Desktop Operating Systems

What's the best desktop operating system? Things I don't like: 1. Desktop Enviroment's, I prefer tiling window managers. 2. Xorg, Wayland if far superior in comparison to Xorg, it is a lot simpler, more secure and faster, it reduces if not eliminates screen tearing. I think that wlroots is good enough and window managers like Sway, Hyprland, Raver and newm are really great in terms of usability. 3. Generic x86_64 architecture, it is 10-30% slower than x86_64-v3. 4. systemd, it is way more then I need, I use it as init system and for init system systemd is bloated, it's more of a suite. 5. GNU core utils, GNU userland is bloated, for example VIM, NeoVim has more features while having only 70% of VIM code. Artix Linux (https://artixlinux.org/) is good, is supports custom init systems and since it's Arch Linux based it also supports Wayland, but they compile their binaries for generic x86_64 and not x86_64-v3, and also they use GNU core utils. Chimera Linux (https://chimera-linux.org/) is also great, it uses their custom init system called dinit and don't use GNU, but also compiles their binaries for x86_64, and they use GNOME which I don't like. OpenBSD (https://www.openbsd.org/) is great, but you have to do a lot of customizations to make your system function properly for desktop, BSD's don't support Wayland well and it uses x86_64 binaries. Currently I use CachyOS (https://cachyos.org/) which is awesome, it compiles binaries for x86_64-v3, have custom kernels with better schedulers and automate other optimizations like auto nice'ing processes, but they use GNU, systemd, have soykaf tone of useless packages and is created with KDE in mind.

None of them are good, but Windows is the best in terms of functionality vs inconvenience. WSL, while not seamless, helps fill a lot of functionality holes. I haven't tried MacOS though, so that might be better. Things I don't like: Fragmentation, extensive set-up time, trouble shooting, reading manuals, inconsistent font rendering, bad defaults, instability, backwards incompatibility.

Alpine Linux is really nice. I would use it myself if I didn't make a bad decision long ago and gotten an Nvidia GPU.

>>65088 >None of them are good Agreed. I have tried windows, mac and many linux flavors. It's about settling with some cons but ensuring that the pros benefit what you do. >Fragmentation, extensive set-up time, trouble shooting, reading manuals, inconsistent font rendering, bad defaults, instability, backwards incompatibility. Also agreed. I settled for Fedora. I work in IT and this met my needs while the cons are manageable.

>>65088 I got back to arch after half a year on W11 where it had problems with > usb-c hubs to hdmi/dp > screen blackouts and reload at random moments > wsl being retarded, not having snap or systemd > being slower At least there is chocolatey now which makes package management usable

>>65087 >What's the best desktop operating system? If you're a hacker: the one you make using simple but powerful tools you can hope to understand in their entirety at some point. In my case: Gentoo nomultilib, bspwm, sxhkd, lemonbar, st, dmenu, aerc, calcurse, sfeed, nsxiv, bwrap, catgirl, emacs, mupdf, etc... and a lot of my own programs and scripts (own music player, manga reader, status bar framework, etc...). It is VERY comfy, at that point, because I know enough to fix what breaks and improve what needs it. I may try StumpWM at some point. > Xorg, Wayland if far superior in comparison to Xorg, it is a lot simpler, more secure and faster >simpler No. Wayland is simpler, but Wayland with all that's needed to reach feature parity with X11 isn't. There has been enough discussion on this board about this, anyway. >VIM, NeoVim has more features while having only 70% of VIM code. Vim isn't GNU. But yeah, code cruft is never nice. >Arch No. Not serious enough and PM isn't powerful enough to help against dependency hell. >Chimera, Cachy Literally who? Only script kiddies use unstable soykafe with a bus factor of 1 or 2. >OpenBSD If you can get by using only base and don't care about performance, great. >>65088 I may have agreed with you if you were talking about Windows 7, but I was forced to use 10 at work for the first time since years and it was the worst computing experience I ever had in my whole life. >>65099 I use Fedora at work, but Gentoo at home. So much less issues (even had to recompile terminus-fonts because the terminus-fonts-legacy-x11 package is fuarrrked) because openrc and the "usual" tools are simply less complex than systemd, no initrd/initramfs needed, better package manager (though dnf is suprisingly good), less installed freedesktop jank, etc...

As a side-note, tiling window managers don't appeal to me. I very rarely want my screen to be split into more than 2 sections, and there's practically no applications I want to automatically split my screen when opened. Yeah, most have a floating mode, and you can keep full screen applications in different workspaces, but if used like that most of the time, there's no point. >>65100 >>65102 I think a lot of problems people have with Windows are hardware based. It's not reliable on old hardware.

