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Windows 11 for gaming PC, Windows 10 for work laptop, Mac OS for personal laptop and Fedora for my old laptop. Also using both Ubuntu and Rocky Linux for servers. Steam Deck is still on Steam OS, Pi's use Raspberry Pi OS (aka raspbian). I don't really have a 'main' computer as it mostly depends where I am and what I'm doing.
I'm pretty comfortable with any OS at this point, even on mobile devices (both Android and iOS/iPad OS). I'm not a big fan of Windows but it pays the bills working in IT. I was in the process of migrating servers away from Ubuntu and onto Rocky (rip CentOS) although with the recent changes in Red Hat Land... We'll see how the rest of the migration progresses.
Why away from Ubuntu/Debian?
It’s Ubuntu in particular that I’m in the process of moving away from. It’s not an easy decision to make as I’ve been using Ubuntu since 10.10, over a decade ago.
It’s becoming a very very opinionated distribution and I just don’t agree with their opinions. Snaps are poor, Mir wasn’t great (especially when it became clear that Wayland was the future) and it seems like the future is just going to be more of the same.
With moving away from Ubuntu, I decided to go down the red hat path. Since doing that, IBM bought out Red Hat and started doing IBM things… so I’m not sure I’ll persist. Maybe Debian, I’m already familiar with it although with that, there’s not much to learn.
Sometimes it's okay to use something you're familiar with and not have to learn (Debian). Fair enough on the snaps though; need to look into them before I form an opinion.
I do agree with you, Debian is amazingly mature and an incredible software project in general. By all means, play with snaps and see how you feel about them. It's also worth looking at Flatpaks (which I do prefer over snaps).
What has been your history with Linux and operating systems?
Fedora is always a good distribution to go to. A heavy focus towards FOSS, a major header for Flatpak and PipeWire, and it's pretty new while still being stable.
Do keep in mind that Fedora is only supported by Red Hat; it is not Red Hat. Fedora is community-managed.
I've also been using Fedora Silverblue (with Arch Linux as my main container for development and gaming) and it's very nice.
I had forgotten about Pipewire, an incredible project. Fedora is a great OS, I had always thought RH had more claws into Fedora than they seemingly do. Nice to know it's community managed.
Silverblue is something I need to sit down and play with properly. Arch makes sense for gaming and development, with the packages being so hot off the production line. Is Silverblue your more daily driver 'needs to be stable' OS?
Silverblue is actually the only OS I've been using for the past year - I've gotten NixOS installed to my laptop once or twice but went right back to Silverblue since I couldn't maintain a Nix config I liked.
If I ever want anything newer or older, I can always rebase my Silverblue install to Rawhide or a previous commit. It's just one
rpm-ostreeaway.Arch is what I run inside of distrobox, I haven't used it on bare metal in... I think, two years now? I've found Arch to be one of the best distributions for use in a container, it's simple, minimal, and (with a few minor tweaks) very easy to understand and utilize.
Lots of developers seem to love NixOS, I think I'm with you in not having been able to set it up exactly how I wanted. Silverblue is definitely on the 'play with' list.
I use Alpine for containers (LXC usually, sometimes Docker). Super tiny, very very minimal.
apk add <package>and you're golden. PostmarketOS even gets basically Alpine working on things like Pinephones, which is fun to play with.