Gentoo was insanely difficult to build practically from scratch when it first arrived in the early 2000's. Getting a decent X session running in the '90s was a challenge, too!
In this point. we don't need to sacrifice our lives installing a Gnu-Linux distro with a hard, old, or rare installation; the final experience, quality, performance, optimization, etc. of it will be equal like another easy distro once you had installed. Nothing is enough to justify a hard installation currently. It's a pure masochism to believe that the "hard" is "better".
The command line install has real advantages, it’s not the difficulty for the sake of- for example, I haven’t seen a gui installer yet that can install on to a USB stick, even with all physical drives removed, the bootloader always fails to install properly, and if you have a sda connected it will install grub there even if you explicitly tell it not to. I had to use arch for this just because of the flexibility of the install, when Debian would have been more appropriate for my application.
You speak for yourself and organise your time how you want to organise it - but don't tell me how to organise mine. I've used Gentoo only for 20 years now and I have put a lot of time and effort into what others call a "hard" distro or "a distro that does not value your time". If others believe that then that is up to them but I have programmed computers for 40+ years now (I started back in 1982 programming assembly language on Z80 CPUs and that was on a college course) and I've made computing my main hobby and source of income for all that time too. In 40 years, I have never had a day without a job, and my knowledge and experience over that time, far from being wasted, means that I have, at least for the past 20 years working on Red Hat Linux servers, been paid to "do my hobby" - which is fine by me.
I mean there are prob hard to install distros that are very niche and geared towards very specific hardware or use case where it is an advantage to use those, but generally yes you are right
Linux is very easy these days. Most people do not understand what difficult means when it comes to Linux. The 1990's early 2000's dependency hell. The difficulty of waiting days, not hours, but days for Gentoo to compile everything, the absolute nightmare that Slackware could be when trying to get software working. These days people think it is "difficut" when widget a isn't working the way they want it to, and widget b isn't as pretty as widget c LOL
As a longtime Slackware user I've never understood the complaints. As long as you install every package that comes with the installer it'll work flawlessly for most things you want to install that have a configure script and even alternative build methods will often work on the first try. First time I had any issues with installing a given piece of software was this past year when I decided I wanted to finally try out FlatPak. I couldn't get one of the dependencies to build and just left it, but I'm fine with that because I prefer AppImages anyway. Literally everything else I've wanted to use I have been able to either find a binary for or build it myself from source.
Yup, my Arch installs are a lot harder and you have to really think of the steps in correct order... Arch on ZFS Root requires a bit of planning and tactics, even more if you are doing it on a BIOS non UEFI boot and want the zfsbootmenu to handle the startup.
I agree 100% about major distro release upgrades being "difficult"... if you have a carefully tuned system with a lot of very specific optimizations and configurations, doing a dist-upgrade is the most stressful thing you will do all year. Since using Arch I've never had an update cause more than a minor hiccup (all my issues were Nvidia driver related) whereas I've had Ubuntu and other Debian based distros break so bad that I've had to reformat.
@@Skelterbane69 I've been using Arch for 8 months already and 0 problem in my main Pc and laptop. The main reason for me is the AUR cause it has all the packages and I don't need to add repositories each time that I want to install something that is not in the repository. Also it could be said that being on the edge gives you security updates on the installed apps.
@@Crow-lz7et Since all of the programs I need are all available as flatpaks, I've been reconsidering just about any distro that can handle them (I.e. 99% of em), so it's all comedown to stable vs rolling release. I initially thought that flatpaks were almost never updated, but most of the updates I got in Mint, were flatpak related, so now I'm in a dilemma. Stable or rolling, which is best for my flatpaks? That's about all that matters to me, other than stability.
I’m still pretty new to using Linux as a daily driver. There have been two version releases for my Laptop’s Linux Mint, haven’t had any issues there. I’m using Artix on my main machine. I’ve had a few issues that were easy enough to resolve, just some applications not working as the latest versions or issues due to having an nvidia card and the new drivers can cause some programs to stop working correctly. Mostly OBS, but the latest updates haven’t broken OBS for me. Just one version release the previous version from the current. The newest one didn’t even break with the new drivers surprisingly. I’m still learning. But so far so good. Everything that has updated has appeared to update properly. The kernel and everything. So I guess I’ll continue as I am for now. 😅
I really like gentoo. In my opinion, portage is one of the nicest package managers to use, port trees make finding packages so nice, and the search functions are great. However, I don’t currently run gentoo, mainly because my computers are all potato laptops and and would take a week to do an @world update.
i don't get the point of Gentoo, on a more powerful machines compiling software for yourself with optimizations and use flags is not needed, and on a potatoes compiling browser would probably take a week or so
@@ДарийФедореев-э7т Use flags are useful for more than just performance optimization, they also let you customize how software works, adding in extra features, removing ones you don’t want, and deciding which libraries you want to compile to (think LibreSSL vs. OpenSSL).
@@tiberiusmagnificuscaeser4929 i mean, generic build from Arch or Debian repos usually has all flags enabled, and removing them is not really doing anything on a more powerful PC - unless you really care about few saved megabytes
Gently was useful for compiling smaller programs on machines that only need a few of them that way you can really optimize exactly what you're installing and installing is still pretty simple to do For example I think that having a gently distribution on a cloud computer would be pretty useful
I don't like portage because you have to type a ton of long strings into a file along with repeating your password a bunch of times during the process, to unmask a package. And portage just directs you to the darn MAN pages whenever it does that, when it could probably explain how to unmask it. And then the config updaters are touted as "useful" when they feel clunky and confusing.
Installing Gentoo is pretty easy when you follow the handbook. Maintaining an existing installation long-term is what is actually difficult. When things break on major upgrades, fixing it can be significantly more complicated than on other distros. For example because of USE flags and having the ability to choose in cases where other distros just choose one solution for you (which is a much simpler approach). Just some of the conflicts in portage can cause headaches and I've been using Gentoo for more than a decade. There is a certain level of Linux knowledge you need to have to handle things like that, which is the reason people call Gentoo hard. Obviously at your level a specific distro doesn't really matter anymore, because you understand the underlying concepts all distros are built on.
I agree with most of your comment, but as a Gentoo user of some 20 years now, I think success in Gentoo is about remaining focused, always keeping "last known good" config files around (especially when building kernels) and being "conservative" when it comes to sticking to "stable" branches as much as possible (given I regularly build Gentoo on 32-bit and 64-bit Intel and ARM platforms anyway) and not going for bleeding edge "testing" branches. I also live by the philosophy that Gentoo is customisable enough to run on "any old cr*p" and therefore there is no excuse to not building it on several different machines that have been obtained cheaply or even on someone else's "cast-off" machines - so as one machine is compiling and updating, you can still use another one.
@@ghosthunter0950 It depends, debian has its quirks and arch has its quirks, if you are a beginner go with mint or Ubuntu, a more advanced user would love arch and after using arch you can try to use debian for a time, it's an excellent distro and I've hopped to the testing branch for a month and I hopped back to arch only bc I want to delete the windows partition and I want the latest and greatest in terms of gaming
I agree about the maintaining part of Gentoo, having used it since 2004. When it can become troublesome is after the odd update when something doesn't work. Having to back out of an upgrade, masking packages and downgrading waiting for an updated version can be a bit of a chore, but as said in the clip, it's not difficult per se, it just takes time. I always take good care to always inspect USE flags when upgrading, or inspect what packages are updated, making sure I understand why, as best I can. An extra package can turn out not to be needed at all just for the stray use flag being activated in a new version. So again, not difficult, just requires some discipline. I'd actually go so far as to say as if maintained correctly, a Gentoo installation gets more and more tuned and "clean" the further along one goes, but it's also Very easy to make it cluttered if one just lets USE flags sit at their defaults when installing something.
Great video! I really like your candid assessment of both the distros as well as yourself not reading the manual sometimes and making it harder! Nice to see a pro still be humble and do an honest self assessment too. Well done!
I also find Arch Linux easy. I have only installed it using Archinstall, which is anything but difficult. Usage wise, it's super easy. Frankly, the enormous amount of documentation for Arch makes it so that any issue you have can be resolved if you do the work.
The arch wiki makes it worth it. I stayed on Deb based for years because I was intimidated, and about 7 months ago I switched to EndeavourOS(Arch) and it's been the best linux experience I have had. Less issues and its has everything I need with nothing I don't. It took me a solid week to get everything down. That wasn't so bad. Switching to Arch this weekend actually and have installed it on a spare drive a few times and it was easy.
Gentoo user here, in it for the Rolling Release cycle, using IceWM for a light & snappy desktop that is not trying to be MS Windows. Gentoo isn't all that time consuming if you schedule updates when you are away or asleep. There are occasional issues but nothing a little brain elbow grease can't fix..
I appreciate the way you explained your point of view when attempting to give your answer to this very difficult question. I do approach things slightly differently - I try to consider the community support behind a distro and judge a distro’s difficulty on how willing those on official forums are to help instead of saying “after reading X in the wiki you shouldn’t have questions” and blaming the new user for their lack of experience with the OS. Over the years, I’ve had a few issues in Arch where I was tempted to go to their forums. But after doing searches on the topic and seeing the levels of derision enough of that community has towards the confused user’s questions, I knew I should not ask and start trying seemingly random approaches to a problem or give up on fixing it. Wikis are not the end-all, be-all of support. Some learn better from people, who can contextualize and make relevant the principles behind a solution, which leads to more efficient education for those types. Some don’t self-teach well, and need that help.
Fedora's semi-rolling model is awesome. Their major updates go flawlessly- no need to clean install. SELinux in Fedora can "get in your way" and make you come up with new swear words when trying to do complex/ unusual things with virtual machine hardware.
I disagree with that statement my latest Fedora Kernel update wouldn't boot due to Nvidia kernel modules not loading. After doing a bunch of nonsense, I completely uninstalled Nvidia drivers flashed the kernel and it booted but it some crap to deal with
Finally managed to get Gentoo installed and running on my new production machine, all set up and ready. Feeling proud, I shall say! Given my personal journey from Windows 7 to Ubuntu to Arch to Gentoo, I shall say Arch is pretty tough the first few times. But it teaches incredibly much. Once you get the hang of it, Arch is super easy to maintain. Gentoo is different in such as it requires even more knowledge, but also teaches an awful lot. If you're into learning how Linux works, start with Arch and head for Gentoo once you feel ready to go it. Ultimately, I assume the Libre distributions will be difficult to set up and use, given the constraints of libre drivers in conjunction with certain hardware.
Good luck with your Gentoo journey! I have been with it 20 years and never looked at any other distro - except to build Linux machines for other people.
Why on earth would I run gentoo over arch? It doesn't seem like a "progression", it seems like something to brag about and maybe have a fun hobby with.