>>65103 >I very rarely want my screen to be split into more than 2 sections With 16:9 "big" screens (27" 2560p here), 3 is what I most often ends up with. >and there's practically no applications I want to automatically split my screen when opened Text is easier to read when it's not taking the whole width, so stuff like PDF reading or web browsing is nice in half a screen. And when you're actually doing something (e.g. programming) your often want a browser nearby to search stuff and a terminal to do some man or run something. >Yeah, most have a floating mode, and you can keep full screen applications in different workspaces, but if used like that most of the time, there's no point. Why would there be no point? Even if you use tiling less than half the time, it being automatic when you need it is nice. >I think a lot of problems people have with Windows are hardware based. It's not reliable on old hardware. No, I was talking about software. Ads everywhere, including in their PoS Edge, no more Windows classic theme to avoid visual clutter, too many menus scattered everywhere with a mix of "modern" and NT or pre-NT style (especially "advanced" parameters), needs a whole week of fiddling with the registry to disable retarded soykaf like the resource hog known as Defender or Cortana or enable basic stuff like showing file extensions and allowing the creation of symlinks, still not customizable enough, the whole Windows Store/chocolatey/nuget/appget/MSYS2/scoop soykafshow is still miles away from even basic PMs like Pacman or apk, still lacking basic soykaf like a way to create a ramdisk or tune the I/O scheduler (i.e. ionice), NTFS is a good joke compared to APFS and modern UNIX FSes (ZFS, BTRFS, XFS with LVM/dm) and a general bloat/technical debt induced decay that can't be solved without starting again from scratch (stuff like https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/why-modern-software-is-slow-windows-voice-recorder/). There's just no end to the small~medium issues.

>>65092 seconding this. i've been daily driving alpine for roughly 6 months and it's super comfy. the setup kinda is like kicking dead whales down the beach, i swapped out openrc for runit, and compiled my own kernel, but it's pretty good when you get it working

>>65105 I just switched to alpine. There were a few tricks I had to learn (BOOT_SIZE, LVM_SIZE, and setup-desktop) but from computer off to working alpine desktop is literally less than 10 minutes. Even faster than openbsd. So far really enjoying it. I don't really miss systemd.

>>65104 I've got a 1920x1080 14" screen. >often want a browser nearby to search stuff and a terminal to do some man or run something I just alt+tab. Probably less efficient, but I prefer that to splitting my screen up into parts, since I'd still mostly be using one application, with the others only occasionally being needed. >Why would there be no point? A stacking manager with some tiling, makes more sense than a tiling manager with some stacking, when I only want tiling like 5% of the time, if that. >I was talking about software A lot of what you list after this is stuff I don't care about, like making ramdisks, or tuning the I/O scheduler. Enabling visible file extensions, can be done with a single button in the file explorer, so I'm not sure what that's about. Turning off Defender and Cortana was also not particularly difficult, and according to task manager, they aren't running or taking up any resources. Not removed from my system, but not getting in the way. I agree that the UI has become an inconsistent mess. Linux is no better in that regard though, unless you use something like Gnome, or configure everything through text files and the command line.

>>65107 >Turning off Defender and Cortana was also not particularly difficult Last time I checked, updates would automatically turn them on again. Maybe it's not hard for seasoned Windows suckers, but it's certainly not "just push a button" easy. >I agree that the UI has become an inconsistent mess. Linux is no better in that regard though, unless you use something like Gnome, or configure everything through text files and the command line. Well yeah, text files. It can be quite painful on Linux too (dotfiles everywhere, X resources, GNOME's dconf soykaf) but if you stay simple and modern like I do, most user programs now obey XDG and system ones usually stay neatly in /etc.

>>65106 my boot time is 8 seconds including efi and luks! you can cut down a lot of time by building a static kernel so udev doesn't do very much at boot; everything that needs to be loaded is already loaded additionally, efistub will save a second or two from grub >>65107 i also have a 1080p 14" screen, i prefer tiling on it. >I'd still mostly be using one application, with the others only occasionally being needed. consider the "deck" layout in dwm

>>65108 How would you go about changing your gtk theme, and making sure it looks like qt programs and vice versa? Do you 1. avoid anything gtk or qt like the plague 2. accept the defaults, which look different 3. install a 3rd party theme changer 4. manually edit both?

