I am considering moving away from Ubuntu, but I haven’t tried other distributions for years. I started on Linux Mint Cinnamon back in 2012, but switched to Ubuntu when I built my current PC in 2020 because I wanted more up-to-date packages. Now I am faced with needing to replace my SSD which gives me reason enough to install a new distro. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with 32G of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, so I would need something that plays nicely with nvidia. I routinely use libreoffice, digikam, gimp, virtualbox, bambu studio, sublime text, filezilla, thunderbird, minecraft, steam, Open WebUI and Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111). I liked Ubuntu because it was familiar, fairly easy to customize, and everything was kept fairly well up to date. I am not a big fan of snap, and I would prefer a more logical and unified package management system. I was wondering if you all had some recommendations for me. Thanks

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    231·
    6 days ago

    Fedora is usually pretty good at being up to date while still user friendly and still operate like a classic distro. The immutable ones are also pretty nice if you’re into that. Otherwise you could consider Arch or Endeavour. If you’ve been using Linux since 2012, an Arch distro’s probably easier than you think.

    I switched to Arch in 2011 after being on Ubuntu since 7.04 and the Unity disaster… and I’m still running that install to this day. I’m typing this from it!

    In practice I’ve found Arch’s always up to date packages to be less of a hassle than dealing with dependency hell of carefully pulling newer dependencies when you inevitably need a newer feature of a package. Worst case there’s containers for the few stubborn “only works on this exact version of Ubuntu” cases but it’s pretty rare.

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 days ago

      I’ve been mostly happy with Bazzite (Fedora based) but sometimes the immutability aspect can be frustrating. I might say any old distro with a regular Timeshift backup is good enough. OP already said they tried Mint, which works well with Timeshift, and I don’t know if it’s improved with it’s update frequency.

      • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
        2·
        6 days ago

        Bazzite drive me nuts. It’s pretty good out of the box but I had to do some crazy shit to make stuff work for my friend that’s just starting on Linux.

        I measured it, I was able to install like 2GB worth of Arch updates in the time it took to rpm-ostree kargs --append. Waiting 5 minutes to install a tiny <1MB utility package gets annoying fast. It’s nice to be able to just tell my friend to boot the last generation though. Tradeoffs.

        It runs great otherwise though, I see the appeal especially for new users and fixed hardware like the handhelds. Just works.

        • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
          1·
          5 days ago

          Not sure I’ve seen the same latency with installing things but I’ve also layered very little. Doing things the immutable way is definitely more challenging but I don’t mind the challenge. I think I have more fun configuring than actually using my system.