Debian-based distro that has the latest kernel patches?

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After reading through this thread and conversation between you and OP, Ubuntu (Kubuntu if KDE is desired) is also the distro I’d recommend. It seems like the major distro most inline with OP’s wants and priorities. And is in my opinion a solid all around choice.

Bit of a misconception. Mint is a very fine choice of distro (not the best from a security perspective, but not worst, and its quite beginner friendly and the Cinnmon Desktop is quite aesthetic). But in terms of “bloat” Mint comes with substantially more pre-installed than Ubuntu out of the box, it has more packages pre-installed (~2200 vs ~1500) and has a larger disk footprint (~9.2GB vs ~8.4GB). In terms of pre-installed packages, Ubuntu now has slightly less pre-installed than even its upstream Debian does. This comparison isn’t a criticism of Mint, I bring it up only to dispel the assumption that Mint is the lighter option, or that Ubuntu isn’t.

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I’m not a Mint expert, but I admire the two distros they make and the community.

Mint does extract the Snap support that Ubuntu uses. There may be other significant differences.

Do consider LMDE, the Ubuntu-free version of Mint. It’s probably still hefty, but should be lighter/smaller than regular Mint.

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I will always have a small soft spot for both Mint and Ubuntu, these distros were my on-ramp to Linux many years ago and ignited my curiosity to explore further.

Ubuntu did a tremendous amount to make linux accessible, fun, and aesthetically appealing at a time when this was not the norm. Mint built on this, adding their own small touches and flair, and eventually their own DE. (this was all long before snap so that wasn’t a differentiator at the time).

Mint does extract the Snap support that Ubuntu uses. There may be other significant differences.

You are right, that is one substantive difference I am aware of, but I don’t see that as necessarily positive in the context of Ubuntu based distros or security.

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Maybe this suits my case possibly, I guess.

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I liked/used Solus briefly. I was (and am) under the impression it was an independently derived distro (as in not a fork of anything else). I didn’t know (and am not convinced) that it is a fork of ChromeOS. It felt just like any other LInux distro, but I have only basic knowledge of Solus so I very possibly could be incorrect. I like the Budgie desktop Environment (the flagship DE for Solus, and a Fork of Gnome) but I believe it doesn’t yet support Wayland which is a (small) downside to me.

A while ago, there was some rather substantial intra-project problems that led to a pretty substantial outage which kind of derailed the project for some time and made its future sustainability feel pretty precarious. IIRC their infrastructure, servers, website were down for some time (months). My recollection is it caused many people to lose some confidence in the project (in the short term, but that trust can be regained).

I know they announced plans to reorganize/course-correct, but I don’t know if they were successful or if there was follow-through. Here are the blogposts announcing the continuation of the project and the planned changes following the drama one | two. I’m not motivated/interested enough to read through them now, but if you are interested in Solus, its probably a good idea.

My knowledge of Solus is too outdated to be relevant now. But when I tried it, I though it was a cool distro doing interesting things.

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Maybe it’s time to revisit this as well. I hated Ubuntu for a while, also based on the community and Canonical. I realized I was being prejudice without a real reason why, so I gave it a shot. I’m running an Ubuntu server right now and it’s honestly great. I distro hopped on my server as well, so it’s not as though I didn’t have other experience. I couldn’t be happier - the amount of support for some of the problems I had just from docs and community forums really makes managing it simpler.

You can also ignore Snaps (what I do), and uninstalling some default software doesn’t kill it. But if you really really hate things not community or non profit ran, I suppose it may not be it for you.

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Not like that, If communities are respected by companies. I don’t have a grudge against them.

Probably everywhere I go, I get recommended of Ubuntu or Ubuntu LTS.

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I said started out as and said the devs kept the easy to use mentality. It hasn’t been a fork of chromeOS in years.

Edit: it wasn’t a fork, I remembered an article incorrectly. It had google accounts integrated into it.

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I only spent a few minutes searching, so possibly I missed something, but I can’t find any evidence that it was ever a fork of ChromeOS, or has any connection to it.

Solus’ original 1.0 release from 2015 describes itself as:

Solus is a Linux-based operating system built from scratch for the modern desktop and targeting the x86_64 architecture.

I do see some ‘listicle’ type SEO articles and an article from 2016 that describe Budgie, the desktop environment used by Solus as having a similar UI/aesthetic to ChromeOS. [Edit: also this phoronix article about Budgie]. But these are just describing the UI/UX in the same way people frequently call KDE Plasma ‘windows-like’ or Gnome a little more ‘MacOS-like’ (and Budgie is a fork of Gnome).

