Mastodawn

Since this seems to come up a lot, especially now with Windows being replaced by Copilot and Tim Apple being a frequent guest at the White House, I thought I'd write up my quick and objective guide to choosing Linux distros:

I just want something stable and easy to install that's still being maintained next century: Fedora.

I want a carefully hand crafted desktop experience curated for me by people who know what they're doing: KaOS.

I want to carefully hand craft my own desktop experience from scratch, I don't care how many wikis I have to read: Arch.

I think I'm somewhere in between those two extremes: Manjaro.

I'm a gamer: Bazzite.

I'm a Mac: Elementary.

I'm a Haskell weenie: NixOS.

I think rms made some good points: Debian.

I think Tommy Robinson made some good points: Omarchy.

I like South African billionaires: Ubuntu.

Eric Mar 4, 2025

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Jack Rusher Mar 4, 2025

Thus it came as a refreshing surprise how simple *and* easy it is to just use a 4€/month VPS. It has monstrous specs for this purpose — 2 CPUs, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD. Same Unix tools I’ve been using for 40 years. 5 minutes to setup Caddy to automate SSL cert renewal for me. I get to use rsync (as I have for 28 years!) to update my website. No terrible vendor-specific config bullshit, no concern that someone is going to rug pull these open source tools, just me happily getting shit done.

Eric Jan 27, 2025

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rob pike Jan 24, 2025

@sjolsen It's the naming that matters. As someone who helped write a system often tagged with the 'everything is a file' meme, I would like to push back a bit, as the point of Plan 9 is not that everything is a file, but that most things can be named and managed through a file system interface, and that general interface model has great power.

So yes, it's about naming, it's always about naming and the access it provides.