First, she’d probably get torn apart and eaten for dinner, because with that many bears, someone’s bound to be around and cranky.
But apart from that, let’s say she enters the bear dining room hall. There are 20 steaming bowls of porridge. She samples a few that are too obviously hot or cold, but then finds a dozen or more that are very close to being perfect, but not quite. They’re so similar that she can’t choose one and just finish the bowl. She regrets not eating before breaking into the bear house and leaves, somewhat sated, but unsatisfied. She is later arrested and sentenced to jail by the forest gnome police and courts.
This is a post about Linux distros.
I have tried the following:
- Mint
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- Kubuntu
- Fedora
- CachyOS
- Pop_OS!
- Zorin
- KDE Neon
- Bazzite
Maybe more! Some I’ve dismissed fairly quickly because of the too hot/cold thing (Debian) or never even tried because I’m not interested in making things more difficult just for the sake of challenge (Arch), but most of the ones above have something to recommend them:
- Stability and built-in apps/features (Mint)
- Customizability up the wazoo (any distro with KDE)
- Speed, efficiency, constant updates (CachyOS)
- Prioritizing gaming (Bazzite)
- Looking pretty out of the box (Zorin)
But in almost every case, there’s some kind of downside:
- Ubuntu: A bit bloated and pushes snaps, a proprietary package format
- KDE distros: No preview app (this turns out to bug me way more than I thought)
- Mint: Updates are slow, so it can lag on features and fixes
- CachyOS: Can break because of the fast updates
- Fedora: Does a few weird things
- Many distros: Don’t play nice with dual boot, forcing you to do all the dirty work yourself
In the end, I rotate through a half dozen or so distros, forever dabbling, but never committing, save for Mint, which I kept as my alternate OS on my old PC.
I guess I need to decide why I want to run Linux:
- Is it to replace Windows? Maybe.
- Is it to putter around and experiment? Yes.
- Is it to find better ways to do some things vs. Windows? Also yes.
- Is it to game? Largely no, because I can do that in Windows 11 now.
Here’s the final irony to this post. I recently tried Fedora, then, due to a weird issue with Grub2Win that requires periodically running a script to keep it working with Fedora, I installed CachyOS.
After not using it for a few days, I went to login and realized I’d forgotten the password. Whoops. I wanted to try the KDE version, anyway (I tell myself).
Stay tuned for more Goldilocks and the 20 Distros, right here.