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.
First Impressions of SpiralLinux: https://mckinley.cc/blog/20231029.xhtml
@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.