency tracking is not a bug. It's a feature. The dependency information is actually in the .SlackBuild files if you need it.
I always wondered why I've always had such a good time with the “beginner distro” Linux mint, was not expecting to rank so high.
Since I tried Mint on a couple of machines and not having ANY issues I haven't looked back. So far has worked on every new machine I put it on. I prefer to spend my time using the OS and not fixing things that are not working. Even upgrading the kernel is just so easy.
Linux mint cinnamon... Because it just works..
The only exception in my opinion, from my experience of using it since late 2010..... Is whenever Nemo file manager Has a temporary 5 to 12 2nd freeze. Whenever I am refreshing, my 16 TB. 7200 RPM Toshiba hard drive that is literally field to the brim. With blue ray movies that I am trying to shrink using Handbrake
Never saw "second" (the unit of time) shortened to 2nd ... it took me a while to realize what I was reading lol
For me, I keep coming back to fedora more often silver-blue these days. It's the distro that started out as the closest to my personal defaults, after a time I found things like snapper to be really important this is where silver blue caught my attention among other things and now with the ublue spins I've got a lot of excitement for its future.
I run XFCE SB as on thin clients for my warehouse.
I recently dabbled with Mint and Debian I would go back to those with flatpacks where it mattered if I wanted something more traditional
I have been SuSE/openSUSE user for over 20 years, as my primary OS for daily use, on desktops and laptops, except @office and @gaming. Tumbleweed is the best rolling for me, using nearly since day 1, currently it is on my latest EliteBook 835 G10 7840U/32GB/5G with 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD ... all is working out of box, including ambient light/5G/fingerprint, etc. Also have to mention that KDE/Plasma is my choice. Next best distro, if I ever had to switch would be Fedora, or Arch but man I wish it becomes much more user friendly starting with initial install.
Arch now has a CLI guided installer and it's great. It installs even your DE for you. It's called archinstall.
If you want Arch with more user friendliness and more reliability, there's Manjaro stable.
Thank you for the quality content. I am always looking forward to a new video.
Welcome @tmendoza6 and thinks for the kind comment!
If I was looking for a clean GNOME implementation, openSUSE Aeon, their atomic/immutable. It's probably a better fit for my laptop; not so much for my development workstation where I'm more inclined to run a dynamic tiling window manager for keyboard efficiency.
But... I'm much more likely to run Void (with a musl rather than glibc userland, they offer both) and increasingly these days Chimera Linux (musl only and no GNU - they use bsdutils rather than coreutils). Both have a ports tree reminiscent of BSDs and feel comfortable for this long time (but former)
FreeBSDer. My desktop OS is always a reflection of personal preferences. I run openSUSE MicroOS and containers on servers.
Dear DJ Ware, I hope you're making a clear distinction between Linux Desktop and Linux Distro!
I know, hopefully they understand that too, but Desktop Environments can impact performance in ways which are strange. ohhhh!, I see what you meant, the title was wrong, I fixed it.
You know what I feel it's missing from the Linux YT space ? A guide for the intermediary - advanced. I mean, there's a lot of focus on things like "which distro is the most newbie-friendly?" or "which distro is the easiest to use" etcetc.
I think it would be useful if somebody also made a video about "ok, after you pass the begginer phase, what would be best fitting for you ? If the learning curve and to an extent, ease of use are no longer a factor, what should somebody consider and why ? What could be the distro you settle for long term?". Also here it would also be nice to mention or take into account the things that can be reasonably easy be changed from the defaults. So if a distro by default comes with btrfs or with ext4 but you happen to like or want the other one and the distro offers an easy option to change, then it shouldn't be counted against that distro that it doesn't default to that FS. Or whatever other choice.
I guess it would simply be too difficult of a video to make. But I think it would be useful to exist, as a peek into what's to come for the begginers who are already in linux already and could use help to see where to go next.
Gentoo FTW!
good suggestion will work on that, starting tomorrow
@@CyberGizmo Oh, that would be awesome, I can't wait. Thanks!
Linux Mint for me, XFCE4 version for older machines, cinnamon if you want more bling. In my experience Mint just works better than any other distribution I've tried (tried maybe a dozen or so). I really like that I often have a choice between distribution packages or flatpacks for new applications. For some reason many Ubuntu based distributions have some issue with the package manager GUI. When I want to install new applications, searches or looking into categories just give empty lists with three dots. In Mint it just works properly, out of the box. IMO a distribution's package manager/GUI should work properly on a default install. I liked Mint so much I actually donated, first time I thought a distribution was worth it.
