Does anyone have any personal experience with Spiral Linux? It is just preconfigured Debian + your choice of DE installed with Calamares. After the installation is completed, you aren’t dependent on anything except the existing Debian infrastructure which is, of course, rock-solid.
@mckinley@twtxt.net Never used that. i typically just use official debian testing image to install with.
@mckinley@twtxt.net Never heard of that one.
First Impressions of SpiralLinux: https://mckinley.cc/blog/20231029.xhtml
@mckinley@twtxt.net Ah. Did you try Ubuntu? That’s also a Debian derivative and claims to be super user-friendly. At least in the past there was Kubuntu which shipped KDE instead of GNOME or Unity or whatever it is these days that Ubuntu defaults to. Personally, I use Debian.
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ubuntu was the first distribution I used. I didn’t know what I was doing and broke the bootloader trying to do something related to dual booting and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I went back to Windows after that.
Many still recommend it as a first distribution. While I’m sure it’s still well polished and easy to use, I don’t like Ubuntu because of Canonical’s shady practices in the past and their move toward Snaps instead of Debian-style packages.
SpiralLinux seems like the best of both worlds. I’m really very impressed. If you are looking for a distribution for some one who isn’t so technical, but also something easy to fix when it breaks, consider looking into it. Use a different password for root, restrict sudo, mount /home with noexec, configure unattended upgrades, and I think it’d be very solid. It is just Debian Stable after all.
@mckinley@twtxt.net Cool, that sounds actually promising. I started out with Debian, went to Kubuntu for now unknown reasons and then broke something with every upgrade. So after four or five times I went back to Debian and never had these kind of troubles. Yeah, snaps are from hell, I don’t like them either.