@@yoyoma2026 To each his own, I guess. With respect to the learning process, Gentoo has lots and lots to offer in terms of kernel customization. This is, of course, possible with Arch as well if you choose to build your own kernel, but what is a decided take on Arch, is default on Gentoo. Given this, you can have a system perfectly tailored to your hardware requirements. It also comes with significant security benefits, as you can simply strip out potential security flaws such as Bluetooth. My system is about 95% complete as of now, and I have it running as a production environment already. It's not something to brag about, it's a path you either choose to follow, or you don't. Remember that Gentoo users aren't notorious to say »I use Gentoo, by the way«. 😉 I'm just proud of having accomplished something which was not easy for me to do at all, and the feedback I receive here proves it was a worthwhile investment of time and effort. It's just that. Nothing more, but nothing less.
I think people get easiness and intuitiveness confused. The graphical installations are typically more intuitive. It's not necessarily easier than something that may require reading instructions.. Sure, I could use a GUI instaler typicaly without reading instructions, yet fine-tuning the system during the installation may be difficult, even impossible, when compared to Arch or Gentoo.
Personally, Red Hat is the hardest because of the way the licensing works. Beyond that, you should pick a distro based on if you like the way the package manager works. That's my 2 cents.
Yup, and Python based package managers are a big no for me because Python is way too easy for the package manager to break during an update, leaving you without the tools to fix it. Yes, we could never touch system Python and pull down Conda, etc... but there are times when that is less feasible.
I've installed (all) debian and arch based distros. Used Ubuntu, popOS and now I've landed on ZorinOS. I look how polished is a DE. Now I triple boot Windows 11, macOS Ventura and Zorin.
Gentoo is easy to run until something breaks. For example right now my binary Firefox plays UA-cam videos just fine, while the source compiled one stopped doing that yesterday and I don't know yet why. Another example when having tough time with Gentoo was when installing busy box stopped my internet (and partially the command doas) from working. I could go on but the point is there are more obstacles in Gentoo besides the fact it's time consuming. Everything sort of depends on everything else so it can be very easy to break.
The hardest Linux install I had took me 60 hours non stop to get wine running. It was Gentoo in 2003, it was shipped on a live CD with a computer magazine. Had to compile everything. When Backtrack Linux came out, I was so surprised it self compiled so much by itself. That I still mostly use Debian derived distros.(Kali, Alpine, TinyCore and Proxmox at the moment) MacOS(DarwinBSD) and HiveOS(OpenBSD). I only touch windows workstations and servers when I work for clients.
I'd argue Arch is fairly easy once you understand it, but I'd say it's not exactly that user friendly for the first-time user as the installation guide is frankly intimidating (especially if they're not familiar with Linux). I would definitely like to see some content to try and make that experience easier for people who are newer to Linux as it would be great for people to experience Arch instead of being stuck with Ubuntu distros to begin with. Arch is really fun, but I think people like to try and gatekeep it.
Nixos is quite the pain to use/get certain things running, mainly because of badly made software i.e. programs with hard coded paths to standard linux paths that do not exist in Nixos, etc. However, I'd still say the advantages are far worth the hassle.
Most modern distros are not hard for the most part. Yes, even Arch. All Arch is is you've gotta do stuff in a terminal, and for some reason that scares people. Yeah you might have to do a bit of maintenance, but rarely at best. Even an inexperienced Linux user could figure it out with the right resources. Really, the only arguably hard modern distro is probably Gentoo. I disagree that it's on the same level as Arch. There's a lot more than the first install. You need to be an experienced Linux user. You need to configure a kernel and know why the options you select are correct. You set up all the bits and pieces of your system and need to know why they exist. You need to know how to set compiler flags properly. And so on. But even then, old distros take the cake. Practically LFS, but you get a package manager.
Problem is people have grown with the consumer mindset and they're too lazy to read a pretty complete installation manual. Quite honestly the hardest distro I've tried is Ubuntu.
A distro that people seem to think is really hard to install and use (it used to be, but not anymore) is slackware. As soon as you figure out a few commands and how the distro generally feels, it's really easy. And stable.
Never had a problem upgrading to the next release neither with Ubuntu or Mint, probably because I wait a month to do that so I know I won't find a day 1 bug or something.
5:22 Yeah free software foundation philosophy is confusing. Ubuntu tell me that my computer don`t need proprietary drivers. But when install libre kernel, my wi fi can`t work, so is proprietary or not?
I was surprised you didn't mention Slackware at all, but maybe it's a blind spot and you never tried it !? I would have thought it would be an obvious candidate for most difficult. Any comments on that?
I had the same experience with upgrading distributions that are periodic release distros, the further away you get from a vanilla install, the more things go badly during a major upgrade. I now run rolling release distros on all my hardware except three machines: two proxmox servers (which both need to be upgraded) and one zentyal domain controller (which also needs to be upgraded). I don't want to upgrade any of the three because they're all important for my home network to function, and if the upgrade goes badly I'm in for potentially many hours of rebuilding.
Distributions I've had problems with have been the versions of Fedora that have the number 4 in the version number (except for Fedora Core 4). To this day, I have no idea why, but I never managed to get Fedora 14 and Fedora 24 to install on my machine. It's been a long time so I have no idea what the problem was, perhaps it's something that I can fix nowadays, but back in the day, I couldn't even figure out what the problem was. P.S. Before moving to rolling release distros I've also had problems with major version upgrades, so I also did a clean install instead.
The CentOS, Fedora, Redhat family never play nice with me. Honestly, I've never installed them, but the number of weird problems I run into while using them is insane, and half the search results that look like they may be even vaguely useful are behind the Redhat paywall.
@@zvxcvxcz It's weird how different our experience has been. I've never had much problems when I was still using Fedora. However, I then found out about Arch-based distros and realized they are a much better fit for me for multiple reasons.
I couldn't agree more. I was amazed with Manjaro not breaking on me using it for over 3 years and doing updates every other week. I had always something breaking up on me when it was time to upgrade Ubuntu or Mint.
The hardest distro, for me, to use would have to be the original Red Hat 7.3. It came out in the early 00s before Fedora and RHEL existed and so support for things like USB ports seemed experimental and took quite a bit of use of the command line to get them operational.
Everything back then had it's quirks. Win98/SE was a pain in the arse to get drivers installed. USB was new and so was Internet Routers from RR. My god what a pain that was.
I've tryied Arch based distros on my production machine and in the beginning was great, but after a while an update will break your computer. The most it lasted was 2 years! On rolling releases you must update all the time, the more the time passes the more you risk to break it! At least for my experience. I don't want to be afraid of the update button ! I've upgraded 5 times in a role the Linux Mint from 19.x to the latest 21.1 and no brake ! So I need a stable environment for my production machine and a good semi-rolling release like Linux Mint fits me perfectly. OpenSUSE too.
Slackware is the distro I started out with, and it was probably the hardest one for me because of the extra drivers and libraries needed when installing apps. It's not difficult, it just takes some time to get used to. Throughout the years, I've used everything from Red Hat, SuSE, Arch, FreeBSD, and Debian. Currently, I'm using MX Linux (based on Debian), and have been for the past several years. It just takes some time and patience of testing various distributions to find the one that's right for you. And like what DT said, "It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish."
YES! The Arch wiki is incredible, installing and maintaining it is really straightforward, especially with the archinstall script. I wish arch had native secure boot support, there're some laptops that are locked with it plus dualbooting with windows is nice to have
It is very possible to do both afaik. For dual booting with windows if you use grub i would install grub-customizer as it will auto generate entries for windows, even if its on a different efi partition on another drive.
I quit distrohopping many years ago, but I have to agree, major release upgrades can be slightly daunting. With that said, I have Debian machines that I have never reinstalled, going back a decade or more. You absolutely have to read the release notes though, and follow the advice carefully. The more you've strayed from vanilla Debian, the more work you have to get the update to go cleanly. But these days it's a lot easier than it used to be. And the release notes are very good!
Totally agree. I love the rolling release, it's so much easier than yearly, or semi-yearly major updates, and it's a big reason I switched from Windows. Just having the latest version all the time is SO MUCH nicer than having to upgrade to the latest version of Windows every couple years (and updating my hardware when my old hardware isn't supported by the latest version). Arch Linux is a cake walk compared to Windows. I started with the "easier" distros (PopOS, Kubuntu, Fedora) and made my way into Arch (via Manjaro) and found that vanilla Arch was actually the easiest to use. So easy that I got my boomer parents on it when it was time for them to upgrade to Windows 11.
@@sus4793 They're on Manjaro with KDE Plasma. I created an update alias in Fish (update) that runs yay -Syu --noconfirm && reboot that they run whenever the update arrow in the system tray has a red dot on it, and I installed AnyDesk on the machine so I can remote in and help with any problem that arises.
I’ve had a similar problem with upgrading to the next major version of Pop!_OS causing a kernel panic on my desktop. Thankfully, I keep my home directory on an entirely different drive, so it was more annoying than detrimental.
As a FreeBSD user since 2004 (FreeBSD 5.3) and GNU/Linux since 2001 (Red Hat Linux 7.2 Enigma) I find Crux Linux and Slackare not "the hardest" but the most complicated to maintain.
After daily driving Gentoo for a year I tried LFS and after the build Kernel I gave up. It wasn't worth the work I had to put into it. I'd consider LFS a pretty damn hard distro.
To be fair LFS isn’t really made to be a useable distro. It’s made to be more of a learning resource if you really want to learn the ins and outs of Linux as an operating system.
@@cagatay518 yep - otoh with a strong CPU and proper job settings you're doing good with Gentoo as well. I had a 6 Core AMD (Codename Thuban) T1090 and it did very well at compiling. :)
Gentoo isn't that difficult ( it's all documented) , it's just time-consuming. Arch is ideal for me, but now and then I'm tempted to try something new ( tried NixOS last time) I was able to install it fine, but the problem was using it. I needed some specific packages for software development and I just couldn't get it to work. So eventually I got frustrated and reinstalled Arch Linux
I started distrohopping from ubuntu specifically because of updates. They always broke something. And you absolutely had to make sure either clean install or create a new user because old configs would conflict between 2 LTS versions (and I was not willign to install non lts version) Even Windows doesn't break system as much as ubuntu during regular updates.
The absolute end for Ubuntu for me was around 2013 after I bought a laptop with it preinstalled. The laptop had a Broadcom WiFi card and a proprietary driver was needed. After an update the driver stopped working and I wasn't able to reinstall it, so no more WiFi.
I been using Garuda Linux for a while now and it's the perfect mix of ease of use and pushing the player to learn more about their system bit by bit at a pace that's not too pressing. Because sometimes with rolling release distros based on Arch and other things, there's going to be a hiccup or a breakage at some point, luckily I've not had anything too major. But whenever a problem does occur, I just look around various forums, especially the Arch forums and I usually find my answer after a few searches, and if I can't I usually ask around, talk about the issue and get some feedback with useful links on how to solve well known issues and then I'm usually golden. Arch and Arch-based systems really aren't that hard, especially when they have great documentation.
