throwawayish

Great choice! But as others already have noted; if it will be used for virtualization only, then perhaps distros like Proxmox should suit you better.

virtualization

Honestly, I don't know. Though, I'd reckon there would be any significant difference between distros.

stability

Depends on what you mean with stability. If you meant it like how "stable" is used in "Debian stable", then it would be any distro with a release cycle that chooses to not continuously deliver packages; but instead chooses to freeze packages and hold off updates (besides those related to security) for the sake of offering a relatively polished experience in which the behavior of the distro is relatively predictable. Some distros that score good on this would be Debian stable and openSUSE Leap. It's worth noting that Distrobox, Flatpak and Nix allow one to have newer packages on these systems if desired.

If, instead, you meant that the distro is less likely to break upon an update, then it's important to note the following:

• While you shouldn't expect breakage to happen in the first place, unfortunately it's realistic to expect it every so often (read: 0-2 times a year on non-stable distros).
• If you have a lot of packages, then it's more likely that at least one of them causes some breakage.
• Technically, every update is a potential 'breakage-moment'.
• Packages that haven't been installed through the official/native repos are more likely to cause breakage.
• Relying on Distrobox, Flatpak and Nix for (at least some of) your packages should benefit the stability of your base system.
• (GRUB-)Btrfs+Timeshift/Snapper allows one to create snapshots one can easily rollback to in case of breakage. Therefore it's worth seeking out a distro that configures this by default or set it up yourself on whichever distro you end up using (if it isn't included by default).
• So-called 'atomic'^[1]^ distros are (generally speaking) more resistant to breakage, but (arguably) they're less straightforward compared to traditional distros. It's still worth considering if you're adventurous or if your setup is relatively simple and you don't really feel the need to tinker a lot. Don't get me wrong; these atomic distros should be able to satiate ones customization needs, it's just that it might not be as straightforward to accomplish this. Which, at times, might merely be blamed on lackluster documentation more than anything else.^[2]^

As for recommendations you shouldn't look beyond unadulterated distros like (Arch^[3]^), Debian, Fedora, openSUSE (and Ubuntu^[4]^). These are (in almost all cases^[5]^) more polished than their respective derivatives.

speed

Most of the distros mentioned in this comment should perform close enough to one another that it shouldn't matter in most cases.

If you're still lost, then just pick Linux Mint and call it a day.

1. More commonly referred to as 'immutable'. Atomic, however, is in most cases a better name.
2. If you're still interested, I'd recommend Fedora Silverblue for newcomers and NixOS for those that actually know what they're getting into.
3. I believe that one should be able to engage with Arch as long as they educate themselves on the excellent ArchWiki. It might not be for everyone, though. Furthermore, its installation (even with archinstall) might be too much for a complete newbie if they haven't seen a video guide on it.
4. Ubuntu is interesting. It has some strange quirks due to its over-reliance on Snap. But it's worth mentioning, if you don't feel like tinkering.
5. With Linux Mint (and Pop!_OS) being the clear exception(s).

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences. Cheers, mate.

Hmm, one I guess is that it is not “permanent” and deactivates after one command (in Kakoune, you have to explicitly do ‘;’ to collapse the selection to its end (which you can flip with the start using ‘alt+;’) or move around without extending the selection). That’s really the only thing I can think of at the moment and I feel like often it really doesn’t matter tbh, so maybe I was just talking out of my ass there a bit lmao.

Regardless; thank you for mentioning this!

Apparently you can quickly reselect it in vim with ‘gv’ though, which I never checked until now. That’s useful to know.

Hehe, thanks for sharing that; might become useful soon 😅.

One thing I’m really missing from vim though is that it can list directories, has a hex editor, and can read a bunch of other file formats. I think it can even edit remote files over sftp, but maybe I’m confusing that with Emacs. Kakoune just does local text files (though you can of course do stuff like ‘%|xxd’ to pipe the file through xxd to get a hex view, edit and then ‘%|xxd -r’ and save but that feels very very sketchy).

Until yesterday I knew almost nothing about Kakoune. But I've since tried to do some reading; while there's still a lot to uncover and/or explore, I feel as if it tries to offer a more focused experience (for better or worse).

I know almost nothing about Vimscript.

This is actually good news as it means I shouldn't have to learn a new language to engage with it.

However, during these years every time I tried it it had some slight differences from vim that made using it somewhat annoying.

Interesting. Would you mind elaborating upon those differences?

I probably started with Vim

Hehe, I assume it has been some time since you started this journey.

Thank you for your contributions to the conversation 😊!

I'm not surprised to hear that you preferred Fedora Silverblue over openSUSE MicroOS. Don't get me wrong, I think that openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa (current names for openSUSE MicroOS Desktop) have a lot of potential. However, as it stands, Fedora's Atomic Desktops are just more mature.

With the amount of different distros you've tried (though mostly derivatives of Arch/Debian), I'm actually surprised to see that you haven't used any derivative of Fedora. Is there any reason in particular?

and without all your configs it is a very different beast of an editor anyway and something you will need to get used to everytime you jump on the server.

Good point.

If you can install stuff to your home drive then it is quite easy to get helix running - it is a single binary with some language assets (requires one env var to point to them). So is trivial to get working from your home dir without a package manager.

I'm impressed. Thank you for pointing this out.

Ideally with things like ansible you should not need an editor on it at all.

Hmm..., honestly, I haven't yet done a lot of things with Ansible yet. Perhaps it's time to go explore that rabbit hole as well 🤣. Thank you (once more) for pointing this out!

Do you mean vi input mode in other editors?

Yes.

Your input has been much appreciated! Thank you!

The problem with SpaceVim is that it offers a lot of toggles that are easy to switch but there are no examples for more ‘custom’ config and I struggled to figure it out. There’s a lot of examples and guides for nvim so it was easier. I don’t know, maybe it was just me but with SpaceVim I also didn’t really see what’s possible. With nvim I just found long lists of useful plugins that you can add one by one.

Makes a lot of sense. Documentation is indeed very important. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and experiences! Much appreciated!

I tried several editors but always come back to emacs.

Have you used Helix and/or (Neo)Vim? If so, would you be so kind to share your experiences?

My impression about VS Code being popular is also from workplaces at several companies, VS Code was literally on every machine and VS Code project config files are nowadays checked in with project into version control. (In the past I would not have been happy about config files in version control, but I just accepted it by now.)

That's actually kinda concerning 😅. I hope I can remain free to use whichever IDE suits me best. But thanks for pointing that out as it's a very realistic scenario.

How to setup VIM/NEOVIM or EMACS as a descent C# IDE?

Hehe, the crux. Honestly, I'm not very optimistic that it can do everything one might be used to do on something like Jetbrains' Rider. Nonetheless, I'll try to get it as close as I can and see from there if I'm willing to deal with it. I'm not entirely opposed to rely on other IDEs from time to time for specific functionality I'd be missing otherwise.