What distro do you use and why?
What distro do you use and why?
yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.
Linux Mint, because I don't like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).
Fedora Silverblue
- I like Gnome
- I like that Fedora adopts new technology quickly
- I like how it makes updates more reliable
- I like flatpak
Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.
Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.
I use the Bluefin flavor of Silverblue. I like not having to tinker with my laptop to keep it working, everything happens in the background.
What do people use for command line utilities? The selection on flatpak is a bit sparse
Options include:
- Installing them through
brew; this is setup, enabled and configured correctly by default on uBlue projects like Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin. - Installing them within a container; be it though Toolbx or Distrobox. This is what Fedora Atomic initially intended (and probably still does).
- Some users got a lot of mileage from utilizing
nixto this effect. - If all else fails (or if you outright prefer it this way), you can always layer it through
rpm-ostree.
- Installing them through
- Flatpak, create a shell script to call the flatpak command and pass arguments
- If the app doesn’t work well as a flatpak or isn’t packaged, I would use distrobox
- If the app doesn’t work well in distrobox, I’d rpm-ostree install it
- If I’m feeling fancy, I might look into installing homebrew. But you need to do some workarounds with PATH and homebrew otherwise it can break things; Universal Blue includes these workarounds out of the box
from the comments, there's a split between
- linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
- linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.
i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it's not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want
Lots of folks use those "toy" distros to accomplish specialized tasks that are cumbersome or impossible on other distros. I'd describe it more as "general purpose" vs "niche"
Both are tools
that could be true, but my comment was the takeaway i had from reading the other comments in this thread (and from previous experience elsewhere on the internet). most people answering "arch" or "gentoo" are saying, themselves, that they like it because it "teaches them how linux works" or that they "like compiling stuff". clearly the focus is tinkering with the system as an end in of itself, not using the system as a means to another end
Yes! Great way of putting it. It's hard to explain how just using an OS can be a fun hobby in itself.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed does it all for me. I work and play games on it and stuff, but my laptop is less mission critical, so I run EndeavourOS on it and experiment with fun layouts and everything is all "frutiger-aero-esque". It feels like how I nostalgicallyremember those WinXP-7 days!
Snapper rollbacks with BTRFS are incredible for letting you play around with an OS you actually use, and still giving you a cushion to fall back on. :D
My little media streamer / guest PC has Mint. Nice, maybe a little boring, predictable, reliable. Ahhh simplicity. :)
Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur
Also pacman and the aur
Another reason why am using cachyos
NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.
Ubuntu because I'm old, uncool, and tired
Hilarious to have to look this low for it, but who want to stand up and declare themselves mainstream.
Polished, reliable, and solid, and snaps are not a big deal or an insidious evil, and neither is Canonical. They make missteps for sure. But with containers etc stability is more important than immediate updates and it's excellent about kernel updates for new hardware. It's slick Debian, and if the fuckery ever gets real switching to Debian is easy.
Me too. Rock solid, with KDE. So easy to learn, make it mine.
Debian on most my machines. Can’t trust commercially backed distros any more. I’m tired of chacing cutting edge stuff. Like things to just work.
I can agree, my goal now is to find a distro that keeps some stuff updated not everything like kernel etc.
And there is ever decreasing need for cutting edge with containers and sandboxing. And hardware improvement is no longer so rapid so buying the hotness of 2+ years ago is cheap and effective and well supported.
- Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it's snappy, reliable, and I don't need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
- Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it's still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop... I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.
edit: typos
I wonder what you will think of lmde its linux mint with a debian base instead of ubuntu (It keeps some stuff for eg the desktop updated).
After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn't want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it's based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that's a two-edged sword.
Right now I'm content with Tumbleweed, but I'm keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.
I wish it was not hard getting nvidia drivers on opensuse.
Debian and Linux Mint.
Debian for mission critical stuff like servers or things I don't want to futz with, like HTPCs, work machines, etc.
Mint for my gaming desktop because it's a bit newer on kernels and such.
EndeavourOS. It's just easy to install and I basically use it like Arch
Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.
I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it's what I'm comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to "just work" most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.
Ubuntu server is primarily because it's incredibly easy to get support when you need it.
yeah i love linux mint just works
Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.
For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.
For my gaming PC, I've got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I'd either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I'd just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I'm doing on there
No Void here?
Oh well... I surely don't use it because it's popular...
- Runit
- Pkg manager
- KISS
- Up to date / rolling distro
- But stable
I went into void as my first DIY distro, mainly because I wanted to mess around with window managers and it was a very good experience. Runit made my underpowered laptop boot into linux in like 4 seconds, crazy fast. XBPS package manager was always really really fast too. I like the fact that nearly everything you need is in the official repo, instead of having to delve into the depths of something like the AUR. I also managed to make a contribution to the repos with the help of the community on the IRC chat rooms which were very noob friendly. Overall just a solid experience.
