Choice of choosing a linux distro for a Advanced Linux users is very limited

hTahaCi:

There are 100s of linux distro out there but only handful of them can be picked out

Once you’re advanced and knowledgeable enough, it doesn’t matter which distro you use if we’re honest. You can always make it good enough starting from a blank slate.

Some make it a breeze or a very unique in the way they work, others are just a million-th variant of Arch/Debian with an Arianna Grande as the default wallpaper and call themselves a distro.

I’d say that we do have some of those unique distros from PG’s recommended page that we can iterate from.

My main gripe and hate/love relationship is how annoying it is to mix and match each distro’s needs, hence I sometimes just give up and use a basic Ubuntu (mostly speaking for servers here, not end user environment).

Still, I think that 2 path can be extremely rewarding and nice for people in the advanced tier[1] that would like to go even further:

• Arch, do you own thing from scratch and enforce it as hard as you can/want, then export and import your settings with bash/other tools
• NixOS, literally version-file your entire system and never have regression while at the same time knowing exactly what’s where on your machine and stop being bothered by trying to remember where do you put those fonts files or those config files to have the app shortcut on your desktop

Arch is definitely popular and quite a lot of variants seeded out of it for very good reasons making it extremely cool for newcomers.

NixOS is the end-game for end-user + servers without going on the Ansible band-wagon IMO.

hTahaCi:

Others like Arch, Debian, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, MX Linux, Devuan, Kali, Parrot, Zorin OS, Black Arch, Garuda, Void, Alpine require extensive hardening and still fall short on default MAC enforcement.

Most of those are very useless ones or super niche hardcore without a lot of benefits to them specifically IMO. And can be totally forgotten.

hTahaCi:

It sorta feels like a parent watching their kids the kids have all the happiness no worries about anything they can do anything they want but the parent has so many responsibilities to taken care of.

Kinda the burden of being a parent yes. But at the same time, if your network/digital hygiene is overall clean, you might not need to worry too much.

1. not sure I’d call myself an advanced Linux user but I do at least have quite some experience in that OS as a whole ↩︎