Best laptop distro

basically title. Should I just use a default distro like Debian or arch, or should I try to find some variant which is lightweight and made for a laptop like deepin? battery life is probably most important but im gonna need a gui

Other urls found in this thread:

voidlinux.eu/
alpinelinux.org/
cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

install gentoo

shove your peppers up you ass stallman

Any lightweight distro is a decent option. SLAX, Puppy, Slackware, Q4OS, etc. Take your pic.

Google is your friend.

yeah ive googled but I want to know what you guys personally use.

It all comes down to resource use vs. how many resources you have.

If you really need someone to tell you what operating system to use then use Windows 10 or OSX.

he's just interested in other peoples opinions you aspie

>Should *I* just use
I beg to differ.

wow dude chill out. noone is forcing you to post im my thread if you dont want to. It will be gone soon enough. thanks for your help regardless thou.

Im new to linux so can anyone tell me where linux keeps its program files?

program config files are in /etc/

No i mean like whats the linux equivalent of the windows program files folder? Like if i install something where do i go to see its files?

I use Void Linux [1] with musl libc, but would also recommend Alpine Linux [2] wich has more musl packages.
Both are lightweight and easy to use distros.

[1] voidlinux.eu/
[2] alpinelinux.org/

All programs are all over the place. A package you install probably has some files in /usr/bin (the executable files), maybe some libraries in /usr/lib, non-code files/assets/reasources in /usr/share, config in /etc, and maybe some other shit at other places.
Consult your package manager to tell what files are installed by what package.

Or, if you really want a program files folder, you could go with something like GoboLinux (not an easy-to-use distro, but it implements the whole "separate directories for every program" thing).

Why does it just dump everything together? How are you supposed to find anything?

Xubuntu is pretty good. It's lightweight and easy to install, if you're a beginner, then I'd definatley reccommend it.

Everything in the "printers" section of the first image can be disregarded. CUPS runs a web server for configuration that works fantastically. Open a browser and go to "localhost:631", and you can configure everything from there.

Torvalds didn't sit down and create the Linux filesystem layout from scratch.

Different folders were added by different UNIX versions at different times for different purposes. What you see now isn't the result of a clean design, it's a result of bits and pieces being added and re-purposed over the years.

The closest thing to a clean, fresh re-design is GoboLinux as said

Because of legacy reasons, and exactly for the reason you're stating: Make it easy to find stuff.
If you're looking for the executable of a program, you're going to look in /usr/bin/program_name (you shell looks there to find all the commands you type. Try running "which cat", for example). If you're looking for a library, you'll be looking into /usr/lib, if you need to find a manual page, you'll be looking in /usr/share/man (the "man" program looks there to find any program's manual pages), all the links to the applications you can find in your desktop's application menu are in /usr/share/applications, and so on and so forth.
I'm not saying it's the best way to do things, but it's just the way things are done in the linux world.

lol I wish
[email protected]/* */-pc:~$ echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n'/usr/local/bin/usr/bin/bin/usr/local/games/usr/games[email protected]/* */-pc:/home/user# echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n'/usr/local/sbin/usr/local/bin/usr/sbin/usr/bin/sbin/bin

thx im currently installing debian but the great thing about linux is you can try them all. if debian is too resource heavy ill def switch over

make sure to put /home on a separate partition, makes it easier to distro-hop without losing all your shit

Unless you're looking for binaries required at boot, need superuser rights, or you installed manually, or your distro's fucktarded and needs a /usr/games. Sheesh, user, it's not like most distros in $CURRENT_YEAR have unified most of those directories or anything.

haven't unified

Ich engirsh very gut today.

I guess cp, rm, mv, grep, nc, tar etc. are all binaries required at boot and can be totally discarded when it comes to filesystem discussions

This is a very common situation in a UNIX-like OS. It's not an edge case that can be forgotten about.

/usr/local/bin contains binaries that were installed by gem. It's not my distro's native package manager, sure, but it's not a manual install

Debian. Y'know, that pretty important distro that so many others are (directly or indirectly) based on.

AFAIK it's only Arch and Fedora/RHEL. Are there others?

Doesn't this break things? I heard you couldn't do this for dual booting.

I'm not telling you to not to look in those places, just that usually you'll find most of what you need in /usr/bin.

To give you an idea, vanilla slackware (full install with 16 packages from SBo):
$ ls /bin | wc -l203$ ls /sbin | wc -l293$ ls /usr/bin | wc -l4266$ ls /usr/sbin | wc -l465

From the distro's perspective that's a manual install. Not much can be done about that except you using the distro's package manager to install them instead, or not install them at all. It's like me saying my firefox binary is in /nix/store/*firefox* but I used their install script so it's not manual.

Which is pretty much the only distro which does that, and even there it's barely used if at all.

At least voidlinux, GoboLinux (even though it tries to hide it), and of course everything based on arch/Fedora/RHEL. Not sure about others.