I was thinking the same thing, but I don't like void because it doesn't have every package I want And they only offer old or extremely specific ones.
Arch. I had some tinkering with other distros in the past but wanted to configure pretty much everything. Running it with Cinnamon. I love pacman and AUR and have been able to not break it so far after a year of being installed which is a new record for me 😂
I use NixOS, Gentoo, and Debian:
- NixOS because I like declarative configuration files.
- Gentoo because I enjoy compiling from source.
- Debian because the other two are more difficult to use.
Technically NixOS is all compiled from source too (if you disable the binary caches). It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head. Debian still holds a special place in my heart too, for its simplicity and stability!
It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head.
I wouldn't say so. We currently don't hold a candle to USE-flags. Many packages are already configurable but there's no standard on anything w.r.t. that.
There's no technical reason we couldn't have such a standard but it hasn't happened yet.
I do this with my kernel & a couple of applications that either compile super fast anyhow or at runtime benefit from further compiler optimizations.
Arch.
Because of pacman. Building and writing packages is simple and dependencies are slim. Also packages are recent. And most likely "there is an AUR package for that". Also stack transitions arrive early, like pipewire.
Also let's not forget Arch Wiki, i bet you have read it as a non Arch user.
I administer Arch on 8 machines including gaming rigs, home server, web server, kids laptop, wifes gaming desktop, audio workstation and machine learning rig and a bunch of dev laptops. I also use ArchARM on RPi for some home automation.
Never considered switching since I switched from Ubuntu over 15 years ago.
I do have experience with several other rpm and apt based distros.
Fedora with GNOME.
I've been using it for over than 10 years in my main computer.
It simply works, it's nice, fresh packages, stable, GNOME is productivity champion (at least I know all the shortcuts, and how to tweak it to my daily use). I also know how to build and manipulate RPM packages, so it's pretty convenient.
I've been using Fedora for the last 5 years and never had to reinstall the OS. I've been upgrading with no issues whatsoever.
With Ubuntu, I had to reinstall everything on every update because of errors. Not on EVERY update of course, but often enough to make me want to stick to LTSs.
oh, fedora,
fedora was so stable i had to run to arch-linux as there was nothing to tinker with
afaik, fedora is the testing distro for RHEL. I also felt this way, when a new gnome version released much earlier than for Arch and it had an obvious bug that could be catched with little testing.
And many issues I found in Fedora's bug tracker was auto closed by the new release. Which is quite frequent. Reviewing the bugs is not that frequent.
PopOS. It was the easiest to get my Nvidia GPU set up and plays all the games that I wanna play without too much pain. I've been meaning to try something like Arch with KDE, something like what my SteamDeck is using... but I don't wanna fuck around setting up Arch.
If you wanna try Arch + KDE without hassle, well Arch has an easier installer now, but I use EndeavourOS. It's a lovely smooth Arch experience!
Very easy installer with lots of options to choose from. :)
Arch based distros if that's fine?
Gentoo because I like it.
And portage.
Different distros for different uses:
- Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
- Nobara for my main gaming PC.
- Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
- Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.
Fedora.
I've tried them all but found it's the most reliable. It's upgrades are even more reliable than Macos and Windows.
Packages are very up to date but also well tested. Sometimes even newer than Arch for short periods.
The community is awesome.
I love Gnome, I've found it's more consistent than even MacOs in its design. And it has perfect keyboard shortcuts.
openSUSE Tumbleweed. I've tried switching to Aurora and Bazzite, but ended up using openSUSE again and now I love it even more.
EDIT: Typos.
EDIT 2: I also love tinkering with Void and Alpine on VMs.
Interesting. Have you also tried openSUSE Aeon(/Kalpa)? Though I assume you're a KDE user and thus waiting for Kalpa to become mature before a test ride.
Could you elaborate on what you didn't like about Aurora and Bazzite; especially about how that experience made you more appreciative of openSUSE?
Thank you in advance!
Though I assume you're a KDE user and thus waiting for Kalpa to become mature before a test ride.
That's right!
Could you elaborate on what you didn't like about Aurora and Bazzite;
Bazzite comes with Lutris and Steam preinstalled as native packages. I don't use Lutris and want to use Steam as flatpak, so I decided to try Aurora.
For some reason it was surprisingly unstable. I've had various issues with KDE, DXVK and a few mainstream errors, that I had to either try to fix myself (like this one) or simply ignore (like this one). I've switched back to openSUSE and now I'm happier than ever about openQA existence.
I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.
Alpine:
- Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
- Extremely lightweight
- Very customizable
- After setting it up I find that it works very well
- Decently sized repo
- OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)
I wonder how hard is it to download apps on Glibc-free systems, On Systemd-free systems ik there is Flatpack and stuff , asking this bcs many apps on Linux only work on Glibc.
I just installed Pop!_OS 22.04, after finally ditching Windows 11 entirely. I picked it because it seemed easy to use, well suited for gaming, and popular with good support.