The hardest to install and set up for me are Gentoo, Arch and CRUX (and probably in that order, from hardest to easiest). I recall the related source-based trio of Sorcerer Linux, Source Mage and Lunar Linux also being difficult to varying degrees, but now they're all dead projects. In most cases I was able at least install the distributions and log in, but gave up on setting up a desktop. Beyond installing and logging in to a command line, I have never had much luck with the BSDs either. I tend to have the most luck with Debian and Debian-based distributions, especially when it comes to building up from a CLI to full desktop. I'm not very familiar with other package managers. I totally agree that standard Ubuntu and Fedora releases with their short release and support cycles and constant major upgrades is a pain in the ass, and I avoid them as well. One of the reasons I left Windows decades ago was to get off the "upgrade treadmill," and these two distros make it worse than ever. I just want a system that works, is stable, and I don't have to start thinking about the next upgrade only 3-4 months after the last major upgrade.
@@YounesLayachi If you want security upgrades beyond, what is it, like nine months after release--then yes, you need to upgrade. And given how important security updates are, I would say that yes... they *are* effectively forcing you to upgrade. Good thing there are LTS releases, unfortunately Fedora doesn't have them, but they bring at least *some* sanity to the Ubuntu world.
Arch would be the hardest for me, but I really haven't played around with it enough. I've only played with Debian and its fork for the raspberry pi. I tried fedora but with what Red Hat is doing Im not sure I if I should bother with it. Now that I think about it the hardest Linux is the one you're not willing to learn or haven't had time to learn. Im hoping to get a two new KVMs with support for two monitors. I hope lots of flavors of Linux run on the raspberry pi. I am hoping that more raspberry pi's will be available for sale.
Hey sir, I never comment on anything, you’re a busy person. I know this video is old and I doubt you see this for that reason. Among many others… I want to say thank you for the content for one. For two, what jump drive bootable ISO software do you use? I ask bc Ventoy corrupted my last one and so I plan to try Balena Etcher this round. Accidentally, Kali Linux became my main OS, which is a version of Debian. I want to put Arch Linux on another partition. I don’t want Windows back just to make a bootable USB!!! Help please
Hey DT, as I see, you have a triple monitor setup. Do these monitors have varied refresh rate between them? If so, does this setup work fine, without tearing? My double monitor setup (60Hz and 75Hz) works fine on Wayland, but has issues on Xorg (either both are capped on 60 fps or one of them has a lot of tearing). My GPU is nvidia 1050ti (probably some proprietary driver related thing because nvidia)
I have the same graphics card in my system, with a dual monitor setup. I especially notice the screen tearing when I run tiling window managers such as Xmonad, Herbst, etc, but in full desktop environments (like Gnome, XFCE, etc) I don't have that problem. It's probably an issue on the back end, some package (or set of packages) that the DE has that' I'm missing, but I'm still pretty new to tiling window managers, so I haven't figured out how to fix it yet. Of course, that's what I find really cool about Linux...there's always something more to learn :)
Personally I've only ran Xorg (or maybe, perhaps once I tried Wayland from some live USB, but that was on single monitor setup), but I've had 2 and 3 monitor setups with different refresh rates, and I've experienced no issues with it. It was mostly on Intel's infernated GPU's, but I don't remember having that kind of issues with dual-monitor nVidia setups either - however results may wary depending on exact hardware and how it's set up, naturally. Boink.
glad about your opinion on nixos its so different than other its not necessarily hard its just something different than other linux os so you need to do some learning first
I've personally found that upgrading to a new release of Fedora is more stable than Ubuntu. Even upgrading to a new release of Debian is more stable than Ubuntu. The instability of upgrading to a new release of Ubuntu is one of the reasons why I no longer recommend it to new users. I switched to Arch at the start of 2020 & the whole install once thing is what got me hooked. I'll be sticking with Arch for the foreseeable, but may at some point switch back to Fedora or Debian if I can ever go back to the upgrading to a new release thing again....
Ubuntu-based distros (Linux Mint, Ubuntu LTS, Pop!_OS an Tuxedo OS) were all a good user experience for me. However, Fedora 40-41 KDE has been an even better experience for me. My worst experience was Manjaro KDE/Gnome, I found the experience overwhelming and confusing. It took me a while to warm up to KDE TBH.
Gentoo is a good option if you want to be closer to the source, besides things aren't changing that much to justify a rolling release these days. Rather, they pretty much work the way they have been.
I think what's hard to use depends on the category of user we are talking about. Got everyday people who have a panic attack when they see a command line any distro that has you use a command line to install probably isn't any lower than a 5
Interesting that you eventually mentioned maintenance as the largest pain (rightfully so IMHO). Even more interesting: declaratively configured OS such as NixOS would logically get the "most painless" label for maintenance and even re-installation, because you literally don't have to do *any* (re)configuration on them, even for a completely clean re-install. Similarly, updating is just *refreshing* your existing config, the only manual intervention you might need is in case of actual package/upstream bugs. So maintenance is in theory zero-cost (and in practice almost so, except for said bugs or cutting edge re-configurations). In fairness though, to get to the point where your system(s) are completely declaratively configured, it's a steep learning curve, and the graphical installer you mentioned for NixOS doesn't change that much (after the basic install you'll still need to actually modify nix files to actually customize your system), install/config would remain "complexity 8" I'm afraid (but well invested time, because you only do it once).
What annoys me the most about any distro is incompatibility between packages, for example pipewire not working with easyeffects on Debian, so my question is what distro is the best for keeping things up to date?
@@zvxcvxcz yeah I get that, you know it would be great if there was a link up between maintainers on common packages that get used in common among distos, perhaps there is and it's just not working so well, I don't know.
Speaking of Sabayon: the guys who used to do Sabayon have rebranded into a very innovative new project called Mocaccino OS that unfortunately went a bit under the radar and they could use a few more eyes on the work they are doing.
Arch user here, this is my list of most difficult distros in this particular order: 1. Slackware (basically a LFS) 2. Gentoo (I have it installed on my Pi 3b) 3. Arch (another LFS but easier than the other two)
I disagree with the ranking. Yeah, if you know already what to expect, what do you have to do, it is easy. But, in some cases, let's take Gentoo, you do have to learn quite some things for it to work. And as nice as the wiki is, there's still things that you kind of need to know before hand, otherwise you'll be in for a bad time. Like someone mentioned, when it breaks... well, it's not so easy anymore, now, is it ? And just the amount of what you need to learn, what packages do what, what an OS requires in general and so on, there's a lot to learn. That's objectively difficult. Of course, there is such a thing as something being difficult no matter how much you know. I'd say that it doesn't apply here almost at all. Everything related to installing and maintaing an OS is knowledge based. There's no realtime dexterity or attention/observation/perception contest where if you do not act in less than 1 second to an event you lose. Back to the Gentoo example. I can bet you that more than 99% of people who a) didn't used Linux before or know that much about it and b) are not developers, now these people, if you would task them to install Gentoo (as their first Linux install) I bet you that more than 99% won't be able to do it in less than 24 hours. On a computer where compiling everything needed takes less than 4 hours. They'll have A LOT to learn. Well, maybe some may be able to do it faster, if they skip on the documentation, and happen that the code examples all work. If you take out the "time to learn" parameter from the equation, most things in life become easy.
My hardest distro was LFS. Not because the install. But maintaining it was an unholy nightmare. Gentoo is my daily driver. Gentoo is not hard at all. No more than Arch. I love the USE flag customization. The documentation is second to none. Arch and Gentoo are the You Distros as in you choose what ever environment you want. You chose your toolsets, chron, ect. That's why I love those two distro.
True. I had some ideas to make my own with it. Package management was not there obviously. I didn't want to compile something like portage, or pacman. Because it would just make a Gentoo or Arch clone over time. The same with the others. I tried some stuff and threw up my hands in frustration from breaking my system. If I had to do it again. I think I would try eith the nix package manager or see if i can use voids pm. I was going to run a local repo on a nas server. I would love to see DT's spin on a LFS build. I wonder what he would build.
Genuine question: did building and maintaining LFS install teach you something? Were there any takeaways, or was it just following instructions and than searching for error descriptions on the interwebs?
Yes, it taught me something very important and a lot of other things also. The biggest lesson was "I can". It taught me to also respect every flavor of Linux out there. Just building a LFS build is only 1/3 of a full build. Then there is beyond the basic build. The other 3rd. Battling various dependency issues to get x11 to compile cleanly was trying. Once, I learned how to deal with that. I was able to deal with the issues building forward. I eventually had a running environment with a desktop. I was happy for a bit. The other 3rd made itself known. Maintaining my build. Then I was miserable on the webs looking for why my Firefox will not compile right, why compiling the new Firefox caused other shared dependencies to break. Making my box to become unstable. In the end. It taught me to honor the efforts everyone put iinto the tool sets, kernal, and utilities. It was humbling. I will build another soon. I need to really study the ALFS set more, and chat with some devs about package management and maintenance.
@@ChadsHobies thanks for thoughtful answer. Distros' maintainers truly deserve our deepest respect (I must admit I sometimes take that packages are maintained and work for granted)
Man I have to agree, this was my exact experience with Ubuntu. I hated having to futz with my install constantly because of upgrades breaking. I transitioned to Ubuntu LTS and eventually Debian. I don't mind using older software but I need my tools to work for me.
I think people who ask this question generally don't know what exactly they are asking. Most times the question should be "What Linux distro allows me to be the most lazy?"
heh, I had the opposite thought: some of these askers want to gauge their own linux knowledge level and see if they can run these "hard" distros effectively, as a challenge.
"What linux distro allow me to be more productive and concentrated on work rather than spending too much time on maintaining the OS and troubleshooting it?"
The gentoo installation process is easy because we have the handbook. Let’s be honest, most of the gentoo installation videos are just the video form of the handbook. However, I don’t know why every time I follow the handbook, I would have some issues, but if I follow the videos, I wouldn’t. Oh, also, DT, can you make a video about how install and set up LFS (Linux From Scratch)?
Great video! I'd say that to me personally, what I find 'difficult', what I think makes a distro "hard", is when there is some part of it that challenges my pre-conceived notions. So Arch or Gentoo wouldn't be hard, as I can 100% understand compiling software, installing from a step by step guide, etc. What would be "difficult" for all of ten minutes or so would be something like Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE micro OS, and I'd even put Easy OS (from puppy linux's creator) and Nix. What could be possibly "difficult" for a while would be maybe bedrock linux? Or Qubes OS? Something that changes enough that the intuitions I have about how an OS works are challenged, and that have a surface area large enough that I wouldn't know where to start if look to diagnose the WHAT when something goes wrong...
@@YounesLayachi ...and anytime I see a post about dismissing someone anytime they write about [X], I make sure that everyone knows how little I care by making a comment about it.
When addressing difficulty levels, I would bet that most people address their daily use needs.For me it is using a browser, some video and photo editing apps, and occasionally a word processor and/or spreadsheet app. I believe that you will find that the average computer using Joe, is quit similar to me and wants to do work on the computer, not work the computer itself, but I'm old-old school, I actually try and minimize my time on the computer.
