I’m wondering if a distro like the one I’m looking for even exists:

  • simple as in KISS and vanilla. This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much, as well as OpenSUSE, where systems administration relies on GUI tools too much and the package manager is even more complex.
  • fixed release (excludes everything Arch-based)

So from the major distros, only Fedora is left as an option, where I really don’t know enough about it. Is it possible to do a minimal install of it? Is it built around a GUI app store? Does it rely on Flatpak like Ubuntu does with Snap?

Or are there other distros out there that I’m not aware of? Basically everything from the past 5 years I have no experience with. I’ve heard good things about NixOS, but it sounds weird as a daily driver.

  • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
    35·
    9 months ago

    What on God’s green flat earth are these requirements??

    What about apt do you find too complex? I guess what’s re you defining as 'complex"?

    I’m terms of package management you’ll be hard pressed to find anything that requires less work that apt, yum, zypper or their various GUIs.

    Debian is the most vanilla distro you can get and you are excluding it out of the gate because of apt. So it would be helpful for all of us to understand your complexity issues with apt (and zypper).

    • z3bra@lemmy.sdf.org
      21·
      9 months ago

      Talking for myself and not OP: What’s complex about apt and yum is the package format per se. The cli is very straightforward and “just works”, but whenever you want something that’s not packaged and need to package it yourself, you gotta fasten your seatbelt and prepare for the complex task of creating an RPM or a DEB package.

      I know there are tools to help with that, but I’ve created packages for many distros (Debian, CentOS, Alpine, Arch, Void and Crux), and rpm/deb are just way more complex to create than the alternatives.

    • KISSmyOS@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      9 months ago

      What about apt do you find too complex? I guess what’s re you defining as 'complex"?

      The fact that it has recommended and suggested dependencies, meta-packages and virtual packages, that installing a package ad then removing it again often leaves your system in a different state than before, that it has 7 different default front-ends for different tasks, …

      Debian is the most vanilla distro you can get

      Debian packages often deviate significantly from upstream.