I just saw a DistroTube video with this question. Quite a thought provoking question [for this seasoned distroholic at least].
“What’s the hardest Linux distro you’ve tried?” can be interpreted many ways, and I wonder what kinds of answers we’ll get.
Especially these days, with much change underfoot and newer users having a different distrosphere to explore…
What’s the hardest Linux distro you’ve tried?
You must log in or # to comment.
I think Gentoo back in 2005. I left my laptop compiling OpenOffice while I went to class for the day. When I came home the laptop was off, so I had to start over. My roommate denied responsibility. The next day the same thing happened! It turns out I hadn’t configured the fan correctly - or I guess at all - so the laptop had been overheating leading to emergency CPU halt.
But I’ve been using Linux since 2002. A lot of distros used to be a lot harder. But it’s also hard for me to remember what the struggles were so long ago.
Suicide Linux of course.
It’s more “annoying” than hard, but… Linux From Scratch. Having to mix and match every element (to see if they work) can be a very frustating experience.
No doubt the hardest was the first one. I recall it was slackware with kernel 2.x around the late 90s. Having to recompile the kernel and configure manually the scan line freq for the monitor made it challenging. Ah yes, the man pages I printed them at work, that was all I had access to. No internet.
Still remember that as well. Though I was in school and had plenty time at my hand. Was a very rewarding experience. Not necessarily easy by any means. But it was so much more capable than any Windows 98 or ME. Didn’t crash like the latter. There was a million things to explore. Software to just install which I’d never have been able to afford as a school kid. Also way easier to customize, or read some log files and fix things once I understood how the filesystem is laid out.
And the CRT monitor was fine. Ours just displayed an error message if the frequency was wrong. At some point I grabbed a permanent marker and wrote the mode line onto the back if the monitor. Problem solved.
Your comment on writing down the freq made me chuckle… I did the same! For some odd reason I still have that old CRT…
Awesome! 🏆
Gentoo. I’ve gotten to stage 3 a few times, but somehow I cannot get past it (Be it a VM issue or a skill issue)
Stage 3 is the default nowadays and not hard to reach. Was this many many years ago?
Follow the Gentoo wiki. It is all that is needed to get across the finish line. What you will learn along the way about how all of the pieces fit together is pretty valuable IMHO.
Linux from Scratch
Everything is built from scratch.
First, you need some kind of host Linux system, which then is used to compile and install everything to target environment.
It is quite a huge undertaking, needs lots of time and patience. Basic LFS book is around 280 pages, and it will just give Linux terminal - you will need to go Beyond Linux from Scratch to actually get desktop environment running.
I have installed it twice, as a learning experience.
Linux from Scratch is not a distribution; it’s a documentation how you build your own distribution from scratch.
It is not a distribution, but when you build your own Linux from Scratch, it will become your own distribution - thus it is distribution!
No, your distribution is the distribution. Your distribution doesn’t make Linux from Scratch into one. Let’s say I think your distribution is the best one for me. That does not mean another distribution created with the help of the documentation found at Linux from Scratch the best one too. Those are two different distributions. Linux from Scratch remains the documentation how to create one.
It’s like finding a video tutorial how to program your own program a little game. The video tutorial doesn’t become a game, it remains documentation how you write your own game. That’s comparable situation with Linux from Scratch (in relation to our discussion).
“What’s the hardest Linux distro you’ve tried?” can be interpreted many ways
it’s a documentation
Rather than merely repeat and invite an infinite loop… I wonder how you’ve interpreted what you just responded to.
I don’t understand what you mean by that. There is nothing to interpret really. Linux from scratch is not a distribution, its a documentation how you build one from scratch. So I’m not sure what else to say about that. Maybe… a car example. :D
Let’s say someone asks you which specific car model you like the most. Would the answer “I don’t like a specific model, but I have a tutorial document how to build my own car from scratch, every single bit of it” a correct answer? To me, no. Because the question was about a specific model. A document how to create one is not a specific model. Hope that makes sense. BTW I’m not trying to be an ashowl or anything. I’m dead serious.
The first one I installed (doesn’t matter its name) as it was the one forcing me to question all my decades long habits and to build new ones.
SLS Linux. I feel old.
First challenge: getting it.
It was about 25-30 3.5" floppy disks, but you had to download the disk images, and I downloaded them to my PC via a modem connected to the modem pool at the University where I worked. At the time, they had no limits on the use of the modem pool, so I was able to stay connected and just keep downloading until I had it all.
Then, you had to manually create the disk partitions and create the file systems on them. When that was all done correctly, you could run the install script.
I switched to Slackware when it came out. I also downloaded that to a SunOS box at work and used that to write the floppies.
Slackware. 64 disks. Three of them somehow failed verification, and i had to re-download them the next day at university.
With “download” being an euphemism here. I had to get the disk images via email from bitftp@pucc (if anyone remembers), over the 38400 baud line of the department. Get one disk image in 64kb emails, decode and join the attachments, log in on the PC, copy it to disk, and log out. Delete everything on the VAX (the disk quota did not allow for more), and request the next disk image from Princeton.
I like to believe that I had a part in causing the university to implement time limits on the modem pool.
However, the University had an excellent Internet connection, so once it dawned on me that I could download it and copy it to floppies there, it was a lot easier.
in the early 00’s it was Mandrake. totally borked my HDD trying to install that and nuked my Windows XP partition in the process. just couldn’t wrap my brain around it.
as for recently? Slackware. My Dad uses it but I just couldn’t get it working correctly. More than likely it’s simply because I did something wrong during install or setup post install. I’ve installed Gentoo a few times and I currently use NixOS and OpenBSD so I don’t think i’m stupid, I just messed up Slackware.
Honestly I have never been much for my home machine being overly complicated. Yeah back in the day I made my own rig but at home I mostly want to use it and not support it. I used linux at work though as far back as the early aughts and nothing today I think is as complicated as that. So I simply have not used a hard one in my day to day. Pretty much went puppy to zorin (ubuntu) to bazzite.
Slackware, back when the Linux kernel was still static and had to be configured and compiled each time an update came.
NixOS. A beautiful idea that had me fight it constantly. That was after daily driving Arch for 10+ years, so I was no newbie. It’s one hell of a learning curve.
Probably trying to design and build my own custom distro. There’s help like LFS but you still need to read an entire book and learn about a million important decisions to make. I scrapped the idea. It’s just hard and then how am I even going to maintain it?
I successfully had a running LFS build.
It booted, I typed in
ls /saw my folders, thought it was neat and read up on what would be required to get a GUI up and running, then deleted the partition.
I to this day have yet to get a successful Gentoo install. Virtual or bare metal and following walkthrough I always fail on compile. Before that though I always struggled with Slackware. The concept of Slackware is something I love, but I have always struggled with the setup and especially installing new packages and updating.
Sort of in keeping with the people saying “the first one I installed”, for me that was some 20 years ago with early Fedora and Ubuntu, I forget which order I tried them but it took multiple attempts over different hardware, any Linux was definitely more “difficult” back then, worse when combined with being a noob. I think some people don’t know how easy they have it.
As for modern distros, it depends what you’re trying to do; for example you might say something like Gentoo, but Gentoo has good documentation and is arguably “easy” for what it’s specifically trying to be.
I’ve tried all the “main” ones over the years and the only one that’s consistently defeated me is Slackware - somehow I could never work that one out.
and the only one that’s consistently defeated me is Slackware - somehow I could never work that one out.
Reminds me, the one distro (albeit not linux) that has consistently defeated me (~not me just deciding “not worth the effort” (like NixOS and LFS)~), is FreeBSD. Fine with all the other BSDs. Curious.
