So, title. Personally after trying out pretty much every major distro save gentoo, I've come back to Ubuntu because it just works and I can focus on my work. Did remove snap and install flatpak, but other than that it's mostly stock ubuntu.
For 3 days lol, no breakages at all. I've switched from arch after using it for several months but now I just want stable enough distro with latest plasma and btrfs snapshots without hassle and decided to give tumbleweed a try.
I'm on EndeavorOS. It's essentially Arch Linux with very specific training wheels. I switched to it about a year ago and remain exceedingly happy with it.
EndeavourOS is Arch, nicely setup for a "Daily Driver" PC and for people who don't need to flex about installing Arch. I've used Arch, I like EndeavourOS better :)
Another vouch for EndeavourOS being Arch but with less hassle, I have installed and maintained for years both Arch and Gentoo and while I think those two are the best way to experience and learn Linux, I don't have as much time anymore, so I was trying out fedora for a while (left because some package lagged just a bit much for my preference; Emacs and some compilers/runtimes mainly) I wanted back into some cutting edge rolling-release distro.
I prefer Arch over debian testing and opensuse thumbleweed because of popularity and gaming, there is bigger chance that if a game has problems, these have been found out on arch especially with the steam deck technically increasing the user base of gamers on Arch.
EDIT: NixOS sound interesting because it might be even less time commitment to maintain I think(?), but the initial learning curve would be more time investment that EndeavourOS is since I'm very acquainted with how to upkeep and Arch system that I daily drive.
ublu also has Budgie rebase for Intel/AMD
Can just rebase from a Kinoite/Silverblue/Serica install:
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/budgie-main:latest
Nvidia:
rpm-ostree rebase ostree-unverified-registry:ghcr.io/ublue-os/budgie-nvidia:latest
I really like NixOS so far. It's definitely got some quirks, and trying to install anything that's not in the repository is, by design, a real pain in the ass. But the general idea seems to work really, really well. It's cool how a lot of tasks that are really involved on other distros just come down to "add this line to your nix config file".
I tried using silverblue for a while and I used distrobox but felt a little weird having a few of my packages in a container. I think I'll go back to it soon because I am interested in it
Pop!_OS on my laptop for everything except gaming. Programming, media consumption, reading, etc. I am much more productive using their stupid simple tiling window manager.
On my servers/cloud VM's I run Ubuntu Server.
On my NAS I run TrueNAS Scale. To be completely honest I kind of regret "upgrading" from TrueNAS to TrueNAS Scale. It's less performant and the amount of issues I've had with their application setup made me completely abandon it and just run Docker on a separate computer, which defeated the entire purpose of installing Scale. I'm sure they'll iron everything out over time and it's not like the performance is horrendous, it's just incomparable to good ol' regular TrueNAS (based on BSD instead of Linux with great ZFS support).
Arch Linux, for many years now. No DE, lightdm for login, i3 for WM, no graphical file manager, Alacritty + zsh w/starship for my terminal emulator, shell, and prompt. I'm extremely comfortable with this setup and have no plans to change it (except for a probable move to sway, once I can finally get a system without an nvidia GPU).
That's basically my setup, except I'm already on sway (I upgraded my GPU a year or so ago, and deliberately choose AMD for the same reason) and I went with greetd(-tui) instead of lightdm when I switched to Wayland.
I used to run Garuda Linux on my desktop and surface but even though Arch is pretty awesome with the AUR I always ran into issues when updating the system. As I do like KDE though I daily drive now KDE Neon (bleeding edge KDE ontop of Ubuntu).
The purpose of my home computer is to help me work or play games. I don't want to expend effort updating/fixing my computer.
I would use Ubuntu but Snaps is impossible to turn off and they are insanely slow. CentOS/RHEL/Rocky seem to make every package require a full Gnome install and I use KDE. That only leaves OpenSUSE and the multi arch Debian installer makes installing Debian easier than OpenSUSE.
Do people really have this much gripe with the Snaps? I don't even touch them and am only reminded they exist when people complain about them. Is there any actual downside to just ignoring installing Snaps and instead installing packages manually anyways?
for me it stopped being fun when firefox couldn't access certain OS features or usb keys because they hadn't specifically coded that one in. and I could only wait for a patch.
Debain for me. Just because it's the one that has worked best for me no other reason.
