So we can clearly see the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them, please follow this format:
- Write the name of the Linux distro as a first-level comment.
- Reply to that comment with each reason you like the distro as a separate answer.
For example:
- Distro (first-level comment)
- Reason (one answer)
- Other reason (a different answer)
Please avoid duplicating options. This will help us better understand the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them.
@amanwithausername got an older laptop celeron processor running xubuntu? Any better ideas?
Hmmm never used xubuntu per se, but XFCE already seems like a good option for a low-spec computer. You could probably chip away at the resource usage some more by building your own desktop environment around a bare window manager, but honestly at this point the gain is negligible. If anything, you might want to look into tiling window managers just because they can offer a much more fluid and customizeable desktop experience as opposed to floating WMs. I’m using BSPWM right now, but considering switching to wayland with hyprland or qtile.
As for choice of distro: Not sure if NixOS would run well on your machine – my homeserver is also a pretty low-spec computer (dual-core Intel Atom), and
nixos-rebuild switch
takes ages to run. Otherwise, go for Debian Testing if you want stability, Void if you want to not have systemd. There’s also Devuan, which is basically Debian without systemd, but iirc it’s not as popular as Void. But honestly if xubuntu works for you, then it’s fine.Also, some miscellaneous tweaks for improved performance:
lazytime,noatime,autodefrag,compress=zstd:3,discard=async,space_cache=v2,ssd
. Again, not sure how well these translate to a low-end system, you should do your research.@amanwithausername comprehensive and good advice. Thank you. I tuck a look at linux, because other laptop isn’t win11 compatible “soon”.
Since you mentioned slow build times…
You can do
nixos-rebuild --target-host
to build locally and deploy over ssh. You can also use something likenixops
.No way, that’s awesome! I’ll give it a try for sure!