Choosing the Right Linux Distro

choosing the right linux distribution is very important because so many people just try to go like a top five list or hey what's the best linux distro or hey is this one any good and the answer to all these questions is well it just depends and let me explain we need to actually talk about what makes up a linux distribution so you actually understand what you're installing because if you're just trying to install some random distribution off the internet or some random linux distribution you're just going to end up moving to windows or mac because you expect everything to just work the same way and they fundamentally work different so what is the big difference and why do we even call it linux distribution instead of windows operating system or mac operating system why don't we call it linux operating system well we can but the distribution aspect of it is because everything can change at the foundational level when you go to windows or mac file manager always stays the same the bootloader always still is the same the display renderer stays the same the login manager stays the same all those things are the same and it's always the same operating system with just extra programs on top in linux when it comes to distributions all those things can change so let me explain we're going to break down each one of those i just mentioned and then talk about there's only three distributions that matter for a desktop linux user especially starting off i don't care what uh neck beard or linux vet that just wants to drive away users say there's only three that matter and let's go over that so first off what's in a distribution i just mentioned it the bootloader this is what loads the operating system you can actually load windows with linux bootloaders you can load mac with linux bootloaders all these things are basically what load the system now the two common ones are systemd boot typically if you're not gonna run like a menu or anything like that systemd boots what most uh go with uh or grub if you wanna do any kind of theming or cool screens that load your operating system you're going to want probably a grub boot loader so there's more than that but for today's video i'm keeping it simple let's move on the next is the init system these initialize the devices to work on the system typically everything systemd nowadays i made a video in this article right here on christina.com you can actually click on this and it'll explain everything about system d and all the different components but the short end of it is most things use systemd uh and you probably should learn a lot of its syntax because almost every modern big distribution uses it next up so you've initialized your devices you're booting into your system is the display render how we're going to display graphics and there's only two that really matter and that's xorg and wayland and xorg is kind of like the granddaddy it just kind of works and then wayland you have over here and it's kind of like the new hotness better coated but uh still very buggy and a lot of legacy programs don't work like i use synergy and barrier and they don't work uh and then also you just run into some kind of compatibility issue sometimes so wayland works for most people now out of the box but i still miss a lot of the xorg features and i still have those legacy programs so every single install i do of linux is using xorg so that's still my recommendation but you can try out weyland if you want honestly doesn't really make much of a difference to me other than those two things and then we have the display manager and really this should be called a login manager but it really is called a display manager because linux is run by highly technical very gifted people that have zero marketing experience and try their hardest to basically scare users maybe not scary users but they're they're obviously bad some things named in linux oh i just could go on a 15-minute rant about that but the display manager or login manager is basically three different things and this is where we start to get a little bit variety on how things are presented you could actually not use a display manager and just dump you right into the desktop but if you do want to log in you're really going to want to install one of these three there is more than this but again for simplicity sake there's light dm which is kind of like the catch-all very easy to do it is very light and then we have sddm which is kde it's a little bit fancier i really like sddm honestly it's probably my favorite uh with light dm a very very close second it kind of goes back and forth depends on the day and then gdm which is gnomes one and you might be thinking what are all these things you're talking about gnome kde all these things well that's like the base system or the login or the desktop environment so when it comes to desktop environments think of all the things all the system utilities the control center all these things that make up a lot of the configuration of your operating system that's what a desktop environment is it's the look and feel it's all the utilities to change like your resolution and other things you don't necessarily need a desktop environment really all you need is something to manage your windows and you could manually configure all this stuff through config files if you wanted in linux but for ease of simple use a lot of people like a full-blown desktop environment and i would say the top three are gnome kde and xfce these are pretty comprehensive they're great there's other ones out there like mate that is like an old school version but really these top three encompass it for simplicity's sake i say check out these three as it makes up so many distributions when it comes to linux and then there's windows managers is kind of what i use but i don't recommend it for a new user because it really has no utilities you have to change the resolution through command line and there's all that nuance there what i don't want to get into today i'll probably make a whole video on window management but it's still something that's really interesting for most people coming in remember the desktop environment most people think you need to install different distributions but you can have more than one desktop environment and switch between a whole host of different ones you can go from kde to gnome to xfce and they all look radically different so the desktop environment really is what affects the utility set that you get and then also that look and feel and then next up is distributions now when i started this off i said there's three distributions you really need to know about when it comes to desktop linux usage and that is fedora debian and arch i would say 99 of the linux desktop users will fall into one of these categories and you might be thinking what about ubuntu what about kde neon