In any case, the split between those directories is quickly vanishing, as more and more people just quit giving fucks and install to /usr/bin, or even remove the whole / vs /usr split. Most distros don't support a /usr-less boot anymore (due to ramdisks), and regular users have all the sbin folders in their $PATH.

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is just as retarded as Windows

At least Windows has the decency to push all the jumbled mess of folders for compatibility reasons under the Windows directory so we don't have to shift through it to find user related shit which is kept under Users or program specific shit under Program Files

because giving every folder a 3-letter name for everything is sure obvious

If there are config files stored in /home that are being read by the wrong version of a program (like if the config was created on an Arch install, and then read on a Debian install with a more outdated version of the software) then potentially there could be issues. Otherwise, I think you should be good.


You're absolutely correct, and that's how it should be. I, for one, like the Arch/Fedora/RHEL way of doing it, and the next time I reinstall I'll strongly consider manually symlinking them if my distro doesn't support it. Nonetheless, originally you said that the shell finds *all* programs in /usr/bin - that's what I was correcting

Ah, you're right. I did type that. Yep, I was wrong.

I just use OpenSUSE. If it werks it werks.
Look into Porteus though. It's like Slackware in the sense that it's packages are just xz files with an install script, but it's frugal. In other words you package what you need, and it's installed as you need it. It also means that if you fuck up you can do a fresh boot and fix it.

Xubuntu and recompile your kernel.

The real question is weather or not you are going to be using the computer as a keyboard based os or mouse based

mouse based would be like a normal human OS with a start menu and icon
for that I would go with manjaro_openrc since it supports old as hell hardware but provides the latest packages still.

A keyboard based computer would be more likely to use a tiling WM like I3 and would be better suited to a barebones os like void or funtoo (i use devuan alpha on my one keyboard based laptop but its nothing amazing)

CLIT MOUSE > TRACKPAD

Quite frankly Ubuntu is by far the best distro for beginners.

However it is a very dumbed down distro, it's almost like using a smartphone.

Fedora and SuSE are strong contenders, slightly less n00b friendly but also less dumbed down. They are the best Gnome and KDE distros respectively.

Gentoo is a meme distro for a reason, if you want to make it actually usable use Sabayon.

It's a meme because it's hard to get started in, but when you grow up, you'll learn it's a great base to create your own customized distro.

Stallman doesnt even like gentoo

ACKSHUALLY

it's a meme because it offers extreme hassle for at best marginal benefits. It is no more "difficult" to use than any other distro. It's just extremely tedious waiting years for shit you shouldn't be recompiling to finish compiling.

No the meme is that it takes forever to install

Gentoo isn't a meme for any one reason, it's a meme for all of those reasons and more.

None of you fucks have used Gentoo for more than a week, have you

asckually there are bin distributions of every gentoo package, recompiling is totally optional

Gentoo
Pretty good, if you know your shit.


Are there? There's nothing official afaik (apart from few big packages like firefox).

Sabayon has binaries for everything, but it's still Gentoo underneath so portage is there whenever you want it.

Eh. I guess it's not that hard to change it though. Might not be a bad choice for a laptop, if that's the case.

Devuan

Thats easy
good luck getting a decent gui though, which does not exist on Linux, its either bloated or light and featureless

Excuse my ignorance, but doesn't Snappy do that already?

Ubuntu is just as easy as any other mainstream distro. In fact they're all pretty much the same at this point.

What is xfce
What is mate
What is openbox
There's more choices actually..
and for basic utilities you don't need guis

Cute pictures OP

Windows doesn't even have a decent gui.

As a matter of fact, I (3rd poster you linked) have. Not as my main desktop, but as server.

You forget that by default normies accept every Windows GUI as good. Even when the hotcorners and edges are making them switch to cellphone style interafaces that they don't understand, every five seconds, that's good because it's Windows

this 1000%
xfce and mate are both 100 100 100

I found LXDE to be convenient, light and full of useful features.

How are you so dense that you can't even use the motherfucking sticky? It's there for this.

Debian Sid worked well on almost all laptops Iv'e tried. Strangely had more issues with the testing branch and stable is just too old. Probably going to have to install non free drivers though for most stuff.

cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/

Here's a link to the iso's with the non free drivers and firmware included. Makes life easier. Most machines just werk after installation.

Agreed. Trinity is also really good. KDE with no bloat, and a really intuitive interface that reminds me of Windows XP.

That just indicates that those distros don't eat up all your ram for fancy stuff.

Turn down the screen brightness and run powertop if you have an intel processor.

...

You're retarded.

I have an older laptop as a daily driver OP and I'm pretty happy with Antergos + XFCE. Fastest this box has ever performed under about a dozen different OSs over the years. And Antergos made getting Arch up and running literally a 10 minute job.

older, non-gaymen laptop: whatever you want.

newer laptop: Fedora, whatever works.

gaymen laptop: Linux Mint.

I personally use puppy, tahrpup.


It's actually better, as the other one said. In Windows you have programs as packages, and everything in a program is together, except some dlls and other shit.
In Linux it's all thrown together and then segregated by type. You have no folders for a program, you instead have a folder for all binaries and then search there.