I’ve been working and testing to switch my main PC (used for work like audio recording, music, and general multimedia) and have been playing with Ubuntu Studio on my laptop. Loving it so far but I keep seeing people talk about CachyOS, Bazzite, or the new Debian Trixie.

I’m having trouble finding what’s really different about all these distros aside from how they look or slight changes in how they do things (I know Ubuntu Studio has a low latency kernel which seems important for what I need to do). Is there a big difference? Like, if I go with Ubuntu Studio am I gonna end up wiping everything and installing CachyOS or Bazzite or something in a month because it’s better? Or are all these distros basically the same thing with a different look and feel and as long as I choose one that gets regular updates, it doesn’t matter fundamentally?

I’m trying to grasp the Linux concept but being a Windows user my whole life I’m struggling to ‘get it’. Instead of trying to understand in the contex of Windows or Mac, is a better comparison Apple/Android? Like iPhones would be similar to both Mac and Windows (you don’t get to choose much) and Android would be Linux (I know it’s built on it haha) and it’s really just a bunch of different options to do the same thing?

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 days ago

    I used Ubuntu Studio many years ago when I was going through an electronica phase lol. It worked fine for me.

    Don’t sweat it, there will always be the hot new distros on the block. Right now it’s Bazzite, CatchyOS, and NixOS, back in the day there was Garuda, Arco Linux, Bunsen, MX Linux, and a ton of others. Some are still around, some are long gone. Doesn’t mean they are bad distros, many of them are/were great, but don’t choose a distro just because everybody is talking about it.

    Plus, as you get more experience with Linux, the differences matter less and less. There are only a handful of package managers, and unless you have some very specific technical requirements, they all do the same thing and work the same way.

    “apt install firefox” becomes “yum install firefox”, or “pacman -S firefox” it’s all pretty much the same under the hood.

    And if you use KDE Plasma on different distros, the Discover store works the same across distros, same with any other GUI package installer.

    If you keep getting better and get into home lab building or just have several different computers, you might end up using a bunch or distros at the same time on different machines.

    Right now across all my physical computers and virtual machines in my home lab, I currently have 9 different distros installed on various machines. Different distros for different purposes.

    My general #JustWorks laptops and VMs use Linux Mint, my hardcore gaming rig uses Nobara, my test junker laptops run Debian 13, Void Linux, and Arch for testing random software and messing around. For my Docker containers, I run Debian 12 as the base, for my Minecraft server, Ubuntu Server, my Steam Deck is SteamOS which is just Valve’s heavily modified spin of Arch, and my main lab’s Type-1 hypervisor is XCP-ng, which is basically Fedora under the hood.