So it begins.
I’ve been flashing my USB often enough that it’s now worth it to keep all my ISO’s neatly to use them when I need them. I plan on buying 10 USB sticks to just have ready when ever I need a specific version.
I’m visiting family now, so time to upgrade their Linux Mint to Kubuntu
Try ventoy
I think I’m missing something here - why would y’all need a storage of ISOs?
Just think of a distro & download it from like anywhere at that moment? Especially if there is a functioning PC you are about to “upgrade”. That way you don’t need to think ahead of anything & get the latest ISO.Don’t distrohop too much, at one point there won’t be much more to explore with other distros other than wallpapers and themes
There is always more.
Have you tried Chimera Linux?
Ugh… why? I mean it’s a fun process to distro hop and better understand the different package managers, boot process, default services, etc but beyond that I’m confused at what the point is.
FWIW one can distro hop “virtually” in minutes using containers via Podman or Docker (or even QEMU to be more isolated) with images that do have a window manager, e.g. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ provides Alpine, Arch, Debian, Enterprise Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu with i3, KDE, MATE or XFCE. Switching from one to another takes minutes (basically download time of image content) and if you mount the right directory you can even use your own content for your tests.
Edit : if one wants to install nothing https://distrosea.com/ is quite neat but it’s online.
Ventoy for most, but some stuff doesn’t work with correctly when booted from ventoy:
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ChromeOS Flex won’t install to internal drive when ventoy booted, it will when flashed directly to a usb.
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also had Linux Mint 22 try to install to the ventoy drive (wiping it and then crashing halfway through)
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and dealing with really old 32bit bios laptops you’ll have to use direct usb too (AntiX still supports 32bit)
I’ve had issue with proxmox from Ventoy but other than that it’s great.
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You can use Ventoy to have many ISOs on one stick ^^
I wish I knew how it worked before! I thought it was a Windows only software and I kept installing isos to my USB one by one every time. Wasted so much time :')
What’s wrong with Debian?
The latest version of anything is at least 6 months old.
Stability over everything is pretty awesome.
I think that term gets confused frequently in this context. Stability as the Debian likely uses it means mostly static APIs. Meaning a stable interface to develop software against.
The way the users mostly understand it means stable software, no major bugs or crashes.
And while those two are linked, they’re not the same. Anecdotally, I’ve used Arch for over 10 years and had only three breakages. Two because I forgot to check for manual intervention before upgrading and one because the battery of the laptop died during an upgrade. All were easily fixed from a live environment, no reinstall necessary. Yes, there were bugs and even crashes in software, but those were upstream issues. I admit that’s not a distinction a user is likely to make. I still consider Arch the most stable distro I’ve ever used.
Don’t “upgrade” to Kubuntu. I’m on it and want to upgrade away because Ubuntu. Fedora Kinoite is probably the best bet if you want KDE for a tech novice.
KDE is really annoying though. Kate is a horrible text editor if you’re not a programmer, and Kwrite has weird default shortcuts without any preconfigured “Gnome/Windows style” available. The Dolphin File Explorer doesn’t allow you to sort and group by different things. And Kparted isn’t as easy to use as Gnome Disk Utility. Still, I like how KDE had better themes than Cinnamon and how it actually lets me move programs to different categories in the start menu.
https://media.ccc.de/v/5012-the-first-encrypted-steam-deck-runs-opensuse#t=0
OpenSUSE is better than Fedora
I tried OpenSUSE and I ran into various issues installing software. Plus the immutable variant of OpenSUSE is an external project IIRC.
Yep, suse is cool, the default firewall config is way more restricted (safer but annoying at times). Dbeaver can’t install some essential depends for some reason and shotcut is missing some features (I could try fixing it but for now I just use appimages). It is way more stable than fedora or arch, even if I sometimes forget to upgrade it for months.
Maybe not Kubuntu? It’s not de-Canonical’d like Mint or Pop!_OS, so it’ll have weird bad things like Snap or the not-yet-ready Rust coreutils.
I like KDE a lot
@Ek-Hou-Van-Braai Did your family request to switch distros? If not, you are not their friend and not doing them a favor.
If you’re wanting to use software that’s most easily available on different distros, why not just use Distrobox? If you are just wanting to change the UI, why not just switch DEs? If you really need to be able to randomly switch away from/to system level differences, what are you doing? What would necessitate that?
This is a phase that most Linux enthusiasts go through at some point. It takes time to understand what a distro really is.
People see distros as being much more different than they really are because of the default settings between distros being so different from each other.
At the end of the day a distro is basically just a way of choosing which group of people you want to trust to package software for you.
Uh… you do know that people don’t literally save a bunch of Linux ISOs, right? It’s a euphemism for collecting less legit things, like pirated media or porn.
By the time you want to install the same distro again, it’s likely that a new version will be out and you’ll want to re-download it anyway.
You can always just use the version you have and run an update after it’s installed.
Speak for yourself. I have ISOs saved for my virtual machine “OS Museum” full of all kinds cool stuff like Damn Small Linux, TempleOS, Haiku, Hannah Montana Linux, the version of Mandrake Linux that came with the Sims 1 installed … Etc.
Objectively a good reason to store ISOs
551GB of ISOs here. Most are very old.
You’re right, but I’m still saving them anyway◝(ᵔᗜᵔ)◜
I don’t mean to crash the party, I used to love Ventoy too. But then the blob issue came up and it was met with silence for over a year by the maintainer, that made me a bit uncomfortable. They have responded to it a while ago, but it’s no trivial task to solve as I understand it: https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/3224
Are they Linux ISOs or “Linux ISOs”?
Ah remember when I had this phase