>>65113 qt can follow gtk2 themes with a package but i haven't tried it in a while. i use zero qt applications on a regular basis

>>65113 As you probably guessed, most of my GUI programs don't have menus or decorations (pure Xlib/Xcb or GL), so I don't really care about mismatch anymore. For gtk, I just use set GTK_THEME and GTK2_RC_FILES in my .zprofile (bluecurve ftw). I have almost no Qt applications (RPCS3 has its own theming and isn't made to be looked at very long, Libreoffice is used only when I have to open the odd MS Office file).

>>65115 Starting from a bare bones tiling window manager, and then learning how to use it, plus going through the process of configuring everything with text files, is what I would consider excessive set-up time.

>>65116 >plus going through the process of configuring everything with text files You don't usually go from GNOME to that kind of setup in one step. >what I would consider excessive set-up time. It's only once, and people who like to tinker aren't annoyed by that setup time, as long as they feel there's something to get at the end.

>>65088 I have found Windows to be a buggy piece of soykaf. I know it's ironic, but open-source software feels more robust and streamlined in terms of user experience. Also, no worrying about malware and not having your default browser randomly change to edge is nice. And can't forget the telemetry, ads and the fact it costs money.

>>65105 how did you switch openrc to runit?

>>65166 Yesterday, I tried the debian, non-free, xfce, live iso. Setting the scale to 1.5, and above, actually made the resolution smaller, and vice versa. So I had to set the resolution to a custom value of .8 to get something acceptable. Little things like that always pile up every time I try linux. The command line is streamlined. ANYTHING graphical isn't, and it's definitely not robust. If I had no choice but to use linux, I would go for xfce. It's been more stable than KDE whenever I tried that. I would not want to use it though. I'm not sold on the linux desktop, and I've given it many chances. On windows, I haven't experienced my default browser changing, and the last time I got malware was around 8 years ago. Windows is also more customizable than a lot of people think. For instance, powertoys provides a utility similar to dmenu, and powershell can be extended through modules.

>>65172 don't change the render scale... you need to change the default font size and some application settings.

>>65169 I uninstalled OpenRC and ported Void's runit scripts, which required almost no work other than fixing assumptions that would be correct with GNU coreutils. I then wrote a couple of services for the daemons I use most often, and it's been fine ever since. /sbin/init is linked to /sbin/runit-init

>>65173 >some application settings Like firefox, which has an separate scaling of everything. Very streamlined. I also don't want tiny buttons. Windows does it correctly out of the box.

>>65177 what is resolution? for me this works fine on a 2560*1600 16inch laptop

>>65177 Its not perfect but it's really not that much effort and it looks a million times better than the floating point scaling soykaf that xorg does. Its like 10 minutes to configure your desktop environment and some apps to work with a high dpi display

>>65087 I used Linux for a long time, but now I use FreeBSD. It has everything I need, I can use most Linux software, jails, it's fairly lean, easy to configure, and no (((soystemd))).[spoiler][/spoiler]

>>65087 Don't we already have a thread for this: >>64379 ? >What's the best desktop operating system? For me, it's Gentoo: >Portage is really flexible and powerful package manager >ebuilds are really powerful (but not as easy to understand as PKGBUILDS (Arch/Artix) and APKBUILD (Alpine Linux)). >You can easily enable and (more importantly) disable stuff using USE flags (either globally in make.conf or on per package basis in package.use). >You can set different compiler options (CFLAGS) on per package basis, if you want/need to (useful for debugging). >You can apply patches easily. >You can compile the Linux kernel yourself but you can also choose to install a prebuild kernel if you want to. >The documentation is good (GentooWiki and the Gentoo Handbook). >Has decent amount of packages in the main repository and you can easily add more overlays (= repos) using eselect-repository (be sure to mask all packages from the overlay before you add it and then unmask only the packages you want to install). >Hardened musl and hardened nomultilib (glibc) stage3 (= bootstrap) tarballs (and "Profiles") are available. The only downside (more like feature) is that you need to build your packages yourself (although it's automated using Portage). I use Alpine Linux on my laptop. I personally use IceWM on both.

>>65180 Same anon as >>65107 so 1920x1080 14"

>>65195 >>65181 So 10 minutes of configuration, compared to less than a minute in Windows. In fact, in Windows, there's sensible defaults based on your resolution, so you probably don't have to change anything. That is objectively more streamlined. I also remember, when I tried KDE for a few days, that after I set things to a reasonable size, websites I use all the time had different, worse looking fonts than on Windows. Regardless of which packages I installed, it just looked worse. Maybe, with enough fiddling and research, I could get fonts to look decent, but in any case, they did not look good out of the box.