I think the hardest Linux, for me, is Ubuntu, or rather, all of deb Linux is very difficult to use, because deb Linux has very strange package naming and very complex and strange package dependencies, and it is very easy to "accidentally" delete desktop environments. Ubuntu also has a snap, which is the most difficult use package manager for me.
Maybe it is just a familiarity issue there, because I feel like other distros have the weird names and apt is a godsend compared to Yum. Snap is also quite easy to use... much less easy to make packages for with some of the isolation constraints not being breakable in the appropriate ways (e.g. why Firefox is dumping ostensibly temporary files in your Download folder).
@@zvxcvxcz But in Arch, the package naming is much more reasonable, in addition, yum similar should be dpkg, apt corresponding should be dnf and zypper and pacman, the other three are much better than apt, opensuse and arch documentation than ubuntu and debian is also much better, in summary, I just do not like deb system, which just a personal preference
What? No mention of Fedora lol... Almost every video you do you struggle (some what) with the disk partitioning and that's with just ONE drive. (I install server version on system with 3 drives.. no problems) Anyway, what about Slackware? It was my very first linux experience... Would have used it but couldn't get it to connect to the internet. So... where do you put these two? I give imho, Fedora a 1 and slackware a 10... Like I said, imho. I also agree 100% with you about release upgrade problems... I'm so glad I discovered rolling-release distros... Arch is my daily although I'm using opensuse Tumbleweed on another laptop and am finding it a good experience once you get over the shock of loosing the AUR..
Lol, I knew you were going to say Nixos. The newer releases are much easier like you said, it's just a different way doing things. Also, like you said, it depends on what your used to. Nixos definitely has a learning curve but once you figure it out it becomes remarkably easy, I'd say easier than arch. Updating(without breaking anything) in particular is easier than Arch and maintaining near-identical machines across all your systems is a breeze. In arch this is actually a pain in the butt depending on hardware/software used. The AUR in particular, while both awesome and convenient, can cause some serious headaches and becomes a love-hate relationship.
"The AUR in particular, while both awesome and convenient, can cause some serious headaches and becomes a love-hate relationship." Bingo! My feelings exactly. I've just upgraded to the latest Manjaro (using Linux 6.1 LTS) and it has all been great. Backups and configuration documentation FTW. The one lurking worry is the AUR packages I have installed - how LTS are those packages? I'm not going to blithely update anything from AUR.
It depends. If you are brand baby penguin, then... probably reinstalling Fedora or Ubuntu is the issue. But if you are some of the old farts, then probably running kickstart, cloud-init or just any automation script is not hard at all. It just depens how do you approach that.
Yes... I too hate regular release upgrades. Like a 75% failure rate for me across 5 machines in a year and a half.. then I moved to rolling and no more trouble... for nearly 4 years now...
Move to Void from Arch. Haven't had as many problems as in Arch but Void is a pain to setup. Somethings I haven't fixed and probably will never fix. Like using pipewire instead of pulse and gui login. I'll try again some other time. But once you're set you're good just sudo xbps-install -Su.
Artix literally makes Arch so extremely simple; probably the easiest install and setup ever. And you can get rid of systemd and go with something like s6 which takes more work to move systemd packages over to s6, but it’s performant, and pretty nice overall.
Ok bu reading the documentation is also difficult at least sometimes. I tried to read Arch's documentation and couldn't understand the first few paragraphs. Maybe I read the wrong thing, maybe it has changed, or maybe I am not too ignorant to read it, but still it goes to show that sometimes documentation is not the solution or the solution is not the documentation for some people.
So you rate one OS hard, because installation was hard without reading the documentation, but you think Arch installation is easy. Without reading anything or having prior knowledge?
Hardest distro I tried was Debian Stable. It was so hard it would not bend to my will and the moment I tried to do something outside of supported by distro maintainers ways it shattered. On the other hand Gentoo - very easy to customize and do whatever I want in it like I want and I didn't even create users yet on it and this system just doesn't care. And being more serious - Gentoo build system maybe is quite demanding (both demands user knowledge, effort and computer processing power) but if you do manage to build it you know everything will work fine and Portage can recover system from your personal manipulations. Most Linux distros assume that if you installed package then nothing bad will happen with anything that was installed. Also "easy" distros do lots of behind the scene workarounds to pretend everything just works. When those workarounds fail then you get zero support from anyone because no one really knows how these systems are configured and the most common solution for any issue is "just reinstall system" and main question people as is "have you reinstalled the OS yet?"
My opinion is mostly similar to you. There's no linux distro is exactly hard to install and manage if I followed the instruction, but for me, I think there's some distros that's hard to manage. I found the lacked of package manager on Slackware hard to deal with and the helper for Slackbuild such as sbopkg isn't that easy to understand. Alpine Linux seem easy but it's not as straightforward as it seems because the documentation lacked organization and considerably hard to follow and there are somethings we have to explore first as they're not going to work properly in the normal way if we don't have something cleared up first, maybe because it's a MUSL distro and some essential thing for desktop user such as Network Manager is complicate to install, and I still don't mention how their version of OpenRC use somewhat different commands or at least the wording of commands than OpenRC on Artix and Gentoo that's make things more complicate. But then everything work fine in the end. I never try to upgrade stable release distros to the new version before except when clean install but I agree that upgrade the version every year is a hassle and I don't really have faith that after upgrade everything will be working properly again either,but if the upgrade process is clear I don't think that is a problem. But I have many problem with the more easier to use distros that doesn't even involve the upgrade. Those Mandrake-based distro such as Mageia and OpenMandriva gave me a big headache. Mageia doesn't have that many problem but their repos are very slowto the point that I don't want to bother with it anymore and management on GUI is rather confusing. On OpenMandriva, it sems unstable for me as it make 2-3 set of computer I tried it on randomly hang up or restart randomly and it can't launch any game from any online platform on it for some reason like it not sit well with my graphic driver. OpenSUSE doesn't have problem aside from amount of package that's used to be just one on other distro broken down into several package on this instead and that makes things hard to keep track on. RHEL-based distros also have problem on the repos, they have to use many outside repos to make the computer usable as a normal desktop and when there's many repos install then there's more dependencies problem happened as well, and sometime they pushed out update on some dependencies first while most software depended on it still haven't get an update and it's break everything.
Based on my 20+ years of using linux on and off I personally say any debian or ubuntu based distro is easy and give them all a 2 or 3. My 2 favorite at the moment being sparkylinux and peperment linux. Super easy to use either of them. At the moment the only non debian or ubuntu based distro I like is tromjaro and I give that a 1 on the easy scale. As I have tried red hat 20 years ago I would rate that a 10. I remember trying slackware and I would rate that a 8 or 9. I tried Gentoo a few years back as a co worker loved it. I hated it and would rate it a 8 in the scale you have in the video.
@@rishirajsaikia1323 Have a look at Kernotex's channel if you ever give building your own kernels on Gentoo a go - he's got a couple of good videos on it. I've been doing it in Gentoo for 20 years now and, yes, I've had the occasional non-booting kernel, especially at the beginning. But the trick is to keep a "last known good" kernel config to hand and just tweak that as you upgrade kernels.
When you achieve the custom kernel without bloats (3.8 sec. boot time without a desktop, only config files and a simple wm) you begin to understand what the freedom is. i strongly recommend to try it with a wm like bspwm maybe.
the need to clean install instead of doing major upgrade isn't a compromise or workaround : clean install is the best way, otherwise you'd be using a rolling release. say no to major upgrades (or suffer)
I do major upgrades and do not suffer much. Usually there are a few kinks to work out, but nothing very significant. It would be way too much work to reconfigure everything from scratch. There are a few times it has been less smooth (maybe 5% of the time) and those tend to be times where it seemed like something was sort of wrong even prior to the upgrade.
Arch isn't as hard as people make it out to be, it's just that installing it without knowing what you are doing can be a huge problem. Arch really *forces* you to know how to setup Linux from the relative minimum. It's obviously not as intense as LFS, but you can have a very minimalist system to the point where you can install any desktop you want. (Or, if you're a bit of a masochist, do everything on the console/terminal.)
I think installers are more aggrevating. I tried Rlxos in a vm and then installed it to an external hdd. When the usb booted up the installer executed and as I attempted to use it the installer stated I had installed already . I tried again and with success. It then didnt boot. I had to set boot flag .
Gentoo was insanely difficult to build practically from scratch when it first arrived in the early 2000's. Getting a decent X session running in the '90s was a challenge, too!
Gentoo isn't hard to install, but it does take a lot of time to keep up with library conflicts with updates.
LFS
@@Thenottheskid I would like to be able to use the system.
@@Thenottheskid Yeah, LFS was easier!
In this point. we don't need to sacrifice our lives installing a Gnu-Linux distro with a hard, old, or rare installation; the final experience, quality, performance, optimization, etc. of it will be equal like another easy distro once you had installed. Nothing is enough to justify a hard installation currently. It's a pure masochism to believe that the "hard" is "better".
This is why I love Linux Mint
The command line install has real advantages, it’s not the difficulty for the sake of- for example, I haven’t seen a gui installer yet that can install on to a USB stick, even with all physical drives removed, the bootloader always fails to install properly, and if you have a sda connected it will install grub there even if you explicitly tell it not to. I had to use arch for this just because of the flexibility of the install, when Debian would have been more appropriate for my application.
@Scarlet no, it is hard to install.
You speak for yourself and organise your time how you want to organise it - but don't tell me how to organise mine.
I've used Gentoo only for 20 years now and I have put a lot of time and effort into what others call a "hard" distro or "a distro that does not value your time". If others believe that then that is up to them but I have programmed computers for 40+ years now (I started back in 1982 programming assembly language on Z80 CPUs and that was on a college course) and I've made computing my main hobby and source of income for all that time too.
In 40 years, I have never had a day without a job, and my knowledge and experience over that time, far from being wasted, means that I have, at least for the past 20 years working on Red Hat Linux servers, been paid to "do my hobby" - which is fine by me.
I mean there are prob hard to install distros that are very niche and geared towards very specific hardware or use case where it is an advantage to use those, but generally yes you are right
Linux is very easy these days. Most people do not understand what difficult means when it comes to Linux. The 1990's early 2000's dependency hell. The difficulty of waiting days, not hours, but days for Gentoo to compile everything, the absolute nightmare that Slackware could be when trying to get software working. These days people think it is "difficut" when widget a isn't working the way they want it to, and widget b isn't as pretty as widget c LOL
As a longtime Slackware user I've never understood the complaints. As long as you install every package that comes with the installer it'll work flawlessly for most things you want to install that have a configure script and even alternative build methods will often work on the first try. First time I had any issues with installing a given piece of software was this past year when I decided I wanted to finally try out FlatPak. I couldn't get one of the dependencies to build and just left it, but I'm fine with that because I prefer AppImages anyway. Literally everything else I've wanted to use I have been able to either find a binary for or build it myself from source.
I find that if an install isn't complicated enough for you, you can always make it harder.
Yup, my Arch installs are a lot harder and you have to really think of the steps in correct order...