So far, everything has been great!
Windows 10? That's still supported ig.
Bazzite, I want my PC to just work and not require me to maintain it, on top of that I need it to be game-ready and have good color management for work related stuff.
Plain old Fedora.
I know the hurdles, i know what to expect, and I've never been surprised by it.
Immutable sounds nice, AUR sounds nice, NixOS sounds nice, but i am utterly confident in my current choice's reliability and comfortable with its idiosyncracies. Everything i want to do works very well.
If i had less time/energy or had to switch, Kubuntu would be my second choice. Less frequent updates and fewer creature comforts, but also very reliable.
I'm in the same boat. I was a kde neon person for a very long time, but I eventually got tired of some weird issues I was having that I couldn't find a fix for. tried fedora on a bit of a whim and everything just worked. Nvidia drivers were a breeze to set up, gnome is very nice out of the box and doesn't take the configuring I'm used to on kde, and even just having gnome boxes pre installed is super useful and I get to skip the virtualboxes setup. very impressed with it overall. never going back
the 9 month update cycle is my biggest issue, and it's not a big deal
Debian. Because it's the best about "Just Works" (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.
BUT I'm also not a "numbers go up" geek. I don't give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that's just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).
If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.
(/soapbox)
My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don't play the latest games anyway, I'm a PatientGamer, and I don't do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.
It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don't have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).
It all works fine, but one day I'll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs
I use EndeavourOS Xfce because it's Arch with pacman and not Flathub or Snap. Plus, I love the simplicity and the performance boost you get with Xfce (even if it's a small boost with a modern gaming PC).
yo finally someone who loves native packages more then flatpack.
Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.
For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn't even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can't talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you're SOL.
Fedora, it has KDE spin and quite recent packages.
Endeavour OS because once you go rolling you can never go back.
I loved EndeavourOS, but I'm just not sure bleeding edge is for me. Mostly because I will forget to update for a week, and suddenly there are 500 updates, all with interconnected dependencies and pacman is just like "wtf dude?"
I'm not sure I really gained any benefit from that over using a more stable release. I switched to Bazzite a few months back, and it's been amazing. Immutable is very interesting, and it's made for the most stable PC I've ever owned.
Highly recommend Bazzite for gamers (or I guess it's good for multimedia too), or if not, one of the other Fedora-based immutable distros.
The only time I come close to that number of updates (300 - 350) is when KDE Applications and KDE is updated at the same time. I update twice a week.
I use Ubuntu because it's the most popular and well-supported.
I'm going to be switching to Mint at some point because it's basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don't trust Canonical anymore, but it's hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I've been using Ubuntu since 2017.
I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I'm going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.
Tuxedo OS. Before that, I was very happy with Fedora, and then I got a tuxedo laptop and tried their distro. Now, I keep using that because I started to enjoy KDE, and I really like their hardware support and how they test and maintain the distro.
I use LMDE. I use it because Mint has proved that it is worth using (for example: it provide easy way to install multimedia codec by only click "Install Multimedia Codec" in applications menu) and I want it to success.
Sorry if my english is bad
Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I've used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I'm comfortable with it and it's supported in every cloud environment I've touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)
I've got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I'd go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don't find much of a difference beyond package management.
Is aura like nix?
Not used nix so can't comment on that, aura is a pacman wrapper + aur helper -S for package operations, -A for aur, gives you similar options too so -Au to update like -Su in pacman. Has a lot of other options that I'm probably not taking advantage of, but for me, gives me a single place to manage most everything (flathub too but I don't use a lot of flatpaks, just nice to have)
Mint pleb on desktop because it's stable and just works, bazzite on steam deck for installing my own games.
I use Bazzite so that it matches with my Steam Deck since SteamOS still isn't an actual distro to play with yet...
I recently installed OpenSuse, I have been using FreeBSD mostly, but have used linux through the years. I decided to go with an rpm based distro and I've always likes the chameleon mascot of Suse. I'm used to Debian based linux, so it's been a slight adjustment but it's been nice and smooth. I'm running Tumbleweed right now and all my Steam games work, as well as my 3d Windows applications via wine. It just works* I am too old and tired to spend time tweaking anymore.
I'm curious, what's the use case for FreeBSD? Seems obscure.
NixOS for most things, Debian on some servers as a docker host
Interesting. I’ve using NixOS many years on servers but recently also started using it as a base for docker hosts. Before that I used Ubuntu or Debian for docker hosts, but I figured out I still like the declarative approach even for simple servers like docker hosts. There’s your basic security config, ssh keys and monitoring setup that I used to do imperatively, but I much rather have declaratively now, no matter how small. And enabling docker on NixOS is just a
virtualisation.docker.enable = true;anyway.Oh I know it's better, problem is I host some stuff my friend group relies on so I don't want downtime while I figure things out. Also, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to get NixOS set up on a VPS without native support (I'm on Hetzner and I know it's possible, it's just a bit of a hassle). It's one of those projects that I'll get to eventually, when I got time. Or so I tell myself
I recently started using compose2nix, and I'm enjoying it.
Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it's easy.
CachyOS. I use it because I am a fan of Arch based systems, rolling releases etc, but CachyOS is optimised for my generation of hardware, and has lots of good default configurations for various apps. They have a customised proton version, a good default fish profile etc.
tl;dr It's Arch, but optimised, and slightly more pre-configured out of the box.
Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It's a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.
Same thing.
I use Debian. The current release has pretty up to date software. It's super easy to install ( I don't have as much time to fuck around with my OS as I used to). And it's stable as fuck.
Linux sub, post with 40 comments under 1 hour
Is this the year...
Damn, not a single pop-os enjoyer here?!
I tried PopOS on my laptop but found it fucky so I tried Fedora KDE and it works. Too many steps Debian -> Ubuntu -> PopOS.
maybe bcs its posted at 11pm in my timezone (gmt +3)
I've been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it's been amazing. I'm sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I've had.
And it's perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It's super impressive actually.
And distrobox (BoxBuddy comes installed) can be used to access the AUR or whatever if I feel the need to. Just fire up an Arch box, and have at it.
I use Arch with Hyprland because it's great.
I heard hyprland is buggy.
It's quite new so bugs are expected. Now it's stabilised a lot after moving to aquamarine.
- Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
- Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
- It's been around for many years and will be around for many more
- I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can't resist the software selection available on Debian
Debian Testing. It isn't "recommended" but it works fine.
Obviously if you want AUR you need an Arch variant, in which case just pick Arch.
Edit: I needed the why, it's up to date enough for me and I know apt well.
Mint, because it seems like the easiest OS for someone who doesn't know wtf a flatpak is
The other hard drive has Windows, because Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux. Hey Autodesk, can you hear me? Make it happen please
I remember autodesk said that "fusion is too windows dependent"
Try solvespace or openscad or blender depending on your use-case.
I use NixOS for my desktop because
I hate myselfyou can configure everything without needing to edit a bunch of different config files that use different configuration languages.I use Arch btw for my Minecraft server because I am crazy.
I used to use Arch btw.
Now I am on Nix, I just love shell.nix files. I haven't spent much time on my configs yet, but once I finish them, they'll be super easy to set up again, thats cool.
Fedora Kinoite. I like KDE, atomic distros and the fact that Fedora is the only (at least that I know of) distro that has proper SELinux implementation.
I also play games on this system, so having newer kernel and Mesa versions help.
I also play games on this system, so having newer kernel and Mesa versions help.
I guess I'm that guy in this thread constantly bringing up his current distro of choice lol... But have you tried Bazzite? From what I understand it's basically Kinoite but built with gaming in mind.
If you have, I'd be curious as to what differences there were between it and Kinoite...
I have tried Bazzite before and understand its appeal. I am an ex-Arch user so I prefer the system to be as minimal as possible. Fedora fits my requirements just right and Bazzite does not seem to bring anything to the table that I miss from Fedora.
the fact that Fedora is the only (at the least that I know of) distro that has proper SELinux implementation.
AFAIK, openSUSE Aeon(/Kalpa) does as well*.
MX Linux. It is Debian with setup and tools I really want but would be too lazy to prepare in one go. Love it as much as I love Debian.
Mint for my desktop system. It just does exactly what I want it to, has good compatibility with software and Cinnamon is my DE of choice.
NixOS for my server, because being able to use one config repo and format for everything is so nice.
Bazzite for my gaming pc, steam deck, and family members. It just works and they cant fuck it up. Even brother laser printers official drivers installed for my mom's comp. Gotta check the details of that cups exploit though. My gamig pc is also the fallback pc I expect to always have working and for servicing any others if problems come up.
Arch or arch based, except manjaro which has screwed me over too many times, for having easy access to pretty much any software that can run on linux, or just stuff that requires too many hoops to jump through to get working on atomic distros like bazzite.
Dietpi on my SBCs like the ones running klipper for my 3d printers
Debian for my servers, homeassistant etc, but I'm planning on checking out coreos.
Also alpine just because.
I'm currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.
I'm really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:
- There actually aren't that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won't hesitate to say "BTW I use arch" were as others don't really bother.
- There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say "BTW I use arch"
- (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it's because it's actually a good distro that people like.
(This is mostly a joke jsyk I'm sure arch is a great distro)
In my experience, the only quirk of arch is its installation.
pacmanand the AUR are great and I really did not have any issues with stability. First time I tried arch I used a tiling window manager, custom menu bars and all that "hackerman" stuff, which was not stable at all and forced me to reconfigure and tweak my machine all day every day. Now I am using a full blown Gnome desktop environment and it is rock stable. My only wish is to have an/etcdirectory just like Intel Clear Linux.
