Hello community!

I come to you for advice. Using an m1 macbook air since 2020, I installed popos on my old 2013 macbook pro and I was quite happy with it but… I bought a steamdeck two weeks ago and exploring its desktop mode made me reconsider some choices. Using distros based on different systems, with different commands, desktop environment, etc. gets a little confusing for someone like me, who doesn’t use linux as my main machine. Do you have any advice for me? From what I understand, steamos is debian-based while popos is ubuntu-based: is that the biggest part of how a distribution works, ie commands, etc.? Good ui/ux is important for me so i should maybe use nitrux or deepin, that are debian-based, or is it a bad idea to choose a less common distro for a amateur like me?

Thanks in advance, I’m a bit lost.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    4·
    10 months ago

    TL;DR: Install Plasma/KDE on your current Linux and select it when logging in.

    First a correction, SteamOS used to be debian based, it’s now Arch based, not that that should matter to you because 90% of using a Linux for day to day will be through the DE or with commands that are the same for all distros, so anything with Plasma/KDE will look and behave the same as SteamOS. The remaining 10% has to do with how you install things, on SteamOS you don’t install things to your system (i.e. the equivalent to apt/yum/pacman/portage in other distros) because it’s immutable, but there is a store to install Flatpaks for your user which I’m sure you can install on other distros (or something similar enough).

    So realistically any distro with KDE/Plasma should feel the same as SteamOS for you. While technically Arch/Manjaro/Garuda are the closest ones I wouldn’t recommend any of them because Arch is bleeding edge, which means sometimes things will break, it’s rare but it happens, and Arch’s philosophy is that you should know how to fix it. If you already have Pop maybe just install Plasma on it and see how you like it, you can select your DE on the login screen, and you can even change the login manager program in the future if you want, and most of the things you’ll learn by doing so will be usable on other Linux distros. Until you’re VERY familiar with Linux the difference between a distro and another is just the package manager they use and what comes pre-installed by default, so use whatever you’re already using unless you have a specific reason for wanting to change.

    • thethirdobject@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      10 months ago

      on SteamOS you don’t install things to your system (i.e. the equivalent to apt/yum/pacman/portage in other distros) because it’s immutable, but there is a store to install Flatpaks for your user which I’m sure you can install on other distros (or something similar enough)

      That’s exactly what I didn’t understand without knowing I didn’t understand it!

      SteamOS used to be debian based, it’s now Arch based, not that that should matter to you because 90% of using a Linux for day to day will be through the DE or with commands that are the same for all distros, so anything with Plasma/KDE will look and behave the same as SteamOS.

      While that’s true, 10% is a big percentage!Especially when you first discover a distro, you spend a lot of time trying to understand how to install this and why is that not working, at least for me: not being unable to replicate what little knowledge I had about linux (from ubuntu and popos) on steamos really confused me, even though I tried to gather as much information as I could.

      I guess steamos being immutable also played a big part in my confusion…

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        I get what you mean, when you’re starting those 10% feel like a lot because it’s one of the main things you do when you first grab a system, but over time you install less and less stuff. Even if you’re not using Arch, the documentation there is really good, for example they have a Rosetta Stone for package managers, so if you know the command you want to do on one you can check the equivalent on other https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta so for example if you know in Debian based distros you would do apt-get install you’ll see that in Arch is pacman -S .

        At the end of the day once you’re familiar with Linux the way you install packages is not that relevant to how you use your system. I currently have 3 machines, with 3 different distros, 2 of them look exactly the same and you wouldn’t be able to tell which is which, except one is Ubuntu (company issued laptop) and the other is Arch (Personal computer), sometimes I run Pacman on Ubuntu or apt on Arch and get a command not found error, but other than that they’re completely interchangeable.