I thought I ask in here rather than making a new thread, is there a good desktop OS suited for being used exclusively for internet browsing? Something easy yet lite? Does that exist?

>>65461 I think Fedora can be great for normal person internet use. Lite can mean different things to different people. It's 1.9 GB and you can try it out from a live USB. Use Rufus to burn that ISO if you're curious.

>>65201 Install gentoo, unironically.

>>65462 I would disagree with that. It is mostly functional by default, but it's missing a lot of programs and drivers unless you manually add third party repositories such as flathub or RPM fusion. The result is, on a clean install, your hardware, will only be partially functional, or not at all. For example, if you have a Broadcom wi-fi card, it will not work, or if you have a radeon GPU, you won't be able to use it to decode H.264 and H.265 videos (most video content out there). Most end-users expect their hardware to be fully functional by default and to be able to install any program they need or want, which disqualifies fedora. That said, it is my desktop distribution of choice, but I could do without the needless additional steps it takes to get a fully functional system and all the software I want.

>>65461 I would use Debian stable for that. Both Chromium and Firefox ESR are packaged. Debian stable never breaks. Be sure to use the netinst iso that contains the non-free firmware (link related): >https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/current/amd64/iso-cd/ Select "Xfce4" during software installation screen (or use "tasksel" to install it and then use apt to uninstall GNOME3). Also, be sure to replace "bullseye" (or similar release codenames) with "stable" in your /etc/apt/sources.list (This will tell your package manager that you want to install the next stable release always when it becomes available). After this, you can just run this to update: tmux #optional # update list of available packages/check for updates: sudo apt update # install all updates: sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade # to install/search/remove software: apt search emacs sudo apt install emacs-lucid sudo apt autoremove vim If you want TUI for APT, install aptitude, or, if you want a GUI, install Synaptic (or just use "apt" command).

>>65462 fedora _doesn't_ just work though the GUI almost crashes the first second you install it. same for ubuntu. both those OS are so slow that a user cannot figure out how to use it because the feedback loop between click and something happening on the screen is up in the 10s of seconds.

>>65470 >(This will tell your package manager that you want to install the next stable release always when it becomes available) Why in the heck would anyone want such a thing? Upgrading from one stable release to the next is always one of the most stressful things. I always need to prepare myself for a ton of headaches and have time set aside to fix them all at once. Why would anyone want to automate this?

>>65478 I'm a different person. I actually would like to have a system that I barely have to update at all, outside of security updates to network-adjacent software (even then I don't have any server-side apllications running.) I don't need the latest of anything, especially as it tends to break things or need new requirements.

>>65484 On Debian, you can still tell apt to track a release codename ("bullseye" instead of "stable") and then upgrade to the next release when you are ready to (or when you no longer get updates on your current release). It's slightly more safe way and I would definitely use it on a server or in corporate environment.

>>65484 Consider Slackware GNU plus Linux created by Patrick Something I’m writing random stuff because the “post was too short” but yeah give Slackware a try it seems to fit your requirements well.

>>65476 eh just use macos or windows, linux is fantastic for servers but not so much on the desktop side of things... >t. just migrated servers from solaris to ubuntu

>>65461 Chrome OS! <antispambreak>

>>65201 If you're going to act so autistic about about binary optimization, just compile your operating system from scratch.

>>65231 i pity you if you only spend a minute configuring windows lol. windows defaults are unusable

>>65469 >>65476 Good points against Fedora, my apologies. What's a good distro or OS for "normal person" web app use only and a few other things like word processing, organizing photos and calculator use? That is not Windows or OS X.

>>66383 Linux Mint if Debian based, EndeavorOS if Arch based, MX Linux (no systemd opt deb based), and/or Artix (no systemd opt arch based).

>>66383 Linux Mint if you (or whoever is going to use the computer) are normal person.

>>65229 If you live in a cold country you can use your computer as a space heater while it compiles :-)

>>65497 Its resolution defaults are very usable. Nice strawman.

>>66439 It's always freezing in my home and my computer makes it much worse as it's a literal icebox with how much cold air that it releases.

>>66440 For me, GNU/Linux has always defaulted to the native resolution of my monitor (and I have had 2 different monitors/2 different PCs, 2 laptops and a Raspberry Pi). And I have used various distributions of GNU/Linux for ~10 years.