Because the logo is cool :)
Fedora KDE.
I was happily using Windows 10 until a few months ago, but needed to build a new PC. I got a glimpse of Windows 11 on a friend's laptop and didn't like it. So I asked my Linux-friend which distribution he would recommend to someone who wants to try Linux, but doesn't want to stray too far away from the windows look and feel.
Mint on my ancient MacBook because I didn’t really know any better and it’s working just nice for me, and Asahi/Fedora on my M1 mini, because it’s the only option.
I use Debian on my server and Arch on my gaming PC and laptop. Both distros offer minimal installs so I can just add the packages I need and avoid the ones I don't. Debian offers a nice stable base for running my services with minimal downtime and Arch has the most up to date packages for all the cutting edge features I want on desktop.
My preference as well.
I recommend giving Bazzite a try for gaming. I switched to it from Arch (well EOS), and it's been wonderful.
PCLinuxOS.
Stable and rolling for regular people OS.
Haven't used it in a few years, but if it is still like it was, I highly recommend it for regular users. Solid, good choice of packages (for regular people). Don't remember ever having any problems with PCLinuxOS.
(I switched away only because I'm not a "regular" user.)
Heard that distro while looking into wikipedia.
NixOS because it's the only usable stab at sustainable system configuration.
All that follows is my personal opinion, but for ease of writing, I'm gonna present it as facts.
Once you have grasped the advantage that Nix offers, all the fundamentally different solutions just seem s o inferior. When I first tried NixOS on a decommissioned notebook, the concept immediately made sense. Granted, I didn't understand the language features very well – I mostly used it for static configuration with most stuff just written verbatim in
configuration.nix, though I did use flakes very early on because of Lanzaboote. But just the fact that you had a central configuration in a single language that was able to cross-reference itself across different parts of the system absolutely blew me out of the water. I was a very happy and content Arch user, even proficient enough to run my own online repository that built from a clean chroot for AUR packages (if you use Arch with AUR packages on multiple systems, check out the awesome aurutils!), but after seeing the power of NixOS in action, I switched over all my machines as soon as I could - desktop, virtual servers (thanks nixos-anywhere!), main notebook and NAS.People often praise the BSDs for their integrated approach – NixOS manages to bring that approach to Linux. Apart from GUIX System that I never tried because Secure Boot was a requirement when I last looked at other distributions, none of them have tackled the problem that NixOS solves, and it's not even certain if they actually understand it. Conceptually, it plays on a whole different level. No more unrecoverable systems, even with broken kernels – just boot the previous configuration. Want to try changes without any commitment?
nixos-rebuild testgot you. Need an app quick?nix shell nixpkgs#appit is.Plus the ecosystem is just fantastic. The aforementioned
nixos-anywherereally helps with remote provisioning, usingdiskoto declaratively setup filesystems and mounts, you havedevenvwhich is a really good solution for development environments, both regarding reproducibility and features, and many more that I can't mention here. There is nothing comparable, and the possibilities are unlike in any other ecosystem.It's not perfect for sure though, and documentation is sparse. The language concepts which allow one to "unlock" the most powerful features are different from what most people know.
I was lucky enough to have some downtime at work to get into the system a bit deeper (this was still for work though, just not my core skillset) by implementing a "framework" for our needs which forced me to not just copy and paste stuff, though I definitely did get inspired from other solutions, but to actually better understand the module system (I think?), thinking in attribute sets, writing your own actual modules, function library and so on. But in the end, it was definitely worth it, and I'm unaware of any other system that would allow what Nix and NixOS allowed me to build.
100%. Took me a good year to learn it well enough to be confident with what I was doing but I've now got it on everything with a single flake for all my hosts. I love that my user profile is configured the same everywhere. I can add a new tool or config or alias or whatever and it's the same on every computer.
I've now written a module to define all the services I self host and from that it generates both nginx config and DNS config on different hosts.
The main advantage for me though is I only have to solve problems once. Once it's there in the config I'm confident it's solved and I won't need to worry about it again. My previous server was 10 years old and there was stuff configured I'd long forgotten about how it worked or even why I did it.
this but since Nix is licensed with MIT and deals with weapon manufacturers, i had to go
GUIX!!!, it is everything
While I do get your sentiment, we currently see in Ukraine what happens if you don't have a defense industry: You're reliant on other countries to supply you in case a hostile nation notices that you're lacking it.
Stock Fedora Silverblue. It does what I need so I can get on with my life.
Devuan because I don't like systemd
Artix for similar reasons
btw i use Arch, i use it because i found lot less effort it takes to do anything and it's stable, i do think there is some bug with QTcreator, gotta see it's os issue or QT issue.
I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can't be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.
So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.
COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.
PopOS but I'd like to switch to NixOS
Try it! Here’s a proof of concept that I’ve made that shows NixOS could even be used as a base for a very simple OS that abstracts the Nix away almost completely. Maybe the source code is of interest to you.
