kzimmermann's State of the Distro 2025 Q1

A little or perhaps a lot late, here's again kzimmermann's State of the Distro series, opening up my postings in 2025!

Instead of making this one repetitive in the same format as the last one (with a ranking and all), I've decided to instead make it a little different. I know we all hate the term "movers and shakers," but what if I this time decided to make a little highlights section out of this series? To document what else I've been trying out, experimenting with or downright newly daily driving in comparison to my last assessment? Let's run this little experiment and see.

New OSes that I've tried or drived since last time

Arch Linux

I have acquired a GMKTek NUC and decided was wondering what to try with it. Debian was a straightforward choice, comfortable and all, but I couldn't make the wifi driver work with the current Bookworm kernel. Thinking about what I could try with a newer kernel instead, I decided to give Arch another go.

Installation via the archinstall script was quite easy: I had done it before, and it worked just as nicely this time. I would have gone with Artix, but I don't think they have a port of archinstall for their distribution. Perhaps one day I'll tackle the raw install instructions and set everything up from zero - just like in the memes.

A small pet peeve I have about Arch is how so much of the software for it has to be taken from the AUR. It's definitely a system that works and there are lots of stuff in it, but it sort of breaks the workflow of the package manager. I mean, go to the web browser, search the AUR repository, clone it, makepkg... OK, there are helpers, but even then, meh.

Fedora

Remember that laptop I had that had Secure Boot on and could not be disabled? I finally became fed up with keeping Ubuntu on it and decided it was time to try something else. My main goal was to get Debian (again ;)) on it, since it does show up in that very small list of "shimmed" distributions that work with it. And although it installed correctly, the installed system refused to boot from the disk due to an "integrity check" error. So, next in line was Fedora Core 41.

Curiously, Fedora was the first distribution that I truly downloaded to try (at the time the release was Laughlin), but I messed up in the process (knew nothing about partitioning disks and live media) and abandoned it for Ubuntu. Coming full-circle for it in 2025 was quite a rediscovery.

Can't say what Fedora was like in the past, but the current 41 release is rock solid, with a fairly up to date software line. It has some nuisances that smell of corporate pressure on it like not offering a basic image to install (I had to choose the LXDE spin for a very minimal base, and even that came with a lot of extra fluff that I don't use, like a display manager, plymouth, etc. One interesting thing is its equivalent of the AUR, known as COPR. I had to use it to install GZDoom, for example.

Perhaps as an alternative, I could try CentOS or Rocky/Alma Linux if they also support shim?

Linux Mint

OK, this one is not for me, but rather... my parents!

A few months ago, I posted a rather dark article about how their 2012 Macbook was at the end of the line in terms of supported OSes and they thinking about buying another. Fast forward to today, and I'm happy to report that story has a happy ending!

I challenged them to try Linux for a week risk free (I had a spare drive) or get their money back without any questions. They accepted it, and the distro I thought about immediately was none other than Mint. I remember the ease of use, elegance, similarity to Windows and all. Plus, Macs don't have the nuisance of Secure Boot to deal with, so it was even easier to set up. I picked Xfce as the DE.

The result? My mother said she "virtually could not see any difference" between Mac OSX and Linux Mint. Her computing experience became much faster, everything worked and her only point was that the battery seemed to drain a little bit faster. Also the touchpad seemed to scroll way too fast, but I could change it in some X settings.

I'm guessing I won the challenge. Now I'm wondering if I should get an SSD to make their experience a lot better.

NetBSD

Last, but definitely not the least, I tried another BSD.

The plan was to install OpenBSD on the oldest computer I have (a Dell Latitude D620), but I couldn't get its wifi working with it, and the installer could not proceed. With NetBSD 10.3 just released, I decided to try it. This time, it worked.

Using NetBSD was similar to FreeBSD in many ways, and its own package manager also made things easy. It's a little weird for me to type pkg_add install instead of pkg, but nothing that can't be learned.

Ironically, post installation the built-in WiFi driver kept failing for a mysterious reason. I couldn't really figure out why (restarting the networking stack would not work either), so I made a practical move: a USB dongle. This had a double positive effect: not only the driver was much better supported, but it also was much faster (the built-in NIC is 802.11g, while the dongle is 802.11n).

I'm quite satisfied with NetBSD but, much like my first experiences with FreeBSD, I'm not sure if it replace my current choice for old computers (Alpine Linux). Still, I'm glad to have stumbled on it and tried it - good thing to keep in my OS utility belt.

Conclusion

Over the last quarter, I've finally kicked the bucket regarding distributions that I was intending to try for the longest of time. I've came full circle using Fedora (properly) again, and ol' Arch came back strong, too. Mint continues to be my go-to distro to direct newcomers too, as it passed the grandma test, and has none of the nonsense that plagues Ubuntu. And I also popped my NetBSD cherry, after waiting for the 10 release for so long.

Who knows what the next quarter will bring in terms of OS discovery? We'll see!

What new OS have you been trying out lately? Let me know in the Fediverse!

This post is number #58 of my #100DaysToOffload project.

Last updated on 02/06/25