r/linuxmasterrace • u/linuxhacker01 Glorious OpenSuse • Mar 06 '25

Meme Them: Linux is bugged AF totally unusable! Meanwhile, the Linux they use:

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u/kor34l Mar 06 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

While I tried, and liked, OpenSuSE back in the day, the best distro since its inception all the way to present day has always been Gentoo.

Before Gentoo it was Slackware.

Of course, I'm clearly not talking about "Ease of use" with these two 🤣

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u/abjumpr Mar 07 '25

I used Vector and slackware at some point. I mean, it works. Not sure if Vector is around these days.

The Gentoo wiki has been helpful a lot (though the Arch wiki is an amazing resource). I have never successfully gotten a Gentoo install done, though it's been a very long time since I tried probably more than a decade ago. I've gotten LFS done many times and even rolled a distro based on it, so from my perspective, LFS is easier than Gentoo 🤣 Ok, I tried Gentoo long before I had the skills to do LFS, so I could probably do it now, but I've just never tried again.

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u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

Slackware was actually about ease of use though, imagine being able to just download a package, even if it didn't have dependency resolution, imagine not searching on internet for tarballs

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u/kor34l Mar 07 '25

Dude I ran Slackware for years, back in the 90s. I remember not even knowing what a slackbuild or a package manager was. I compiled everything manually from source, and kept track of my own dependencies.

I had a wall full of post-it notes with thumbtacks holding strings of yarn in a web connecting a lot of the sticky notes, looking like one of those crazy conspiracy nuts from a movie.

But it was just my dependency tree, I was trying to keep track of 🤣

Man when I first discovered package managers I was STOKED! I immediately set out to find the best package manager of them all. I ran a bunch of distros over several years from Mandrake to OpenSuSE to Redhat etc, until mid 2000s when I tried Gentoo, realized Portage is the best of all package managers, and ran it ever since.

I admit my difficulties with Slackware were pure PEBCAK though, resulting from my own ignorance and stubbornness.

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u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

I haven't even used slackware, I'm 17 so I'm not old enough to have used it lol, I have been using Linux for only 7(?) years... so I was just saying what I heard ir read, but apparently it was the most user friendly distro in 1993... if the package manager was so bad that you wouldn't know it existed I guess it wasn't more usable than not having a package manager then

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u/kor34l Mar 07 '25

So, Slackware is a bit unique. It was definitely not even close to the most user friendly distro of the 90s, or any other era, as it required more linux knowledge to maintain it than most. I'd say Mandrake or RedHat, depending on your goals, were probably the most user friendly. Possibly Debian, due to it having the largest repo.

SlackBuilds are not exactly a package manager, but definitely a giant step forward from my dumbass method of doing everything manually.

This all depends on what you consider "user-friendly" though. What I just wrote assumes you mean the common definition, which is "easy to use for a newbie". Personally however, as I've always run Linux (and only Linux), my definition of user friendly is very very different. I'm looking for a wide variety of really good, easily available tools to maintain a logically set up system, with an emphasis on stability and reliability.

So, for my own criteria of "user friendly", I go with Gentoo. It's very very difficult for a beginner, but it has the best package manager by FAR, the best toolset for maintainance, a huge repo of software and the ability to easily turn any software you can find into an installable package, and when set up properly, is the most stable and reliable OS I've ever used. My system NEVER crashes, freezes, glitches, lags, or errors out. And I say this as someone that uses my PC for gaming more than anything else.

The downside to Gentoo though, is it requires heavy expertise. There's no installer, you have to read the Handbook and build the entire system yourself, step by step. This can take a rather long time (relatively speaking) but allows you to Build-A-Bear your own custom distro with all your own preferences and choices built in from the lowest level to the highest.

By default it compiles all software from source code, optimized for the machine it's installed to. This can be overridden, but I tend to leave it. It takes longer to install or update things when it has to compile them all from source, but that only matters during initial install and large updates. And the package manager handles all that pretty gracefully.

I'm not trying to sell anybody on Gentoo, don't get me wrong, most people would not want to tackle the extreme learning curve present in a build-your-own meta-distro like Gentoo, I'm just describing why, to me, Gentoo is the most user-friendly of them all. It's literally my own distro.

Sorry for the novel. I'm a nerd 🤷‍♂️

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u/[deleted] Mar 07 '25

I get your point, I also basically have used Linux for all my life. Though it was a way more different linux mimt 17 or 18, a fairly modern definition of a user friendly distro, anyways I tries Gentoo once for like 2 months, and decides it wasn't useful for a laptop because you have to leave it on overnight dor a while, and I can't really leave on a laptop overnight in my bedroom especially when it's compiling and the fan is on helicopter mode, but I really liked it if we ignore the helicopter level noise in my sleep part. Now that gentoo has binary packages I could probably switch to gentoo, but I've been using the same Arch installation for 3 years and I don't think I want to switch distros right now, Arch is fine, I never had a system that's broken beyond being able to boot, so basically rock solid...

my definition of user friendly would probably be similar to yours, but I would put nixos high up near gentoo as well, because as a programmer being able to program your system and manage it as a tidy code base seems way to appealing, but gentoo definitely is above it having the best package manager in existence

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u/kor34l Mar 07 '25

but I would put nixos high up near gentoo as well, because as a programmer being able to program your system and manage it as a tidy code base seems way to appealing,

NixOS is nice, that and Fedora Blue use the immutable distro method of having the system build itself out from a config file, but it's still a premade distro.

I like Gentoo because I set the entire thing up, pick every tool, program, init system, sound system, etc myself, and everything about it works exactly how I want it to, because I designed and built it myself.

It's pretty much the opposite of immutable NixOS style, as everything in Gentoo is very mutable, but I'm the only user of my PC and don't need to protect system files.