A few for different use cases. NixOS on my wife's 14 year old laptop because it proved to handle the hardware the best, and she struggles with change so if that system dies the NixOS configuration can be redeployed identical to how she had it with no additional effort.
Debian on my old IOmega NAS.
OpenSUSE on my personal PC and Work computer, since it supports my proprietary CAD software, and nVidia releases a driver specifically for SUSE/OpenSUSE use.
Arch, pacman is why
Arch. I need the AUR for certain applications, and the high degree of customizability and opportunity for learning appeal to me as a relatively new-ish Linux user (going on a few years now, most of that time having been on Arch).
LMDE. It really does just work.
How does it fare compared with the standard Mint?
I've been considering try it but because of the focus on Cinamon I keep delaying it.
The main difference is that Mint is Ubuntu-based and LMDE is Debian-based.
Xubuntu. Convenience of ubuntu, less cluttered UI.
Bazzite for personal stuff because it looked neat and just worked after installation with a small learning curve. Due to interia I went with bluefin on the work computer for the same reasons
Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would've picked Debian or Mint.)
I don't love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can't be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.
My gpu twin! I was also on Kubuntu at the time for the same reasons.
How difficult was it to run games?
In 2017? Well, that's an interesting question. On one hand, it definitely wasn't as easy as it is now. On the other hand, I was motivated to ditch Windows and willing to make the gaming sacrifices necessary to make that happen. The last version of Windows I used was 7, and I was determined that 10 would never touch this machine -- or any computer of mine going forward, for that matter. I also was done putting up with 7, given that Microsoft was starting to backport 10's spyware and forced-upgrade BS to it by then.
It's been a while, so I'm fuzzy on the details of what I was playing between 2017 and 2018 (when Proton came out). I think I just limited myself to the subset of my Steam games that had native Linux versions (e.g. TF2 and other Valve first-party games, Don't Starve, Cities Skylines, etc.), supplemented with PlayOnLinux for Star Trek Online, which, being an MMO I was already committed to, was pretty much the only exception I made. Otherwise, my attitude became "if the developer can't be bothered to support my OS, that's their loss, not mine, and I don't need their shitty Windows-only game anyway."
After Proton came out and I flipped that switch to "enable Steam Play for all other titles", I think the majority of my Steam games "Just Worked" -- yes, even back at that initial release -- and the ones that didn't became compatible pretty rapidly over the next couple of years. With one exception, I don't think I've had trouble getting a game working since the start of the pandemic, if not earlier. At this point, I've softened my "I won't buy a new game if it doesn't natively support Linux stance" and instead simply expect every game I buy to work. And they have!
(That one exception was Star Trek Online, which I had continued running via PlayOnLinux because (a) why mess with a working config, and (b) the Steam version of STO wants to permanently link your STO account to your Steam account, which I didn't want to do. One day, though, they updated the launcher or something and it quit working. I eventually gave up trying to fix it in PlayOnLinux and decided to use Proton for it instead. But I still didn't want to link my accounts, so I had to jump through these weird hoops where I installed the Steam version, but didn't log in or play it, and instead re-imported it as a non-Steam game pointing at the executable for the Steam version and then fiddled with the compatibility settings to find a version of Proton that worked. That's still the configuration I'm using for it to this day.)
OMG I use cachyOS too, for the same reasons, plus I love how much I can tinker with it.
Yeah i kinda like it lets you install desktops that is in arch repos, well because its arch based.
At work a mix of red hat, fedora, centos, and red hawk. At home mint debian spin. It just works and games run great. I don't have time to deal with the red hat crap if i'm not getting paid.
2 flavors of Fedora with KDE on it:
- Aurora-DX for some dev work on the side. Once you get used to distroboxing / devcontainers, it's rock-solid and mean dev environment (saw some minor issues with how certain GUI apps were scaled, but that's about it).
- Nobara for gaming (tried Bazzite and it'd prolly work for that purpose as well).
Unfortunately, had to keep Windows on one other machine (fuck you KORG for not providing anything working on Linux), but that's limited to being a glorified music player now 😄
Opensuse TW. It is rolling release and rock solid. Also amazing btrfs implementation.
Snapper saved my ass so hard last night! I've tried all the other major distros and TW is where I stayed.
Gentoo for anything my I use a mouse with, Arch for everything else. I like Gentoo for the customization. For things where I want to run a service, Arch is my go to as it keeps working without drama. Anything complicated, Gentoo is better.
Manjaro on main pc and phone. Proxmox (debian) on server
Been using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment for a few years now. Does everything I need it to.
Guix SD because i like editing declarative ((`scheme)) config for my system in emacs
Man gnu endorsed distros are quite rare here.
Debian. Used to use others but realized they all just added crap I didn't want, or could add myself with a simple script.