I like your point of view how you are talking about distributions. I saw some "Tier Lists" on Tube where people said this or that distribution is pointless. I think this is a very rude way to tell an opinion of something because they say pointless to a distribution which has a lot of work behind it. People should be more polite to each other, all in all they are all working for the Linux world, they are all pulling the same cart.
I've been on Pop_OS for a few weeks now myself. Switched from Garuda (Arch based distro) that I was and am a huge fan of after a switch in GPU's from an AMD card to Nvidia one. I''d used Pop in the past and thought it kinda meh, but having used and daily drove it for the last couple of weeks I gotta say it's solid.
Manjaro stable with Plasma works fine. The power of Arch and its AUR with the added reliability of additional testing steps and user friendliness.
Nice video, DJ! I would just point out that you can pretty easily upgrade the kernel in stable distros like Debian and RHEL/RHEL clones. Linux Mint even includes a GUI option for doing this (which makes me wonder how Edge is different). I know kernel upgrades would mean it's no longer the default OOB experience and could make your stable distro less stable, but folks shouldn't rule these distros out simply because the kernel is older.
Sure you can do that, but there are other system dependencies that might not know what to do with the new kernel, I remember one kernel update a long time ago which was out of sync with libc...that's never a fun experience. Sort of like watching your system self destruct after doing a 'sudo rm -rf /'. Good tip, though, thanks @bradm1507
@@CyberGizmo Yikes, that doesn't sound good lol. I've been fortunate not to have any issues, but might be a little more hesitant going forward. Thanks!
Well done presentation DJ. We are in the age of retirees who are on fixed pensions that were good before the inflation hit. Ero, no membrship for some of us. I do appreciate your professionalism and your well designed presentations.
Thank you, Sir!
For myself, I've currently chosen Nobara Linux as it works amazingly well for gaming. I realize there are a couple others out there that work well, but Nobara feels the most polished and easiest to use.
Surprised by the performance (or lack thereof) of EndavourOS.
It will still be my go to, the Arch repos especially with the AUR on top are to bountiful, and being able to use the Arch Wiki without limitations is also very nice.
But I wonder if it had something to do with the setup... You pinned a comment that you used ext4 for Fedora, did you do the same for EndavourOS? I believe that it does use BTRFS by default these days... Oh well. Not as if I don't use BTRFS anyways. And it sure feels snappy, though that might be due to my use of a ridiculously fast SSD.
Hi Samuel, I am concern about that as well, was going to do some analysis of that issue to find out what is going on with it, it should be much better than that. I didn't make any changes to the filesystem, so if it is BTRFS I think I will change it to ext4 and rerun and see how it places, BTRFS will definitely flood the kernel with copy-mem sysreqs
Arch runs faster than EndeavorOS (Lot of bloat!) and Btrfs is also faster than ext4
@@DCM777. When it comes to things such as boot times I'm absolutely with you, but in "regular" benchmarks such as FFMPEG I'd rather expect endavour to win over a "basic" arch installation. Endavour uses arch repos for packages, so fundamentally they have the same capabilities, but endavour might install more acceleration libraries than a bare arch installation.
This is probably also a reason that popOS won. If you look at eg. The arch Wiki for zram, it references popOS as source for some recommended settings. So I guess popOS comes with zram by default, which I'd expect to help with some things, such as benchmarks with datasets exceeding system RAM. There probably isn't a benchmark that is helped by that in this test, but I am just using this as a representat for some optimizations that can help "bloated" Linux distros.
@@9SMTM6 You are talking nonsense, come back when you gained some wisdom! Bye>
@@DCM777. Is that so? Assuming that I were to follow your oh so wise recommendation, how would I be able to tell that I gained enough wisdom to come back?
Let's take your comment as an orientation for my lack of wisdom. I'd say that saying that BTRFS is faster than EXT4 is nonsense. It has a different performance profile. It will be faster in some situations, and slower in others. Take for example a swap file. Using BTRFS for that is it a good idea, not just for the life of your drive, but also for performance, since that is one big file that has a huge amount of changes over time, which hurts massively with the copy on write default of BTRFS. You needed to either disable a quite fundamental feature of BTRFS or it will destroy your drive and be quite abut slower.
Second example, you've got a fast SSD that doesn't accelerates compression, you've set up a BTRFS with compression - the default - and an uncompressible file (any compressed file is, assuming perfect compression, no longer compressible. Eg photos, or videos are compressed). BTRFS is gonna be worse here, since it burns cpu time on compression.
