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Cake day: September 13th, 2023

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  • I mean I guess there are more noob friendly distros than Debian [ there was a time when all I saw was Ubuntu around me and it’s ubiquitous Unity DE was instantly recognizable to my eye] but chances are many of them are ultimately based on Debian itself. Mint’s main ISO is based on Ubuntu [and indirectly Debian] whilst they also release a LMDE [Linux Mint Debian Edition] as a fallback variant directly based on Debian. I guess Zorin OS or elementary OS are also decent but they also seem more like heavy reskins to me than anything else.[Zorin has a Windows like feel to it].


  • Void is rolling release IIRC. The package manager is quite fast and gets the job done. The pain point is that Void has a lower selection of package in its repos compared to say, Arch. Some good stuff is there (for example I was looking for a third party Spotify client ncspot? Back in the day and it was packaged in Void’s repos) but if someone uses niche stuff a lot, there can be issues.

    Of course there is Flatpak support. And the system itself is comparatively lean and fast. I don’t think my installation of Void came with plenty of pre-installed apps.

    It ships in two builds : glibc or musl. The latter one is less favored because it only makes life tougher honestly. Runit support is a strong point of it though personally I don’t have any anti systemd qualms.

    The documentation is basic and okayish. I still often go to Arch Wiki since that’s honestly the most detailed. Also, I just found that it’s the highest rated distro on Distro Watch. I have distro hopped a long time and Void is decent. I still hold Debian in higher regard since it’s slightly easier for a novice to get used to (though it’s repos can be hold often old versions of software) and also because it was my main entry point to the Linux world.


  • Yes, Trisquel can be a pain to be used as a daily driver. Whilst I admire the philosophy behind it’s concept, it definitely leaves a lot of end work to be done by the user.

    I have used Fedora for quite some time in the past . I think Fedora and now discontinued Cent OS were two RPM based distros (I think Fedora now uses Dnf as well) I have used. Cent OS I liked decently, it wasn’t as bleeding edge as Fedora and for a long time I dual booted Cent OS and Debian.

    Void is decent independent distro. Ironically I don’t have any anti systemd feelings and just gave it a try for heck of it and stuck to it. I think there is a musl version of Void as well but that makes things only complicated.


  • I once gave Trisquel a try back in the day. It’s one of those FSF approved distros right? My use case was more ahem, standard rather than anything programming related. Either case, one evening, I ran into a dependency hell trying to install a simple Direct Connect client onto it and no matter how much I tried I couldn’t succeed.

    I then decided to move back to Debian. Either case, most distros have Eiskaltdcpp (as one example of a client) in their repos, except for Trisquel. This was multiple years ago. I am currently on Void.