Arch on ZFS Root requires a bit of planning and tactics, even more if you are doing it on a BIOS non UEFI boot and want the zfsbootmenu to handle the startup.
@@CMDRSweeper
> planning and tactics
Like an airstrike?
I agree 100% about major distro release upgrades being "difficult"... if you have a carefully tuned system with a lot of very specific optimizations and configurations, doing a dist-upgrade is the most stressful thing you will do all year. Since using Arch I've never had an update cause more than a minor hiccup (all my issues were Nvidia driver related) whereas I've had Ubuntu and other Debian based distros break so bad that I've had to reformat.
The reason I've been avoiding rolling release is because it can break, but this kinda makes me wanna try it out..
@@Skelterbane69 As long as you don't do stupid things with your Os, breakages are rare, at least in Artix.
@@Skelterbane69 I've been using Arch for 8 months already and 0 problem in my main Pc and laptop. The main reason for me is the AUR cause it has all the packages and I don't need to add repositories each time that I want to install something that is not in the repository. Also it could be said that being on the edge gives you security updates on the installed apps.
@@Crow-lz7et Since all of the programs I need are all available as flatpaks, I've been reconsidering just about any distro that can handle them (I.e. 99% of em), so it's all comedown to stable vs rolling release.
I initially thought that flatpaks were almost never updated, but most of the updates I got in Mint, were flatpak related, so now I'm in a dilemma. Stable or rolling, which is best for my flatpaks? That's about all that matters to me, other than stability.
I’m still pretty new to using Linux as a daily driver. There have been two version releases for my Laptop’s Linux Mint, haven’t had any issues there. I’m using Artix on my main machine.
I’ve had a few issues that were easy enough to resolve, just some applications not working as the latest versions or issues due to having an nvidia card and the new drivers can cause some programs to stop working correctly. Mostly OBS, but the latest updates haven’t broken OBS for me. Just one version release the previous version from the current. The newest one didn’t even break with the new drivers surprisingly.
I’m still learning. But so far so good. Everything that has updated has appeared to update properly. The kernel and everything. So I guess I’ll continue as I am for now. 😅
I really like gentoo. In my opinion, portage is one of the nicest package managers to use, port trees make finding packages so nice, and the search functions are great. However, I don’t currently run gentoo, mainly because my computers are all potato laptops and and would take a week to do an @world update.
i don't get the point of Gentoo, on a more powerful machines compiling software for yourself with optimizations and use flags is not needed, and on a potatoes compiling browser would probably take a week or so
@@ДарийФедореев-э7т Use flags are useful for more than just performance optimization, they also let you customize how software works, adding in extra features, removing ones you don’t want, and deciding which libraries you want to compile to (think LibreSSL vs. OpenSSL).
@@tiberiusmagnificuscaeser4929 i mean, generic build from Arch or Debian repos usually has all flags enabled, and removing them is not really doing anything on a more powerful PC - unless you really care about few saved megabytes
Gently was useful for compiling smaller programs on machines that only need a few of them that way you can really optimize exactly what you're installing and installing is still pretty simple to do For example I think that having a gently distribution on a cloud computer would be pretty useful
I don't like portage because you have to type a ton of long strings into a file along with repeating your password a bunch of times during the process, to unmask a package. And portage just directs you to the darn MAN pages whenever it does that, when it could probably explain how to unmask it. And then the config updaters are touted as "useful" when they feel clunky and confusing.
Installing Gentoo is pretty easy when you follow the handbook. Maintaining an existing installation long-term is what is actually difficult. When things break on major upgrades, fixing it can be significantly more complicated than on other distros. For example because of USE flags and having the ability to choose in cases where other distros just choose one solution for you (which is a much simpler approach). Just some of the conflicts in portage can cause headaches and I've been using Gentoo for more than a decade.
There is a certain level of Linux knowledge you need to have to handle things like that, which is the reason people call Gentoo hard. Obviously at your level a specific distro doesn't really matter anymore, because you understand the underlying concepts all distros are built on.
How easy is it to maintain arch/arch based compared to something debian based like mint?
@@ghosthunter0950 Why are you asking someone about Arch as someone who stated that they have used Gentoo for 10 years?
I agree with most of your comment, but as a Gentoo user of some 20 years now, I think success in Gentoo is about remaining focused, always keeping "last known good" config files around (especially when building kernels) and being "conservative" when it comes to sticking to "stable" branches as much as possible (given I regularly build Gentoo on 32-bit and 64-bit Intel and ARM platforms anyway) and not going for bleeding edge "testing" branches.
I also live by the philosophy that Gentoo is customisable enough to run on "any old cr*p" and therefore there is no excuse to not building it on several different machines that have been obtained cheaply or even on someone else's "cast-off" machines - so as one machine is compiling and updating, you can still use another one.
@@ghosthunter0950 It depends, debian has its quirks and arch has its quirks, if you are a beginner go with mint or Ubuntu, a more advanced user would love arch and after using arch you can try to use debian for a time, it's an excellent distro and I've hopped to the testing branch for a month and I hopped back to arch only bc I want to delete the windows partition and I want the latest and greatest in terms of gaming
I agree about the maintaining part of Gentoo, having used it since 2004. When it can become troublesome is after the odd update when something doesn't work. Having to back out of an upgrade, masking packages and downgrading waiting for an updated version can be a bit of a chore, but as said in the clip, it's not difficult per se, it just takes time. I always take good care to always inspect USE flags when upgrading, or inspect what packages are updated, making sure I understand why, as best I can. An extra package can turn out not to be needed at all just for the stray use flag being activated in a new version. So again, not difficult, just requires some discipline. I'd actually go so far as to say as if maintained correctly, a Gentoo installation gets more and more tuned and "clean" the further along one goes, but it's also Very easy to make it cluttered if one just lets USE flags sit at their defaults when installing something.
Great video! I really like your candid assessment of both the distros as well as yourself not reading the manual sometimes and making it harder! Nice to see a pro still be humble and do an honest self assessment too. Well done!
I also find Arch Linux easy. I have only installed it using Archinstall, which is anything but difficult. Usage wise, it's super easy. Frankly, the enormous amount of documentation for Arch makes it so that any issue you have can be resolved if you do the work.
The arch wiki makes it worth it. I stayed on Deb based for years because I was intimidated, and about 7 months ago I switched to EndeavourOS(Arch) and it's been the best linux experience I have had. Less issues and its has everything I need with nothing I don't. It took me a solid week to get everything down. That wasn't so bad. Switching to Arch this weekend actually and have installed it on a spare drive a few times and it was easy.
Gentoo user here, in it for the Rolling Release cycle, using IceWM for a light & snappy desktop that is not trying to be MS Windows. Gentoo isn't all that time consuming if you schedule updates when you are away or asleep. There are occasional issues but nothing a little brain elbow grease can't fix..
After using arch for years, Gentoo has been my heaven. it is the real (stable) freedom.
I appreciate the way you explained your point of view when attempting to give your answer to this very difficult question.
I do approach things slightly differently - I try to consider the community support behind a distro and judge a distro’s difficulty on how willing those on official forums are to help instead of saying “after reading X in the wiki you shouldn’t have questions” and blaming the new user for their lack of experience with the OS.
Over the years, I’ve had a few issues in Arch where I was tempted to go to their forums. But after doing searches on the topic and seeing the levels of derision enough of that community has towards the confused user’s questions, I knew I should not ask and start trying seemingly random approaches to a problem or give up on fixing it.
Wikis are not the end-all, be-all of support. Some learn better from people, who can contextualize and make relevant the principles behind a solution, which leads to more efficient education for those types. Some don’t self-teach well, and need that help.
Fedora's semi-rolling model is awesome. Their major updates go flawlessly- no need to clean install. SELinux in Fedora can "get in your way" and make you come up with new swear words when trying to do complex/ unusual things with virtual machine hardware.
I disagree with that statement my latest Fedora Kernel update wouldn't boot due to Nvidia kernel modules not loading. After doing a bunch of nonsense, I completely uninstalled Nvidia drivers flashed the kernel and it booted but it some crap to deal with
Finally managed to get Gentoo installed and running on my new production machine, all set up and ready.
Feeling proud, I shall say! Given my personal journey from Windows 7 to Ubuntu to Arch to Gentoo, I shall say Arch is pretty tough the first few times.
But it teaches incredibly much. Once you get the hang of it, Arch is super easy to maintain. Gentoo is different in such as it requires even more knowledge, but also teaches an awful lot.
If you're into learning how Linux works, start with Arch and head for Gentoo once you feel ready to go it.
Ultimately, I assume the Libre distributions will be difficult to set up and use, given the constraints of libre drivers in conjunction with certain hardware.
Good luck with your Gentoo journey! I have been with it 20 years and never looked at any other distro - except to build Linux machines for other people.
@Scarlet It is good for me. I don't care about anyone else - they can choose the distro that is good for them.
Same path... :)
Why on earth would I run gentoo over arch? It doesn't seem like a "progression", it seems like something to brag about and maybe have a fun hobby with.
@@yoyoma2026 To each his own, I guess. With respect to the learning process, Gentoo has lots and lots to offer in terms of kernel customization.
This is, of course, possible with Arch as well if you choose to build your own kernel, but what is a decided take on Arch, is default on Gentoo.
Given this, you can have a system perfectly tailored to your hardware requirements. It also comes with significant security benefits, as you can simply strip out potential security flaws such as Bluetooth.
My system is about 95% complete as of now, and I have it running as a production environment already.
It's not something to brag about, it's a path you either choose to follow, or you don't.
Remember that Gentoo users aren't notorious to say »I use Gentoo, by the way«. 😉
I'm just proud of having accomplished something which was not easy for me to do at all, and the feedback I receive here proves it was a worthwhile investment of time and effort.
It's just that. Nothing more, but nothing less.
Arch is like Studio 54: You gotta go through a lot to get in there, but when you do you're gonna have a gooood time.
I think people get easiness and intuitiveness confused.
The graphical installations are typically more intuitive. It's not necessarily easier than something that may require reading instructions.. Sure, I could use a GUI instaler typicaly without reading instructions, yet fine-tuning the system during the installation may be difficult, even impossible, when compared to Arch or Gentoo.
Also the fact that you can't resize the calamares window, so trying to view and edit all your partitions gets messy
Personally, Red Hat is the hardest because of the way the licensing works. Beyond that, you should pick a distro based on if you like the way the package manager works. That's my 2 cents.
Yup, and Python based package managers are a big no for me because Python is way too easy for the package manager to break during an update, leaving you without the tools to fix it. Yes, we could never touch system Python and pull down Conda, etc... but there are times when that is less feasible.
I've installed (all) debian and arch based distros. Used Ubuntu, popOS and now I've landed on ZorinOS. I look how polished is a DE. Now I triple boot Windows 11, macOS Ventura and Zorin.
Gentoo is easy to run until something breaks. For example right now my binary Firefox plays UA-cam videos just fine, while the source compiled one stopped doing that yesterday and I don't know yet why.
