What is Reddit's opinion of KaOS?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I'm another one who is liking openSUSE Tumbleweed a lot although I'm a recent transplant from Kubuntu. It also has a good implementation if you install and use their back ports ppa.

For something a bit different that tries to give a pure Qt experience, try Chakra OS or Kaos

I'd go with Manjaro. It's rolling release and based on Arch, but the devs hold updates back just long enough to test them. So in my experience you get less breakage than with straight Arch or Antergos. Of course, if you're the kind of person who can wait and watch how the upgrades are working out, then Arch and Antergos are pretty much the same as Manjaro. Also, you can download other desktop environments pretty easily with these.

You might also want to look at KaOS if you're interested in KDE. I used it for a few weeks and really liked it, but I've been using XFCe or Fluxbox or Openbox for a long time now, so the switch to KDE is always jarring for me.

I will mention Netrunner, which I really liked. However, they seem to have switched from a Manjaro-Arch base to Debian testing base. Can't remember which version I used.

KaOS is the first one that comes to mind, in that it tries to run in a purely Qt environment.

With that said, I gave it a try in a VM once and quickly found that I couldn't get a few must-have apps working on it, so I abandoned it.

well, there is kaos! https://kaosx.us/

I don't use it myself, because its repo's are kinda limited, but for a kde desktop, should be great!

btw ... as a fellow gentoo user, I know exactly what you mean.

From all I know, macOS is notoriously tricky to emulate. This is also one of the reasons, why many devs buy a mac book and run Windows and Linux in VMs, in order to test on all systems and so on. While there are probably other ways to reach you goal, especially if it is simply about rescuing the data. You can use a live ISO like this one, which has a tool called QPhotorec available, which enables you to rescue even deleted data.

https://kaosx.us/

Yep, seems Arch is your home since the only distro that picked your interest (RebornOS) was an Arch derivative.

Fedora Rawhide could maybe work with your "Gnome-first rolling release distro", but seems your previous experience with DNF wasn't the best.

> Is Arch just my home forever, until someone out there (me) makes a lean & clean rolling distro that curates Gnome desktop?

I'd love to see the GNOME answer to KaOS.

KaOS - The real KDE-focussed Linux.

>Users who have tried many Operating Systems/Distributions/Desktop
Environments and have found they prefer a Distribution that uses all its
available resources to work on one DE to make that the best it can be,
and know that after their searches, the best for them is KDE.

well, I have an i5-2410 with optimus nvidia (no drivers installed) and everything flies on this laptop....just like with you. thing with KDE is that it performs very differently in different distros. and I've tried with and without nvidia drivers. for example https://kaosx.us/ is for some reason unusable for me while KDE neon really flies.... should maybe give other distros a try....?

It's a pretty small KDE based distro. Pretty much they go all-in on the latest KDE/QT, the OS being built from scratch and rolling release. They also have a really attractive default configuration of Plasma, it's really my favorite. Felt right at home since they use pacman too.

Their package selection is somewhat limited though, and I'm not in love with Octopi. Not a big problem for me since I don't mind using flatpak to grab the handful of apps I need that aren't in the repos, and I don't like to use a GUI for updates/installs anyway.

If those are things you can live with, I think it's at least worth playing with.

I'm splitting my time lately between Kubuntu (my daily driver for 3+ years) and Kaos, and I have to say I'm impressed with the polish and stability of Kaos. Pacman is a fine package manager once you get the hang of it, and packaging is pretty simple if they don't have exactly what you need already in the archive. I'm surprised I don't hear more people talking about it around here.

Yes, you can chroot:

Chrooting

This process boots from the USB device, then (by many small steps) changes the filesystem root to point to a different set of configurations and directories, such that, at the end of the process, it will be as though you booted to the installed instance.

If it's done correctly, you can then issue commands just as though you had successfully booted to the inaccessible instance. This makes Grub repairs much simpler.