Please, tell me your wisdom, what have I missed? Since BTRFS is apparently faster than exf4 in an unqualified way, I clearly did.
Please, choose any one of these to refute. If you don't, I sure know which person I will assume to talk nonsense.
Another great video Dj!
Thanks again! Great to see you, Oziq
Beard of knowledge has spoken!
LOL
Do you have an idea why Mint scored low in the GLmark2 test. *Actually I don't know what that test does, but Mint (my favorite OS) looked to score much better in the other tests - see *. Thanks.
GARUDA - an Arch distro was playing with some months back & thought this would be a cool, slick & easy experience as a 1st distro.
Blend looked like a way to try em all, I haven't messed with it...
My dailys aren't as fun with RHEL, Ubuntu, Oracle is (RHEL), & Alpine.
There might be an update OS step missing before running the performance tests. Why? Because my Ububtu 22.04 LTS is now running 6.2 kernel and not 5-dot-something as DJWare mentioned. And I didn't do anything on purpose for that, was just running regular apt update & upgrade.
But I loved the idea of benchmarking distros on your own hardware, it gives some interesting insights
I didn't benchmark 22.04 LTS, I used 23.10 which was 6.5.0-17 at the time I made the video. Hope that helps.
@@CyberGizmo sorry sir, I again misheard everything :)
as always: Debian for servers, Archlinux for desktop
I run Archlinux for many years now as a server without any problems.
@@DCM777. Sure but I don't need so many trivial updates in the host, i prefer predictable updates
@@luigitech3169 Lol trivial updates. Ok buddy>
Ubuntu, right or wrong my distro, since Windows Vista.
I WANT to use Arch btw, but I keep coming back to Pop OS. It performs well, has tiling and sensible keyboard shortcuts out of the box, and I can use GNOME extensions such as Focus that do not work in GNOME 45+ to rice it. When Pop switches to COSMIC, I'll lose those extensions, unfortunately.
Have you tried Manjaro ? I first tried Tumbleweed, then switched. It's friendlier than Arch and more reliable while still having access to the AUR and many Arch packages.
Anybody know what the music at the beginning was? I've been trying to find out what that music is called for ages.
Moved to Arch 20 years ago.
probably installed it on more than 250 computers & VMs
I've lost count of how many computers I've had, but it's always been roughly the same.
pacman export of installed package names on the old system
copy the home directory then pacman install of the packages on the list.
I still have the same Openbox config from that era and use it from time to time.
Nice!
For me I love any Linux desktop that allows me to invoke sound when I code in the terminal. In that regard, Plasma is the devil! I don't use any fancy IDE, with bells and whistles. Bash does everything I want!
I too, have gone back to bash. I don't think we are the only ones. Fish and ZSH are ok, but meh.
yeah I grew up in that time period, you could have any desktop color you wanted as long as it was gun metal gray, and your terminal screen could be any color you wanted as long as it was in green (later amber)
Currently Arco Linux Xfce. I'm surprised Endeavour OS scored low compared to the others🤔
Apparently, there was issue in 6.7 which caused Endeavour to score lower, next time I cover the comparisons I will include the updated Kernel
The non-kde one with 1-line panel. KDE issue for me: it uses so much memory. Ubuntu: a left panel + a top panel: a waste of screen estate. OpenBox + tint2 or Hyprland + waybar suite me (both use 1.6GB of ram in cachyos), but all the themes, configurations for hyprland + waybar that I've seen until now waste a lot of screen space. So, finally, as I don't have much energy and time to configure hyprland and waybar, I come back to Windows 11 with a 2-line bottom panel :(
Look, DJ, I really do appreciate you doing all of this and giving us real information. I'm looking to choose a new desktop OS so this helps a lot! BUT....(always a but)....We cannot see your screen. When you bring up the web browser, and it's not "zoomed," we cannot see (well) the graphs and text along with them. AND when we try to zoom it, the text is unreadable. Some of us are old and cannot see as well as we would like too. :)
Could you fix this in the future? It would help many of your viewers.
Keep up doing the great videos!
Hola DJ Ware como me recomienda instalar endeavourOS con systemd-boot o grub y que sistema de archivo btrfs o ext4 saludos
Saludos @juarncarlosfernandez5559. Estoy usando grub para este punto de referencia. El sistema de archivos para este banco es ext4.
Muchas gracias por su amabilidad@@CyberGizmo
One time I was using random() function in xinitrc from 5 DEs and lots of WMs. Every login I had a different candy flavour. I bet you can do something similar with distro itself, but it has to be virtualized in some form.