Do recall where you heard of the connection to ChromeOS? If there was a connection I’d be interested to learn about that history. I am curious why there aren’t any popular open ChromiumOS forks.

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I managed to find it. I remembered the article incorrectly and I thought it was a fork but it was Google accounts being integrated with the OS. Solus Project: No Longer Just A Chrome OS Alternative - Linux.com

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Thanks for digging that up, its actually the same article I managed to find also.

(I can see how it would be easy to misremember the details of the article, the way the article is written, it does kind of give the impression of a greater connection to ChromeOS).

Thanks for clearing that up.

@ikelatomig has anyone mentioned VanillaOS yet? It may be worth looking into. Its Debian based, atomic/immutable, rolling (I think), designed to be simple/beginner friendly and hard to screw up too bad. I haven’t personally used it. They recently released VanillaOS 2 Orchid which rebased to Debian Sid.

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Hmmm I have one last suggestion: distro hop. Gather your top 3 distros or so, and just try them out for a month. Talking about a distro and then actually using it are quite different. Analysis paralysis can happen, and making a choice you can change can alleviate stress. Plus trying more distros will give you more comparison points on what you like :+1:

You can make this change more seamless by creating a “/home” partition on your first (re)install if you haven’t done so already. That partition won’t be wiped out on each new install of another distro if you follow the setup process carefully. You’ll still need to reinstall your previous software (easy enough with package managers). However, if your configs live in /home along with the rest of your data, you will barely notice the change.

I’ve done this and it’s allowed me to install multiple distros on my server, and it helped me settle on Ubuntu! I was able to keep all of my docker configs setup each time, and aside from a few hiccups, it’s worked well. I might even switch back to CentOS stream soon, since I want to try Podman and Podman is a RHEL originating package (I’d assume it works better by default on RHELs distros).

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Well, being on a rolling release, I have got used to frequent updates. Why exactly do you hate it? It’s not like it turns off your computer in the middle like Windows.

Yeah, I did. But whenever I get 5G wifi network, I just like that update it. And yeah, restarting for a single 4KB update sucks.

It really depends on what is being updated. Rule of thumb : Updates for the kernel, systemd and drivers (especially gpu drivers) need a reboot. If the program doesn’t need to be running all the time for the OS to function, then just close it and update. No need to reboot.

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Since systemd 254 released over a year ago,

systemctl soft-reboot

allows you to reboot the userspace in entirety. The only time you actually need to hard reboot is when you want to switch to a newer kernel.

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I never notice system updates on Aeon. They just happen in the background, and next time you boot or reboot your PC, it just boots into the new snapshot. If something broke (never happened to me), you just boot to the previous snapshot.

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Did you use your distros GUI software center like ‘Discover’ by any chance to update? Use the command line to update instead and you need less restarts after updates. You can also activate automatic updates just for security updates, so you won’t even notice these most of the time and do a full update including feature patches one or two times a month.

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Also KDE has an option to apply updates after reboot -

image

Under System Settings > System > Software Update.

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Yeah, I know it already, Problem is rolling and no KDE variant. They planned it but need to wait for a while. I would like to use a LTS distro, but PG’s guidelines make me not to.

I tired OpenSUSE, vast tools such as YaST, etc and rolling. So, no.

Debian was good and was preparing to do the shift but as I said, I am not sure due to PG’s guidelines. Hence, why, “Linux Mint + Latest Kernel (Kernel only) + KDE” is my idea for now.

Solus is there but what if in the future, the project is down. I am willing to donate them $1/month. But I can’t risk it and change stuff back later again.

I do know that, But I would definitely mess up. So, I am not doing it.

I update and restart my fedora. Then, while working after 2 or 3 hrs straight, I get another update cycle.

Yeah, I could just set the notifications to weekly basis and update it. But I think it’s risky what if it’s 0-day vulnerability.

Using offline updates in fedora, so updates are applied correctly instead of breaking when apply via live update.

You mean offline updates for packages except kernel ?

In Fedora, it needs to update to the new packages when I reboot or start the deck in the morning.

A mix of both.

Actually this is what I am trying to do in fedora and settle without swapping but nothing helps in fedora forum or web.

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Soft-reboot command doesn’t handle any updates of any kind. It’s purpose is to clear the userspace and re-initialize the system again starting from PID 1. But as you have guessed, you can’t bring down the kernel while it is still running.

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I don’t think you are required to update ASAP. You can just ignore them and update when you have time. That’s what I do with arch, I wait 2-3 days if there aren’t a ton of packages have updates. If the amount of packages that are updatable cross the 100-200 range, then I update.