I was a Slackware then Fedora, then Ubuntu as my daily drivers (whipe trying other distros, or Kali for specific purposes) before settling here.
Void because I don't like gnome, primarily because it uses more than 50% of my resources, so I need something lightweight and have had bad experience with arch. I've had some hiccups with void but it wasn't something I couldn't fix. The downside is that it there are no package repository mirrors in my region, and sometimes I have to change mirrors to install packages, and some applications are not packages for void, so I have to look for open source alternatives that I have to compile.
What distro do you use
I daily drive secureblue.
and why?
Long story short; I love me some security. Unfortunately, My device is far from ideal for running Qubes OS. From within the remaining options, secureblue comes out on top for me.
I started using linux seriously with Manjaro, but since I didn't know what AUR really was I fucked my system up (thank NVIDIA drivers for that). Then I switched to arch, learned everything I should have known on the arch wiki. So yeah, I use arch btw.
For me i started linux seriously with fedora,Some packages was hard to get so i went with cachyos.
Fedora 41 KDE at home on my daily driver laptop and desktop.
Antix on my dell mini netbook.
Multi machine VMs I manage at work run on red hat enterprise with no DE or WM.
My web app servers at work run Ubuntu server 24 LTS with no DE or WM.
My home lab runs on fedora 41 server, no DE or WM.
Debian Testing (laptop, workstation and RPIs) since it works best for me. Tried Gentoo, Arch, OpenSUSE and several others. Also, I've been using FreeBSD for some time.
mint cinnamon because on my system it has no major issues and everything is easy to configure. i don't have a lot of spare time so i can't spend hours or even days troubleshooting why something won't install or run. most other distros have been annoyingly buggy or too difficult to set up.
Pop. I just need ubuntu without snap, distro's default look doesnt matter since I'll just use sway/i3wm.
Though the fact that they're building their own tiling DE could make me stick with it fully when it comes out.
Cosmic?
Yep. It's still in alpha stage, but I really like what I saw from it right now.
I use Fedora on my desktop, and mint on my laptop (this one is going to get wiped soon for Fedora as well). I tried manjaro but it just wasn't for me. I installed it on the recommendation of my friend, and I like it a lot. Except for it not staying asleep because a part on the motherboard kept sending a wake command -__- . But a CMD fixed that issue.
Currently, Arch btw. I was on Ubuntu in the 12* days, but arch wiki had the solutions to every problem I encountered, so naturally migrated. I want to switch to NixOS but ran into some issues getting my finicky nvidia/amdgpu laptop to work. I might go blendOS as a holdover, it seems like a good mix of the two. Also I have some issues with Manjaro (tried for a while) but pamac cli at least handles all of my aur and pacman needs properly.
Fedora.
Most of the others either booted to a black screen after install, or the track pad was somewhat uncontrollable when scrolling. Older Asus laptop with separate GPU.
Began moving all my hardware to Linux this year since none of them will run win11 without fk-about-ing - and I just don't want to. So my server, media box and laptop are all cut over, only my main desktop left on windows a bit longer but it's goose is cooked too.
I've tried dozens of distros over the years but I've settled on Fedora KDE.
The why:
- Skipping x11 and head straight into Wayland so I don't have to worry about that in the future.
- I wanted something more up to date than debian-based and less cutting edge then Arch-based.
- Stability and support of being in the RHEL family
- Flatpaks
- Tried to get on with gnome to get away from the 'start menu' paradigm but ended up getting on with kde better.
In my opinion skipping x11 Will make compatability worse.
Good point - my thought is to go through that pain now while I'm still learning to use Linux properly. I'm not tied into anything yet so I can always swap something out if it doesn't play with Wayland and gets too troublesome.
NixOS & OpenWRT are my two. NixOS’s Nix language as declarative config is such a great tool for setting up & maintaining a machines for the long-term that despite the initial learning curve has paid off in the long run (Guix or a Nix successor should also be in the same category). OpenWRT is the purpose-built tool it is for having an OS for a router with low overhead & a UI that can be easier to understand the config when networking isn’t something you do on the regular.
Alpine Linux. It's pretty lightweight (uses ~250MiB on idle with sway), is easy to install and is super stable. My only criticism is that there is quite a lot of software not available in the repos, but this is mainly fixed by flatpaks.
Fedora because I like this out of the box look more than Ubuntu and it runs my games well with my nvidia card
I have one Ubuntu and one fedora server. Honestly they’re both fine.
I've hopped distros alot and then just felt most comfortable with arch linux. I try other distros and then just go back to arch linux everytime. I just love the AUR and the utilities that are available to arch linux. The wiki is also very good.
Best wiki and aur fr.
I started with mint cinnamon and then tried out bazzite and nobara but they both gave me issues so I'm back to mint because it really does "just work"
My server is running mint currently, but I'm going to switch to fedora at some point soon. Mostly because I have to deal with RHEL at work and I'd like to better familiarize myself with it.