Another example when having tough time with Gentoo was when installing busy box stopped my internet (and partially the command doas) from working. I could go on but the point is there are more obstacles in Gentoo besides the fact it's time consuming. Everything sort of depends on everything else so it can be very easy to break.
The hardest Linux install I had took me 60 hours non stop to get wine running. It was Gentoo in 2003, it was shipped on a live CD with a computer magazine. Had to compile everything. When Backtrack Linux came out, I was so surprised it self compiled so much by itself. That I still mostly use Debian derived distros.(Kali, Alpine, TinyCore and Proxmox at the moment) MacOS(DarwinBSD) and HiveOS(OpenBSD). I only touch windows workstations and servers when I work for clients.
I'd argue Arch is fairly easy once you understand it, but I'd say it's not exactly that user friendly for the first-time user as the installation guide is frankly intimidating (especially if they're not familiar with Linux). I would definitely like to see some content to try and make that experience easier for people who are newer to Linux as it would be great for people to experience Arch instead of being stuck with Ubuntu distros to begin with. Arch is really fun, but I think people like to try and gatekeep it.
Nixos is quite the pain to use/get certain things running, mainly because of badly made software i.e. programs with hard coded paths to standard linux paths that do not exist in Nixos, etc. However, I'd still say the advantages are far worth the hassle.
Most modern distros are not hard for the most part. Yes, even Arch.
All Arch is is you've gotta do stuff in a terminal, and for some reason that scares people. Yeah you might have to do a bit of maintenance, but rarely at best. Even an inexperienced Linux user could figure it out with the right resources.
Really, the only arguably hard modern distro is probably Gentoo. I disagree that it's on the same level as Arch. There's a lot more than the first install. You need to be an experienced Linux user. You need to configure a kernel and know why the options you select are correct. You set up all the bits and pieces of your system and need to know why they exist. You need to know how to set compiler flags properly. And so on.
But even then, old distros take the cake. Practically LFS, but you get a package manager.
Arch is nothing more than "a poor man's Gentoo".
Problem is people have grown with the consumer mindset and they're too lazy to read a pretty complete installation manual. Quite honestly the hardest distro I've tried is Ubuntu.
I rarely, if ever, have a problem with major version upgrades on fedora. if anything, it's just "I have to reinstall zfs or display driver"
A distro that people seem to think is really hard to install and use (it used to be, but not anymore)
is slackware.
As soon as you figure out a few commands and how the distro generally feels, it's really easy. And stable.
Never had a problem upgrading to the next release neither with Ubuntu or Mint, probably because I wait a month to do that so I know I won't find a day 1 bug or something.
👍
@@guilherme5094
5:22 Yeah free software foundation philosophy is confusing. Ubuntu tell me that my computer don`t need proprietary drivers. But when install libre kernel, my wi fi can`t work, so is proprietary or not?
I was surprised you didn't mention Slackware at all, but maybe it's a blind spot and you never tried it !? I would have thought it would be an obvious candidate for most difficult. Any comments on that?
I agree completely, thats why i use LTS releses on all my production machines. 5~10 years of support is more than enough for me.
I had the same experience with upgrading distributions that are periodic release distros, the further away you get from a vanilla install, the more things go badly during a major upgrade. I now run rolling release distros on all my hardware except three machines: two proxmox servers (which both need to be upgraded) and one zentyal domain controller (which also needs to be upgraded). I don't want to upgrade any of the three because they're all important for my home network to function, and if the upgrade goes badly I'm in for potentially many hours of rebuilding.
Distributions I've had problems with have been the versions of Fedora that have the number 4 in the version number (except for Fedora Core 4). To this day, I have no idea why, but I never managed to get Fedora 14 and Fedora 24 to install on my machine. It's been a long time so I have no idea what the problem was, perhaps it's something that I can fix nowadays, but back in the day, I couldn't even figure out what the problem was.
P.S. Before moving to rolling release distros I've also had problems with major version upgrades, so I also did a clean install instead.
The CentOS, Fedora, Redhat family never play nice with me. Honestly, I've never installed them, but the number of weird problems I run into while using them is insane, and half the search results that look like they may be even vaguely useful are behind the Redhat paywall.
@@zvxcvxcz It's weird how different our experience has been. I've never had much problems when I was still using Fedora. However, I then found out about Arch-based distros and realized they are a much better fit for me for multiple reasons.
Lol, at the end, man you're kinda like an alien to us!
I couldn't agree more. I was amazed with Manjaro not breaking on me using it for over 3 years and doing updates every other week. I had always something breaking up on me when it was time to upgrade Ubuntu or Mint.
The hardest distro, for me, to use would have to be the original Red Hat 7.3. It came out in the early 00s before Fedora and RHEL existed and so support for things like USB ports seemed experimental and took quite a bit of use of the command line to get them operational.
Everything back then had it's quirks. Win98/SE was a pain in the arse to get drivers installed. USB was new and so was Internet Routers from RR. My god what a pain that was.
I've tryied Arch based distros on my production machine and in the beginning was great, but after a while an update will break your computer. The most it lasted was 2 years! On rolling releases you must update all the time, the more the time passes the more you risk to break it! At least for my experience. I don't want to be afraid of the update button ! I've upgraded 5 times in a role the Linux Mint from 19.x to the latest 21.1 and no brake ! So I need a stable environment for my production machine and a good semi-rolling release like Linux Mint fits me perfectly. OpenSUSE too.
That's why it is called rolling release. You must update it frequently.
Slackware is the distro I started out with, and it was probably the hardest one for me because of the extra drivers and libraries needed when installing apps. It's not difficult, it just takes some time to get used to. Throughout the years, I've used everything from Red Hat, SuSE, Arch, FreeBSD, and Debian. Currently, I'm using MX Linux (based on Debian), and have been for the past several years. It just takes some time and patience of testing various distributions to find the one that's right for you. And like what DT said, "It all depends on what you're trying to accomplish."
YES! The Arch wiki is incredible, installing and maintaining it is really straightforward, especially with the archinstall script. I wish arch had native secure boot support, there're some laptops that are locked with it plus dualbooting with windows is nice to have
If I remember correctly all that is documented in the Arch Wiki, especially the dual boot process.
I am on an arch system right now with windows duelbooting, so you 100% can do that.
It is very possible to do both afaik. For dual booting with windows if you use grub i would install grub-customizer as it will auto generate entries for windows, even if its on a different efi partition on another drive.
I quit distrohopping many years ago, but I have to agree, major release upgrades can be slightly daunting. With that said, I have Debian machines that I have never reinstalled, going back a decade or more.
You absolutely have to read the release notes though, and follow the advice carefully.
The more you've strayed from vanilla Debian, the more work you have to get the update to go cleanly. But these days it's a lot easier than it used to be. And the release notes are very good!
Totally agree. I love the rolling release, it's so much easier than yearly, or semi-yearly major updates, and it's a big reason I switched from Windows. Just having the latest version all the time is SO MUCH nicer than having to upgrade to the latest version of Windows every couple years (and updating my hardware when my old hardware isn't supported by the latest version). Arch Linux is a cake walk compared to Windows. I started with the "easier" distros (PopOS, Kubuntu, Fedora) and made my way into Arch (via Manjaro) and found that vanilla Arch was actually the easiest to use. So easy that I got my boomer parents on it when it was time for them to upgrade to Windows 11.
So what DE is your parents. Or are they running on the terminal?
@@sus4793 They're on Manjaro with KDE Plasma. I created an update alias in Fish (update) that runs yay -Syu --noconfirm && reboot that they run whenever the update arrow in the system tray has a red dot on it, and I installed AnyDesk on the machine so I can remote in and help with any problem that arises.
The title of this video is missing the "for me" at the end. Arch would be very hard for someone wanting to try Linux for the first time
That is 100% my experience.
I suffered through Mint before i found MX.
I use Endeavour because i still dont have the patience for Arch.
I’ve had a similar problem with upgrading to the next major version of Pop!_OS causing a kernel panic on my desktop. Thankfully, I keep my home directory on an entirely different drive, so it was more annoying than detrimental.
As a FreeBSD user since 2004 (FreeBSD 5.3) and GNU/Linux since 2001 (Red Hat Linux 7.2 Enigma) I find Crux Linux and Slackare not "the hardest" but the most complicated to maintain.
After daily driving Gentoo for a year I tried LFS and after the build Kernel I gave up. It wasn't worth the work I had to put into it. I'd consider LFS a pretty damn hard distro.
To be fair LFS isn’t really made to be a useable distro. It’s made to be more of a learning resource if you really want to learn the ins and outs of Linux as an operating system.
@@warhawk_yt yep indeed, I found it out the hard way XD
i just read about it (i am using Gentoo right now) and understood that it would be great if i could write my own package manager ... 😅
@@cagatay518 yep - otoh with a strong CPU and proper job settings you're doing good with Gentoo as well. I had a 6 Core AMD (Codename Thuban) T1090 and it did very well at compiling. :)
Gentoo isn't that difficult ( it's all documented) , it's just time-consuming. Arch is ideal for me, but now and then I'm tempted to try something new ( tried NixOS last time)
I was able to install it fine, but the problem was using it. I needed some specific packages for software development and I just couldn't get it to work.
So eventually I got frustrated and reinstalled Arch Linux
it happened to me, trying to install some Haskell but end-up compiling GHC from source and failed, now back to arch btw
I started distrohopping from ubuntu specifically because of updates. They always broke something. And you absolutely had to make sure either clean install or create a new user because old configs would conflict between 2 LTS versions (and I was not willign to install non lts version)
Even Windows doesn't break system as much as ubuntu during regular updates.
The absolute end for Ubuntu for me was around 2013 after I bought a laptop with it preinstalled. The laptop had a Broadcom WiFi card and a proprietary driver was needed. After an update the driver stopped working and I wasn't able to reinstall it, so no more WiFi.
Arch is the only base distro I love using. Part of the charm is the arch wiki.
I been using Garuda Linux for a while now and it's the perfect mix of ease of use and pushing the player to learn more about their system bit by bit at a pace that's not too pressing. Because sometimes with rolling release distros based on Arch and other things, there's going to be a hiccup or a breakage at some point, luckily I've not had anything too major. But whenever a problem does occur, I just look around various forums, especially the Arch forums and I usually find my answer after a few searches, and if I can't I usually ask around, talk about the issue and get some feedback with useful links on how to solve well known issues and then I'm usually golden. Arch and Arch-based systems really aren't that hard, especially when they have great documentation.
The hardest to install and set up for me are Gentoo, Arch and CRUX (and probably in that order, from hardest to easiest). I recall the related source-based trio of Sorcerer Linux, Source Mage and Lunar Linux also being difficult to varying degrees, but now they're all dead projects. In most cases I was able at least install the distributions and log in, but gave up on setting up a desktop.
Beyond installing and logging in to a command line, I have never had much luck with the BSDs either.
