Namaste Beaches!

We all long for clarity, ease of mind and enlightenment. Shut up, don’t argue with me. We all want that, it’s the human nature. Fact! Some mind over matter idiots are trying to get into that state of mind by practicing yoga and meditation, more pactical matter over mind assholes by using Linux on their computers.

Orca belongs to both camps. But that doesn’t need to concern you, dear awesomites. I couldn’t care less about your yoga lessons if I were hanging dead on a fence. But I care about your happy Linux lifes! Now that I’m hardly inworld Second Life anymore that’s kinda this blog’s new agenda or sumfink.

Where you as shocked as I was when I kinda killed both entries in my very brief list of personally recommended Linux distros … and replaced them with three new entries?

I, as already admitted, was a bit shocked about my own radical action. Not the replacement of two Linux distros by two new ones shocked me, but that I added a third distro to my list. It didn’t make me happy, it bloated my nice and tiny list and was counterproductive to my goal of reaching enlightened nirvana. 😦

So, like 10 minutes ago, I started thinking and meditated about the purpose of a recommendation. And I came to a conclusion. A pretty simple one, uncompromised, unfettered by wrong sympathies and personal feelings.

Does a recommendations list even make sense? You’ll always have a favourite. So recomend that. Not the second- and third-best. Only the number one bestest!

And my list of two items was just that. One recommendation each, one for beginners, one for advanced users. By all means this should be enough. The reason for me taking on a third recomendation was weakness, a compromise, lifting a distro into my list that I don’t really like. Not anymore.

Can you guess which one?

Yes, fukn LMDE4. Not because it’s not finished yet, not because of technical reasons at all. I put LMDE4 in my list because I wanted to be nice to a majority of new users preferring the Cinnamon desktop environment. Well, I’m not too fond of it. I can see why it’s so beloved, particularly among new users, and I rate it as second-best desktop too.

But only as second-best. My absolute number one desktop is Mate, so why would I recommend a Debian distro that only comes in Cinnamon flavour and kicked out Mate a while ago? Not because Clem doesn’t like Mate but considering how few people are actually using LMDE, the number of Mate users was even smaller, and he came to the conclusion it’s too much labour to keep both versions alive.

Hah, and I did the same now, Clem! Reduced the number of recommended dektops to one: Mate DE. But at least my recommended distros offer the users a choice of various desktops to work and play with. If they want. Not that anyone must follow my recommendation.

So my new, and nicely enlightened list of personal recommendations looks now like so:

• Sparky Linux (LXQt, Mate, Xfce)
  
• Archman (Budgie, Deepin, Gnome, JWM, KDE Plasma, LXQt, Mate, Xfce)

Pheew, feels good now. One recommendation for n00bz, one for advanced users. Both strictly for adults who can work shit out independently and don’t need to be poked and directed in any direction and be told what to do. Don’t like it? Too bad. I gave you what I think is best. And LMDE 4 just isn’t the best!

And another point I had to reconsider: I was stating that nobody must look further down than #20 in the Distro Watch charts, since cream rises to the top and yadda yadda yadda. I found out that is largely nonsense. Not only is the DW chart of no consequence and highly irregular, but my favourite distros aren’t even featured in the Top 20.

Look:

See where my recommendations are? Sparky on 25 and Archman on 30. I think they are both the best for the respective usage scenario. Mint is on #3, a place this distro has honestly earned. But it’s Ubuntu-based, so I ignore it for my list. And the Mint guys didn’t even regard LMDE as part of their distro. Pfff.

As we all (should) know: This is Linux, it’s highly individual and personal opinion. And what you just read was mine.