Thanks for unbiased information! Keep posting please
Thanks DJ, few surprises here I guess. Very surprised with POP_OS performance (good) and very dissapointed with OpenSuse. But it seems to be correct, when I did simillar tests OpenSuse Thumbleweed vs Leap, somehow Leap always does slightly better. But with so many variations in hardware, you can never assume that this or that distribution will perform as good on different types of hardware. Thanks again. Still hoping for studio tour and your hardware setup tour, look your audience is mostly geeks, I run everything from old Celeron 1GHz with MS-DOS, Core2Duo Windows XP, i3 with Windows 7, i5 Windows 10, i3 with Debian 9, i5 Ubuntu 22.04, i3 OpenSuse Leap, RPi 4 with Raspberry Pi OS. We just curious what's in your cupboards ;-)
well I guess I better do a studio tour then, it will be short, the video is mostly what you see on the videos...just need to swing the camera around the other way for a bit. BTW welcome and thanks for the confirmation on openSuse.
@@CyberGizmo I'm really looking forward to it, and I bet you whole community too 😀
If Fedora is set with ext4, what would be the cause of having such low scores on the benchmarks?
Fedora was one of the four which did not complete all the tests successfully, when you calculate a geomean across 43 tests, an incomplete counts as a zero score for that particular result.
EndeavourOS fanboys will go crazy now! Lol! :P My favourite distro's are Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora, Debian & Manjaro. I would loved to see how Manjaro performs in these tests, something tells me that it would perform better than EndeavourOS.
I am a Fedora user. But to view mp4 files, I have to boot to Manjaro. And I noted that Manjaro has the look and feel that I have with Fedora 39. I also take the time to help out the Fedora developers by beta testing new releases.
Do you do a lot of /etc/fstab manipulation or updates? I wrote a software that validates every /etc/fstab table, with string validation. The program reformats the fields into neat columns,
The /etc/fstab equivalent that is produced can be used to replace the existing fstab table.
Interested in a complementary copy? I am the author, and I make it available gpl3.
you should talk about gaming distros for the gaming crowd. cough cough nobara linux
Dbebian!
Because is the best distro.
KDE Plasma!
Because is the best desktop environment.
Another amazing video! Thank you once again and have a beautiful day!
Hi, tkana food this Vizio, why not add also Manjaro, Garuda and Novara?
system 76 is like the Apple of Linux, they make their own hardware and software
The Linux uncle I never had
Is Fedora part of Red Hat?
OpenSuSe and Fedora has no HW accelerated H264/H265 support out of the box for legal reasons but it can be enabled via extra repos after install. OpenSuse is also running BTRFS by default so I/O will be lower.
Only mentioning it, I know this was an out of box test and that's fair. :)
Looking forward to the NIX people coming in and complain about it getting left out. ;) (Just kidding).
Oh i am sure they will, but each test takes 4 hours and I;ve got 40 hours in already, so doing all 600 is a meer 6000 hours or 250 days or 8 months, and by that time there will be at least two new releases of the distros and 4 releases of the kernel....I could make a career out of this. LOL
I do like my BTRFS snapshots. They have saved me from myself more than once. I'll give up a little speed for that. 😀 Besides, the openSUSE guys were the ones that got the sub-volumes all set up and working. Coming from Arch/btrfs/Timeshift, it did take a bit of adaptation, but now I will take Snapper any day of the week.
@@act.13.41 I wouldn't run a system without it to be frank.
Using Fedora 39 KDE.......this week
KDE-- on most any distro-- was my "goto"-- until they f....d it up with this last update.. NO tiling-- but I found the tiling part- just haven't got it to work. I DON"T DO key crap... and WON"T-- that's BS on a gui distro!!
If you don't want to become crazy the only feasible distribution is an ubuntu-based like Linux Mint.
Fedora broke my system few times...
it will break more, it always seems to happen closer to a new release (probably the testers are busy working on the new one)
@@CyberGizmo Most breaks occur right after kernel releases. Effects most socket/thread-based programs. For instance, screensaver constantly gives trouble on any WM after kernel updates.
Simple. You just run Arch. ;)
"OOBANTOO" doesn't exist.
How should it be pronounced?
People have accents, pretending otherwise is pretentious.
The Bot is back, he doesn't actually know
opensuse tumbleweed running here
Use the fork Luke! 😂
🤣🤣🤣 May the FOSS be with you. Always.
what nerd gave you a thumbs down? :D
Haters be hatin;
These are all problematic, I'm always cussing my system,whichever one I'm running. Of course, they'd probably work better if an idiot wasn't running them.