I had made a media/gaming box tried PopOS! but had some trouble getting encoding to work through docker. Switched to Ubuntu after that and it worked like a charm. Now with Bookworm, when I get the desire & energy, I might switch it to full Debian.
Another Zorin OS here. I was surprised and delighted by how little it gets in your face. Updates also seem extremely fast compared to the (many!) other distros I've tried. Unless there's a kernel update, there will just be a little notification at boot asking "There are these updates. Do you want to update now or later?" - and I always choose now because it's so fast and gets out of your way. I also appreciate the defaults.
I've started using linux roughly a month ago and I am using Garuda. I'm amazed how easy everthing is. I expected there to be a lot more troubleshooting.
Yeah for me too!
I installed ubuntu and it just... worked. The only thing that was annoying was the touchpad scroll speed, which was a bit high (lightning speed), and couldn't be changed in the settings, but I learned a lot more about linux after trouble shooting that.
Now im using debian because it is S T A B L E.
It's more hands-on and takes a little more work to set up initially than something like Ubuntu or Pop!_OS, but it's simpler and generally more stable than Gentoo or Arch and has a nice, snappy package manager. The underlying system is simple enough that in the rare event something does break, it's relatively easy to fix.
It's the first distro I've returned to since leaving Slackware a second time.
Y'all are gonna make me say it, I run Arch BTW. The AUR and wiki are compelling reasons, but the truth is I was interested in being forced to learn how things work on a lower level, and the more I understand the more control I have over how things are done.
I've been using Nobara Linux for maybe half a year and I'm incredibly pleased with it. GloriousEggroll has taken Fedora and made it a great distro for Windows gamers to jump in. I had been running Manjaro for a few years before, but wanted something more streamlined, though I wouldn't exactly Nobara Linux a lite distro. It does have everything I want preloaded though.
Thats a very complicated quesiton. I have 3 computers, of which 2 are ThinkPads, and one Asus Gaming Laptop.
The Thinkpads are spread out over the places I usually do stuff, and I have an encrypted portable Sandisk 1TB ssd with Debian installed on it, that i take wherever my thinkpads are to do stuff. My asus gaming laptop runs Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS and i haven't bothered to change it to Debian. I use that one mainly for stable diffusion, voice to text with AI and to play minecraft singleplayer, with shaders.
My thinkpads can work without my portable ssd, and they run unencrypted Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS with basic stuff like firefox and realistic documents and normie stuff, so that it doesn't look suspicious :)
on my main desktop Minisforum UM500: Manjaro (But only because I have no idea how it works and Manjaro came with the UM500 and I'm afraid I can't install something else that will work with all the graphics.)
Ubuntu Studio (XFCE desktop). It's not the fanciest desktop, has one or two rough edges, and there are one or two tweaks I make right away on any new install, but I can get most things done without thinking about the OS at all now.
I like the UI eye candy of KDE, but I find it too weighty for an everyday use distro.
I used to use Debian plus XFCE, but it's a bit too spartan for me these days.
I tried Ubuntu Studio for a bit for audio work, but it was really slow for some reason. Even the terminal would take 12 seconds to open up. Couldn't find the problem so I switched to OpenSUSE Leap and now it's super responsive.
Unfortunately, it looks like Wwise refuses to install with Wine or Bottles, so I might not be able to use Linux for work.
I use Gentoo. We have what's probably the most flexible and powerful package manager for Linux.
Adding new packages is trivial; an ebuild script is created which describes how to build the package, along with a little metadata. This is placed into an ebuild repository - I like to contribute to the Gentoo one, but any folder structure will do (however git is by for the most common method). It's not uncommon for a Gentoo user to package software outside the official repos. These will have all of the features (like configurability via USE flags) that ebuilds in the official repo have.
These repositories, for convenience, may be registered with Gentoo and linked on https://repos.gentoo.org/ where the eselect repository tool can be used to add them by name from the index. http://gpo.zugaina.org/ indexes known ebuild repos and can help you to identify whether or not something has already been packaged.
Slowly moving to nixos for everything but still have a few laptops on arch. For servers I'm on CentOS for work compat/similarity. And one Ubuntu server for Plex.
Arch on my desktop; Debian on the box running my Lemmy instance; and macOS on my laptops. I've tried all the major ones; I've only ever liked Debian, pre-snap Ubuntu, and Arch. I'm only using Arch on my desktop because the RX6000 series drivers weren't in the Debian repos at the time I installed (and had just recently been merged). I'll probably switch back to Debian when it breaks; but for now, Arch works and has been pretty stable.