I tend to have the most luck with Debian and Debian-based distributions, especially when it comes to building up from a CLI to full desktop. I'm not very familiar with other package managers. I totally agree that standard Ubuntu and Fedora releases with their short release and support cycles and constant major upgrades is a pain in the ass, and I avoid them as well. One of the reasons I left Windows decades ago was to get off the "upgrade treadmill," and these two distros make it worse than ever. I just want a system that works, is stable, and I don't have to start thinking about the next upgrade only 3-4 months after the last major upgrade.
nobody's forcing you to upgrade. oh wait, someone is forcing you : it's yourself !
@@YounesLayachi If you want security upgrades beyond, what is it, like nine months after release--then yes, you need to upgrade. And given how important security updates are, I would say that yes... they *are* effectively forcing you to upgrade. Good thing there are LTS releases, unfortunately Fedora doesn't have them, but they bring at least *some* sanity to the Ubuntu world.
Arch would be the hardest for me, but I really haven't played around with it enough. I've only played with Debian and its fork for the raspberry pi. I tried fedora but with what Red Hat is doing Im not sure I if I should bother with it. Now that I think about it the hardest Linux is the one you're not willing to learn or haven't had time to learn. Im hoping to get a two new KVMs with support for two monitors. I hope lots of flavors of Linux run on the raspberry pi. I am hoping that more raspberry pi's will be available for sale.
Hey sir, I never comment on anything, you’re a busy person. I know this video is old and I doubt you see this for that reason. Among many others… I want to say thank you for the content for one. For two, what jump drive bootable ISO software do you use? I ask bc Ventoy corrupted my last one and so I plan to try Balena Etcher this round. Accidentally, Kali Linux became my main OS, which is a version of Debian. I want to put Arch Linux on another partition. I don’t want Windows back just to make a bootable USB!!! Help please
Hey DT, as I see, you have a triple monitor setup. Do these monitors have varied refresh rate between them? If so, does this setup work fine, without tearing?
My double monitor setup (60Hz and 75Hz) works fine on Wayland, but has issues on Xorg (either both are capped on 60 fps or one of them has a lot of tearing). My GPU is nvidia 1050ti (probably some proprietary driver related thing because nvidia)
I have the same graphics card in my system, with a dual monitor setup. I especially notice the screen tearing when I run tiling window managers such as Xmonad, Herbst, etc, but in full desktop environments (like Gnome, XFCE, etc) I don't have that problem. It's probably an issue on the back end, some package (or set of packages) that the DE has that' I'm missing, but I'm still pretty new to tiling window managers, so I haven't figured out how to fix it yet. Of course, that's what I find really cool about Linux...there's always something more to learn :)
@@BonFromageTech You need a compositor on Xorg to have some graphical stuff like shadows, vsync, opacity etc. Most DE's include a compositor in them
I actually found you a few links and replied to them twice but somehow my comments got deleted (:
@@nishantjoshi6712 That's why I love YouTubr
Personally I've only ran Xorg (or maybe, perhaps once I tried Wayland from some live USB, but that was on single monitor setup), but I've had 2 and 3 monitor setups with different refresh rates, and I've experienced no issues with it.
It was mostly on Intel's infernated GPU's, but I don't remember having that kind of issues with dual-monitor nVidia setups either - however results may wary depending on exact hardware and how it's set up, naturally. Boink.
The hardest is the first distro you ever used
I use GNU Guix and have not found it difficult.
Yeah, rolling release is the way to go, at least for me. Dealing with Ubuntu and derivatives upgrades is a pain.
glad about your opinion on nixos its so different than other its not necessarily hard its just something different than other linux os so you need to do some learning first
I remember installing gentoo back in 2010 yes 2 days to compile KDE lol I just stick with Fedora Xfce don't appreciate eye candy in my later years
I've personally found that upgrading to a new release of Fedora is more stable than Ubuntu. Even upgrading to a new release of Debian is more stable than Ubuntu. The instability of upgrading to a new release of Ubuntu is one of the reasons why I no longer recommend it to new users. I switched to Arch at the start of 2020 & the whole install once thing is what got me hooked. I'll be sticking with Arch for the foreseeable, but may at some point switch back to Fedora or Debian if I can ever go back to the upgrading to a new release thing again....
Strangely, Fedora was quite difficult for me. Ubuntu based dostros seem to be easiest and arch is fairly easy and extremely useful.
I had the opposite experience with Fedora myself. It Just works
Ubuntu-based distros (Linux Mint, Ubuntu LTS, Pop!_OS an Tuxedo OS) were all a good user experience for me. However, Fedora 40-41 KDE has been an even better experience for me. My worst experience was Manjaro KDE/Gnome, I found the experience overwhelming and confusing. It took me a while to warm up to KDE TBH.
Gentoo is a good option if you want to be closer to the source, besides things aren't changing that much to justify a rolling release these days. Rather, they pretty much work the way they have been.
Hey DT, what are the best distros for laptops according to you ?
Redcore is gentoo for the rest of us. Really worth a try.
I think what's hard to use depends on the category of user we are talking about. Got everyday people who have a panic attack when they see a command line any distro that has you use a command line to install probably isn't any lower than a 5
Interesting that you eventually mentioned maintenance as the largest pain (rightfully so IMHO). Even more interesting: declaratively configured OS such as NixOS would logically get the "most painless" label for maintenance and even re-installation, because you literally don't have to do *any* (re)configuration on them, even for a completely clean re-install. Similarly, updating is just *refreshing* your existing config, the only manual intervention you might need is in case of actual package/upstream bugs. So maintenance is in theory zero-cost (and in practice almost so, except for said bugs or cutting edge re-configurations).
In fairness though, to get to the point where your system(s) are completely declaratively configured, it's a steep learning curve, and the graphical installer you mentioned for NixOS doesn't change that much (after the basic install you'll still need to actually modify nix files to actually customize your system), install/config would remain "complexity 8" I'm afraid (but well invested time, because you only do it once).
What annoys me the most about any distro is incompatibility between packages, for example pipewire not working with easyeffects on Debian, so my question is what distro is the best for keeping things up to date?
The trouble with that is that often "up to date" is synonymous with "in a broken, work in progress state.".
@@zvxcvxcz yeah I get that, you know it would be great if there was a link up between maintainers on common packages that get used in common among distos, perhaps there is and it's just not working so well, I don't know.
Rolling release distributions have latest packages most of the time. If it does not, you will have easier time here compiling the things as well.
Speaking of Sabayon: the guys who used to do Sabayon have rebranded into a very innovative new project called Mocaccino OS that unfortunately went a bit under the radar and they could use a few more eyes on the work they are doing.
Arch user here, this is my list of most difficult distros in this particular order:
1. Slackware (basically a LFS)
2. Gentoo (I have it installed on my Pi 3b)
3. Arch (another LFS but easier than the other two)
I disagree with the ranking. Yeah, if you know already what to expect, what do you have to do, it is easy.
But, in some cases, let's take Gentoo, you do have to learn quite some things for it to work. And as nice as the wiki is, there's still things that you kind of need to know before hand, otherwise you'll be in for a bad time. Like someone mentioned, when it breaks... well, it's not so easy anymore, now, is it ? And just the amount of what you need to learn, what packages do what, what an OS requires in general and so on, there's a lot to learn. That's objectively difficult.
Of course, there is such a thing as something being difficult no matter how much you know. I'd say that it doesn't apply here almost at all. Everything related to installing and maintaing an OS is knowledge based. There's no realtime dexterity or attention/observation/perception contest where if you do not act in less than 1 second to an event you lose.
Back to the Gentoo example. I can bet you that more than 99% of people who a) didn't used Linux before or know that much about it and b) are not developers, now these people, if you would task them to install Gentoo (as their first Linux install) I bet you that more than 99% won't be able to do it in less than 24 hours. On a computer where compiling everything needed takes less than 4 hours. They'll have A LOT to learn. Well, maybe some may be able to do it faster, if they skip on the documentation, and happen that the code examples all work.
If you take out the "time to learn" parameter from the equation, most things in life become easy.
My hardest distro was LFS. Not because the install. But maintaining it was an unholy nightmare. Gentoo is my daily driver. Gentoo is not hard at all. No more than Arch. I love the USE flag customization. The documentation is second to none. Arch and Gentoo are the You Distros as in you choose what ever environment you want. You chose your toolsets, chron, ect. That's why I love those two distro.
I don't think LFS fits as a distribution
True. I had some ideas to make my own with it. Package management was not there obviously. I didn't want to compile something like portage, or pacman. Because it would just make a Gentoo or Arch clone over time. The same with the others. I tried some stuff and threw up my hands in frustration from breaking my system. If I had to do it again. I think I would try eith the nix package manager or see if i can use voids pm. I was going to run a local repo on a nas server. I would love to see DT's spin on a LFS build. I wonder what he would build.
Genuine question: did building and maintaining LFS install teach you something? Were there any takeaways, or was it just following instructions and than searching for error descriptions on the interwebs?
Yes, it taught me something very important and a lot of other things also. The biggest lesson was "I can". It taught me to also respect every flavor of Linux out there. Just building a LFS build is only 1/3 of a full build. Then there is beyond the basic build. The other 3rd. Battling various dependency issues to get x11 to compile cleanly was trying. Once, I learned how to deal with that. I was able to deal with the issues building forward. I eventually had a running environment with a desktop. I was happy for a bit. The other 3rd made itself known. Maintaining my build. Then I was miserable on the webs looking for why my Firefox will not compile right, why compiling the new Firefox caused other shared dependencies to break. Making my box to become unstable. In the end. It taught me to honor the efforts everyone put iinto the tool sets, kernal, and utilities. It was humbling. I will build another soon. I need to really study the ALFS set more, and chat with some devs about package management and maintenance.
@@ChadsHobies thanks for thoughtful answer. Distros' maintainers truly deserve our deepest respect (I must admit I sometimes take that packages are maintained and work for granted)
Man I have to agree, this was my exact experience with Ubuntu. I hated having to futz with my install constantly because of upgrades breaking. I transitioned to Ubuntu LTS and eventually Debian. I don't mind using older software but I need my tools to work for me.
what about LFS? where YOU are the package manager
No one mentioned LFS (Linux From Scratch)? I think that one deserves a solid 10!
I think people who ask this question generally don't know what exactly they are asking. Most times the question should be "What Linux distro allows me to be the most lazy?"
heh, I had the opposite thought: some of these askers want to gauge their own linux knowledge level and see if they can run these "hard" distros effectively, as a challenge.
Yes, finally someone who gets it!
"What linux distro allow me to be more productive and concentrated on work rather than spending too much time on maintaining the OS and troubleshooting it?"
That would be Mint
1:23 "maintenance" I'm not going to babysit someones's code just so my system continues to work.
The gentoo installation process is easy because we have the handbook. Let’s be honest, most of the gentoo installation videos are just the video form of the handbook. However, I don’t know why every time I follow the handbook, I would have some issues, but if I follow the videos, I wouldn’t.
Oh, also, DT, can you make a video about how install and set up LFS (Linux From Scratch)?
Great video!