what about linux mint what about all these other ones elementary os all of those are debian based so most of the popular ones out on the market that most people know about are all just debian at its core with just stuff added on and that's the first thing you should know and i even made a shirt said debian there is only one because so much is based on debian and it is great and how you know it's based on debian is how you install packages the package manager is really the big thing here and app is probably the most popular package manager to me i don't see really a purpose in installing anything but debian you know i think the next video i'm going to make is just doing like a linux mint or installing the desktop environment that linux mint uses on debian and you'll notice really quick there's not really much difference other than it's a little bit less bloated and there's a lot less stuff installed which can be a blessing and a curse but debian is the granddaddy the the best in in my opinion when it comes to stability and reliability so if you're looking for something incredibly stable and everyone uses it debian's typically it the one downside to debian the con why you wouldn't choose it is there's not very many new packages even running a sid branch which is like the bleeding edge of debian it's still like you know several months behind sometimes up to six months behind even on that that development branch so that's debian i would say you know install the grub boot loader system d xor these are what basic settings are used when installing a base debian spin and i'll again in the next video go over this and creating linux mint from debian basically so you can see what i'm talking about next up is uh arch linux by the way i use arch arch has a special place in my heart because it is the bleeding edge you usually has amazing packages like you could install pretty much anything on orange and it'll be the the absolute newest it could be in pretty much any linux system which is great and you can build stuff directly from git which means as it's being developed you can install it and use it which is again a blessing and a curse because sometimes there's bugs and if you and i a lot of people say arch isn't stable it is stable with some caveats like you make sure you're updating your system every week make sure that you're not installing just all willy-nilly from the aur which is this basically build service that's created by the community to install packages but sometimes people contribute and then forget about it and it just falls to the wayside and then you go to install that package when it hadn't been updated and bad things happen so there's some downside starch but it's great for being on the bleeding edge and being able to install anything the downside the biggest downside i see is people not updating their system on arch and then like six months later they go to update their system or something and then just the whole system breaks and you have all these key problems there's ways around it and to fix it of course but it's probably the least stable of the three but also has the newest packages and best accessibility and as long as you know what you're doing it's awesome so i love arch but you should know those things up front and then probably lastly i want to touch on and this is what i'm using right now is fedora linux and it's like a branch between debian and arch it's a as if they almost had a baby this is what you'd get you get a little bit newer packages not as new as arch but not as old as debian you have a more of a rolling kernel so the kernel's more up to date than what you'd see on debian and it is uh used it's actually made by red hat which is one of the biggest manufacturers of linux programs out there i mean they've created so many amazing things for it so it's actually a lot more stable than your arch counterpart like if i don't install or update fedora in six months and then i just go dnf update it'll install which is great so that's kind of the beauty of fedora it's a good in between ground but for stability i'd still say debian is more stable than fedora so kind of important to know and i also do a base build of fedora which probably sometime in the future i want to do debian first because i think that's what most people will go to and also it has the best support so the problem with fedora i would see the the biggest downside to me is if you don't know much about linux a lot of how-to articles and guides online usually forget fedora or it's less supportive because less users use it so it's it's more of the oddball between debian and arch because debbie and arch i think have a bigger share of linux desktop especially when it comes to how-to articles but how-to articles i will say just a little blip on that don't blindly follow them because i can tell you there's so many 10 plus year old articles out there of debbie and linux that will get you in trouble if you follow them today so these are the three you should choose you know that was six but there's really only three you should choose fedora arch or debian and really that is it learn what makes up these entire distributions and changing these things around if i had to push you towards something i would say for a bootloader use grub for init system it's going to be system d on almost any of these that i talked to about today display renderer i would choose xorg and desktop environment if you're coming from windows i'd choose kde if you're coming from mac i would choose gnome and then for a package manager honestly doesn't matter all of these have pros and cons that i just outlined and it just depends on your setup and your feelings but now that you have a good basis you can try these and there's splinters of arch and same with debian you have your ubuntus your pop os's your elementary os linux mint all these are debian linux at its core and then you have fedora which honestly i don't really know any forks of fedora it just kind of nobody really forks it for some odd reason i be curious to see why on that but this should give you a basis of where to start in linux learn these things i've talked about the next video i'm going to be going over a full install and we're going to do linux mint basically we'll we'll use a base debian install and then install each one of these components i talked about and that way you understand each one of these components because if you don't understand these components you'll never understand linux and if you don't want to learn these components and you just want things to work i don't recommend using linux so that's where i'm going to leave this video if you want the full guide again check it out over christina.com and with that let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 333,588

Keywords: chris titus tech

Id: dL05DoJ0qsQ

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022