As someone who was pretty die hard Ubuntu since 08.04, around 22.04 ish I started to get rather irritated with the direction Canonical was pulling in. I tried Fedora, Arch, and Opensuse Tumbleweed, and ended up settling on Tumbleweed. It's kinda nice being so close to the bleeding edge, but without some of the annoyances of Arch. I've stuck with Tumbleweed for around 8 months now and don't think I'll be going anywhere for a while.
Server stuff - I used to run Ubuntu server with docker, but these days I'm running Proxmox and am using Alpine as the OS for the VMs/LXC containers it hosts.
Started with Slackware back in 1993. First issue was convincing my boss I needed a couple dozen 3-1/2 inch floppies. Next was compiling the kernel with support for my network and video cards. Good times!
These days it's pretty much Ubuntu everywhere and all the time from our cloud systems to the deep learning workstation I built last month.
Laptop: NixOS, mostly to try it out. So far I'm really liking it.
Fileserver: Open Media Vault (it's Debian with a cool web UI)
Container servers: Ubuntu, but I'm thinking of switching them out. Still contemplating between Rocky or Debian.
Ubuntu 23.04 for my laptop. I experiment with other distros from time to time when I grow bored but getting back to Ubuntu is like putting on my favourite pair of jeans.
Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition is my home. It has been since almost the beginning of my Linux journey (Raspbian Wheezy was my very first distro). I just love how polished it is.
I've been running Fedora for many years now. Prior to that, I tried used Ubuntu for a bit. When Unity's search started throwing in Amazon results, I said nope, I'm out.
Fedora is fitting. My very first distro was RedHat 6. I picked up a book from the public library with install discs. (A friend told me all the hackers use Linux, so I figured I needed to get it. After all, I could compile basic C++ programs in Microsoft Visual Studio!) I tried Mandrake too. A coworker of mine helped maintain a compile-from-source distro called Lunar, so I ran with that for a couple years. Then Debian, then Ubuntu, and finally Fedora.
My early distro hopping was a combination of curiosity and a heavy handed solution to not knowing how to get something to work. Some library version isn't easily available in RedHat? Wipe the system and try Mandrake!
Tumbleweed with KDE is my favorite flavor. I have all sorts of machines and vm's running which use Debian, Ubuntu, Leap, Rocky, and Alma.
Tumbleweed is my daily driver. Ubuntu and Debian have been my primary vm distro, but Alma and Rocky I've been dabbling with. I use Leap on various apple machines I have as it seems to play nicer with the stupid Broadcom wireless adapters apple uses.
To Gentoo users: what I'm supposed to do about the upgrades of browsers if I don't have a great CPU? Do you install alternative/smaller browser or compile them on night? I feel like there are too many sites that require Firefox/chromium to run functionally, I'm pretty sure Firefox (the only one I tried) accounted for over 1/3 of the compile time with its dependencies.
Maybe there is some setting, preferred hardware, that makes the compiling a bit easier. Outside of NixOS (might want to learn) and Arch (currently using), Gentoo (know how to use but too much compiling made me not install on new PC) is the only distro I'd like to daily drive, so would be cool to get some advice on it.
Someone here mentioned NixOS and it made me want to speak up. I've been thinking of moving to BlendOS or VanillaOS for a while now. I've been using them virtualized and I think I like blendOS more.
With that being said, I'm really intrigued by all those distros picking up the immutable atomic core update model. I want my system to always be up to date but I want it to be stable as well. I feel this is the true power of containers.
My question here is, does anyone use an immutable and atomic distro on their desktop PC like blendOS, VanillaOS, Fedora silver blue, or NixOS?
If so, what is it like?
Note: I know that steamOS, HoloISO, and ChimaeraOS are also immutable and atomic but I don't count those as "desktop" distros. I have been testing ChimeraOS myself on an AMD 5600X3D based platform and aside from Bluetooth latency issues, it's very very nice.
Fedora now and probably forever but I wanna try NixOS for a month soon. I installed it in a VM and it is very different to any other distro I've ever tried
Ubuntu. I started with Mint when I first dropped Windows because it had a similar look. But I found it was harder to find answers to problems I had with Mint than with Ubuntu because more people use it. So I switched to Ubuntu.