I'd say that to me personally, what I find 'difficult', what I think makes a distro "hard", is when there is some part of it that challenges my pre-conceived notions. So Arch or Gentoo wouldn't be hard, as I can 100% understand compiling software, installing from a step by step guide, etc. What would be "difficult" for all of ten minutes or so would be something like Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE micro OS, and I'd even put Easy OS (from puppy linux's creator) and Nix. What could be possibly "difficult" for a while would be maybe bedrock linux? Or Qubes OS? Something that changes enough that the intuitions I have about how an OS works are challenged, and that have a surface area large enough that I wouldn't know where to start if look to diagnose the WHAT when something goes wrong...
You just described me trying to use MacOS 😅definitely much harder than any Linux distro I used in my life.
Figuring out how to install arch in LUKS LVM was much harder than clicking a checkbox in the fedora installer
anytime i see a complaint about the fedora installer checkbox i automatically dismiss the person making it
@@YounesLayachi ...and anytime I see a post about dismissing someone anytime they write about [X], I make sure that everyone knows how little I care by making a comment about it.
Great Points, Derek. Although I respectfully disagree with you on many points here, I massively enjoyed to hear your point of view. Keep it up, sir 💪
When addressing difficulty levels, I would bet that most people address their daily use needs.For me it is using a browser, some video and photo editing apps, and occasionally a word processor and/or spreadsheet app. I believe that you will find that the average computer using Joe, is quit similar to me and wants to do work on the computer, not work the computer itself, but I'm old-old school, I actually try and minimize my time on the computer.
I think the hardest Linux, for me, is Ubuntu, or rather, all of deb Linux is very difficult to use, because deb Linux has very strange package naming and very complex and strange package dependencies, and it is very easy to "accidentally" delete desktop environments. Ubuntu also has a snap, which is the most difficult use package manager for me.
Maybe it is just a familiarity issue there, because I feel like other distros have the weird names and apt is a godsend compared to Yum. Snap is also quite easy to use... much less easy to make packages for with some of the isolation constraints not being breakable in the appropriate ways (e.g. why Firefox is dumping ostensibly temporary files in your Download folder).
@@zvxcvxcz But in Arch, the package naming is much more reasonable, in addition, yum similar should be dpkg, apt corresponding should be dnf and zypper and pacman, the other three are much better than apt, opensuse and arch documentation than ubuntu and debian is also much better, in summary, I just do not like deb system, which just a personal preference
What? No mention of Fedora lol... Almost every video you do you struggle (some what) with the disk partitioning and that's with just ONE drive. (I install server version on system with 3 drives.. no problems) Anyway, what about Slackware? It was my very first linux experience... Would have used it but couldn't get it to connect to the internet. So... where do you put these two? I give imho, Fedora a 1 and slackware a 10... Like I said, imho.
I also agree 100% with you about release upgrade problems... I'm so glad I discovered rolling-release distros... Arch is my daily although I'm using opensuse Tumbleweed on another laptop and am finding it a good experience once you get over the shock of loosing the AUR..
fedora isnt hard at all
13:30 Lubuntu installed with broken bootloader for me.
"invalid environment block"
I watched the whole video expecting that LFS will be mentioned; it never was; so I had to find it in the comments.
Lol, I knew you were going to say Nixos. The newer releases are much easier like you said, it's just a different way doing things. Also, like you said, it depends on what your used to. Nixos definitely has a learning curve but once you figure it out it becomes remarkably easy, I'd say easier than arch. Updating(without breaking anything) in particular is easier than Arch and maintaining near-identical machines across all your systems is a breeze. In arch this is actually a pain in the butt depending on hardware/software used. The AUR in particular, while both awesome and convenient, can cause some serious headaches and becomes a love-hate relationship.
"The AUR in particular, while both awesome and convenient, can cause some serious headaches and becomes a love-hate relationship."
Bingo! My feelings exactly. I've just upgraded to the latest Manjaro (using Linux 6.1 LTS) and it has all been great. Backups and configuration documentation FTW.
The one lurking worry is the AUR packages I have installed - how LTS are those packages? I'm not going to blithely update anything from AUR.
yup.. same point.. thats why I like rolling release better than those point release ones...
It depends. If you are brand baby penguin, then... probably reinstalling Fedora or Ubuntu is the issue. But if you are some of the old farts, then probably running kickstart, cloud-init or just any automation script is not hard at all. It just depens how do you approach that.
Yes... I too hate regular release upgrades. Like a 75% failure rate for me across 5 machines in a year and a half.. then I moved to rolling and no more trouble... for nearly 4 years now...
yep I'm happy with my RR Distro as well. (Garuda)
Move to Void from Arch. Haven't had as many problems as in Arch but Void is a pain to setup. Somethings I haven't fixed and probably will never fix. Like using pipewire instead of pulse and gui login. I'll try again some other time. But once you're set you're good just sudo xbps-install -Su.
For me it is actually ubuntu....I love manjaro. Occasionally things break but for the most part everything is easy to fix if it occurs.
I'm in the same boat with you, my arch systems are much easier for me to install and maintain.
Artix literally makes Arch so extremely simple; probably the easiest install and setup ever.
And you can get rid of systemd and go with something like s6 which takes more work to move systemd packages over to s6, but it’s performant, and pretty nice overall.
Been using systemd on gentoo and arch for years but I have been using artix as a rescue iso and I'm tempted to give it a try
@@XenHat it’s pretty worth it imo; it’s just.. idk, a smooth experience as long as you have yay installed
Ok bu reading the documentation is also difficult at least sometimes. I tried to read Arch's documentation and couldn't understand the first few paragraphs. Maybe I read the wrong thing, maybe it has changed, or maybe I am not too ignorant to read it, but still it goes to show that sometimes documentation is not the solution or the solution is not the documentation for some people.
So you rate one OS hard, because installation was hard without reading the documentation, but you think Arch installation is easy. Without reading anything or having prior knowledge?
Hardest distro I tried was Debian Stable. It was so hard it would not bend to my will and the moment I tried to do something outside of supported by distro maintainers ways it shattered. On the other hand Gentoo - very easy to customize and do whatever I want in it like I want and I didn't even create users yet on it and this system just doesn't care. And being more serious - Gentoo build system maybe is quite demanding (both demands user knowledge, effort and computer processing power) but if you do manage to build it you know everything will work fine and Portage can recover system from your personal manipulations. Most Linux distros assume that if you installed package then nothing bad will happen with anything that was installed. Also "easy" distros do lots of behind the scene workarounds to pretend everything just works. When those workarounds fail then you get zero support from anyone because no one really knows how these systems are configured and the most common solution for any issue is "just reinstall system" and main question people as is "have you reinstalled the OS yet?"
My opinion is mostly similar to you. There's no linux distro is exactly hard to install and manage if I followed the instruction, but for me, I think there's some distros that's hard to manage. I found the lacked of package manager on Slackware hard to deal with and the helper for Slackbuild such as sbopkg isn't that easy to understand. Alpine Linux seem easy but it's not as straightforward as it seems because the documentation lacked organization and considerably hard to follow and there are somethings we have to explore first as they're not going to work properly in the normal way if we don't have something cleared up first, maybe because it's a MUSL distro and some essential thing for desktop user such as Network Manager is complicate to install, and I still don't mention how their version of OpenRC use somewhat different commands or at least the wording of commands than OpenRC on Artix and Gentoo that's make things more complicate. But then everything work fine in the end.
I never try to upgrade stable release distros to the new version before except when clean install but I agree that upgrade the version every year is a hassle and I don't really have faith that after upgrade everything will be working properly again either,but if the upgrade process is clear I don't think that is a problem.
But I have many problem with the more easier to use distros that doesn't even involve the upgrade. Those Mandrake-based distro such as Mageia and OpenMandriva gave me a big headache. Mageia doesn't have that many problem but their repos are very slowto the point that I don't want to bother with it anymore and management on GUI is rather confusing. On OpenMandriva, it sems unstable for me as it make 2-3 set of computer I tried it on randomly hang up or restart randomly and it can't launch any game from any online platform on it for some reason like it not sit well with my graphic driver. OpenSUSE doesn't have problem aside from amount of package that's used to be just one on other distro broken down into several package on this instead and that makes things hard to keep track on. RHEL-based distros also have problem on the repos, they have to use many outside repos to make the computer usable as a normal desktop and when there's many repos install then there's more dependencies problem happened as well, and sometime they pushed out update on some dependencies first while most software depended on it still haven't get an update and it's break everything.
Based on my 20+ years of using linux on and off I personally say any debian or ubuntu based distro is easy and give them all a 2 or 3. My 2 favorite at the moment being sparkylinux and peperment linux. Super easy to use either of them. At the moment the only non debian or ubuntu based distro I like is tromjaro and I give that a 1 on the easy scale. As I have tried red hat 20 years ago I would rate that a 10. I remember trying slackware and I would rate that a 8 or 9. I tried Gentoo a few years back as a co worker loved it. I hated it and would rate it a 8 in the scale you have in the video.
Gentoo, it's Gentoo. Specially without genkernel if you want to custom configure your kernel.
I installed Gentoo once with genkernel. Would try to install it again someday with custom kernel just for fun.
@@rishirajsaikia1323 Have a look at Kernotex's channel if you ever give building your own kernels on Gentoo a go - he's got a couple of good videos on it. I've been doing it in Gentoo for 20 years now and, yes, I've had the occasional non-booting kernel, especially at the beginning. But the trick is to keep a "last known good" kernel config to hand and just tweak that as you upgrade kernels.
When you achieve the custom kernel without bloats (3.8 sec. boot time without a desktop,
only config files and a simple wm) you begin to understand what the freedom is. i strongly recommend to try it with a wm like bspwm maybe.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 we met again
The monitor alignment being wonky is giving me anxiety
the need to clean install instead of doing major upgrade isn't a compromise or workaround : clean install is the best way, otherwise you'd be using a rolling release.
say no to major upgrades (or suffer)
I do major upgrades and do not suffer much. Usually there are a few kinks to work out, but nothing very significant. It would be way too much work to reconfigure everything from scratch. There are a few times it has been less smooth (maybe 5% of the time) and those tend to be times where it seemed like something was sort of wrong even prior to the upgrade.
Kali linux was the hardest for me. I spent well over a week figuring out how to obtain a 18 character wpa3 wifi password.
Arch isn't as hard as people make it out to be, it's just that installing it without knowing what you are doing can be a huge problem.
Arch really *forces* you to know how to setup Linux from the relative minimum. It's obviously not as intense as LFS, but you can have a very minimalist system to the point where you can install any desktop you want. (Or, if you're a bit of a masochist, do everything on the console/terminal.)
I think installers are more aggrevating. I tried Rlxos in a vm and then installed it to an external hdd. When the usb booted up the installer executed and as I attempted to use it the installer stated I had installed already . I tried again and with success. It then didnt boot. I had to set boot flag .
I tried Gentoo 15 years ago, and got so frustrated with trying to install it, I never considered it again.
One that almost everyone finds difficult is Slackware. I love Slackware, but I do not think that it is the easiest to deal with.