Kubuntu 24.04 because it's a solid desktop and I have nothing against Snap. If it works then I don't care if it's a deb flat or snap. p PPAs were fun and exciting but I broke my system more than once with them back 10 years.
I use TuxedoOS. I wanted something that kept up with the latest KDE updates which ran a cleaned up version of Ubuntu... that's TuxedoOS to a T. I had looked at other options like Kubuntu or just installing KDE over something like PopOS, but TuxedoOS was the most stable and up to date of those options in my testing.
That said, I have run into innumerable problems on it due to apt repos that it doesn't include which come standard on Ubuntu.
Fedora KDE, because my preferred distro Mint Cinnamon doesn't at the moment have good support for things like FreeSync.
Idk if you use smth like gamescope to enable it in cinnamon
Dietpi. Because I'm forced to.
🔥
Nix because I have a bad memory and hate doing things more than once
Arch on my desktop and laptop, Debian stable goes on everything else.
Kubuntu on my desktop, I prefer KDE as a DE and I'm used to the Debian ecosystem.
Linux Mint on my relatively low powered laptop that I rarely use.
Debian stable on my media server.
Cachyos.
Used to use pure arch but I like the cachy optimisations and their repos
You can put Cachyos tweaks kernels and repos on top of arch or nixos if you like.
I know you can basically turn arch into catchy, but I see no reason to when there is a pre made distro.
As for Nix, I think it looks very interesting but I very much love arch for my desktop and am not really looking for a replacement at the moment, but it is number one on my list for the future if things change
Fedora 41 KDE Plasma
For the simple, shallow reason it looks great and feels snappy.
Personal rabble:
spoiler
I would say that it does not feel as "set and forget" as Mint, but I enjoy the feel of of environment.
I am pretty new at Linux in general - only have experience with a Mint environment before.
I did have some issues with Fedora - mostly audio problems in Steam games and it can feel slightly more intimidating to work with ( compared to Mint) but after digging into various help threads and trying stuff( responsibly) I did reach a point where I reached a satisfied conclusion - even if I am not sure what exactly I did that solved the problem
Mint, first one I tried, and works just fine. It's xfce with i3wm.
Primarily I use Arch on my desktop (and by proxy, my Steam Deck which runs SteamOS), which is what I've landed on after a ton of distro hopping. The idea of Atomic distros catches my eyes, but for me in its present state there are too many steps needed in order to make deeper changes (for example, installing a kernel module) - but I quite like SteamOS on my Deck since I know it will always be in a "consistent" state, for example.
On servers I run a mix of Rocky Linux and Debian.
Arch with KDE on ThinkPad T460s (studying and bullshit pc).
Nobara with i3wm on home studio/gaming desktop. Switching to Arch on it one day but CBA at the moment.
Honestly which distro I use isn't all that important to me these days so long as I'm getting decently new kernel updates. Depending on my use case that's not even important. Used Debian LTS on a home media center for probably 8 years.
Elementary OS.
I really like the focus on delivering a solid, intuitive and snappy desktop environment. It is absolutely what I recommend to newbies, who are looking for a Windows or macOS replacement.
Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn't enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.
CJK isn't an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn't force systemd on me.
Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with 'is it deb or is it snap?'. Not sure what I'll go to.
Arch, cause I set it up to my liking once out of curiosity when I was procrastinating, wrote a script that automates https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance and now am too lazy to switch to something else.
Especially since maintenance involves typing Update.sh once a week or so, and nothing else.Kubuntu, because it's the most solid distro I've used that meets my needs.
Ubuntu, because I'm fine with something that "just works"
How did you deal with snaps?
Fedora. I like the rolling release but with large updates separated into point releases, as well as the ability to perform offline updates. I also like the preinstalled security stuff
NixOS because all the other ones differ about as much as Windows 10 from Windows 11. Guix doesn't count.
Tuxedo OS. Same idea as smth like mint or PopOs but (imo) done much better. It also has rolling release for some stuff (like the DE) and non-rolling for other stuff (not even sure what bc I don't really look in detail). It also uses KDE plasma my favorite (and imo the best) DE. It's got pretty good app availability in terms of official packages because it is based on Ubuntu LTS (now 24.04). There are a couple things that are vestigial on most computers bc it was made for tuxedo computers but these have no negative effect on other devices in my experience.
I like Manjaro
- I like it
- Its user friendly if you don't want to spend a month fiddling with it
- Feels comfy and relatively lightweight
- If you are living on the edge of latest and greatest versions, it can be a pain to wait for official repos to be updated. Though I only noticed this problem with Discord desktop app, however since I realised that it spies on every process that runs and you cannot turn that feature off. Uninstalled. Problem gone. Happy me.
Artix because I love Arch and the AUR but networkd kept causing my home network to act like the mad hatter's tea party with IP assignment.
