Why do you use the distro you use?
from aleq@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 17 Apr 21:06
https://lemmy.world/post/28368008

Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.

My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.

#linux

threaded - newest

Crabhands@lemmy.ml on 17 Apr 21:10 next collapse

I run a headless Ubuntu server and Mint as my daily driver. I tried Pop OS first, which was great, other than I hated the task bar and had some problems with some apps. I also tried Kubuntu which gave me problem after problem. Mint made everything easy.

ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com on 17 Apr 21:18 collapse

Honest question, why add headless? Who used a server with a gui?

wuphysics87@lemmy.ml on 17 Apr 21:23 next collapse

Specificity

ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com on 17 Apr 21:47 collapse

Feels like saying I drive a car with wheels, the alternative is possible but no one does that.

Crabhands@lemmy.ml on 17 Apr 22:11 collapse

Its my first server, and I’m not a network admin. Guess I’m not fluent in the lingo.

ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com on 18 Apr 00:24 collapse

I wasn’t being rude, genuinely asking! :)

I also don’t know and see some people use it.

I wonder if having a terminal keyboard thing plugged it counts as non headless

JASN_DE@feddit.org on 17 Apr 21:17 next collapse

Debian on my servers as a very stable base, Fedora Kionoite on the laptop to try out the concept of atomic distros.

ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com on 17 Apr 21:19 next collapse

Ran Ubuntu and Ubuntu server first then switched to desktop fedora and liked it so I switched all my servers to fedora. Tried TrueNas Scale in the past and disliked it except for SMB shares. Also have an unraid server but hate it.

I guess I’m pretty superficial about just liking the base fedora DE. Idk beyond that.

mrerr@lemm.ee on 17 Apr 21:24 next collapse

Long time user of Fedora. Tried Ubuntu but came back to Fedora. But now almost migrated to Almalinux. For software app, use flatpak, which has the latest and no library dependencies. Using Wayland too on Almalinux. So not missing anything since moving to away from Fedora to Almalinux.

lordnikon@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 21:25 next collapse

Debian for everything since it’s one of the few distros that has always been there. It’s one of the second distros to come after after SLS. Distros come and go, but Debian marches on.

aleq@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 21:43 next collapse

Most big distros are old enough to drink though. Ubuntu is 20yo, Fedora 21yo, openSUSE 18yo, Arch 23yo, Gentoo 23yo. (I got curious and a bit carried away…)

But sure, Debian does have them beat by roughly 10 years (31yo).

Tanoh@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 23:40 collapse

Yepp. Started using Debian around the Ham/Slink releases, haven’t found any reason to change yet.

lordnikon@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 01:58 collapse

Oh wow yeah I started around the same time. 1998 was a magical time. I stated with a boxed copy of OG Suse but switched to Debian like 6 months later then never switched again. I learned a lot from the thick manual that came with Suse but once I tried Debian everything just clicked. It’s like you learn the Debian rules and philosophy and any package you work with makes sense.

Xiisadaddy@lemmygrad.ml on 17 Apr 21:26 next collapse

I run Debian Stable. I wanted something i could just set and forget. I don’t need updates, or want them outside security stuff. And i want stability. My machines pretty old so i dont need newer drivers or anything anyway. It also has all the software i need.

BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca on 17 Apr 21:32 next collapse

I use Devuan on my servers, changed because I was annoyed that systemd was forced on me. (I have mellowed a bit since and accept that systemd is here to stay)

I chose Mint for my laptop, because I just want a OS that works and still gives me a taskbar. (Here I got fed up when Ubuntu switched away from gnome)

All of them are apt based Linux because it just works and when apt shoots itself in the foot during dist upgrades you can still wrangle it back in working order.

asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev on 17 Apr 21:34 next collapse

I switched to Arch Linux for the memes, but now am unable to leave it. I’ve tried a few dozen distros, but none of them are as good as arch for me, I always come back to it. It’s like arch is my perfect distro.

aleq@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 21:44 collapse

Do you remember any examples of things that made you turn away from those other distros?

asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev on 17 Apr 22:14 collapse

Mostly the package manager and even the rolling distros’ packages being more outdated than arch everytime. AUR is also very nice to have. The only distro I found that did spike my interest alot was NixOS.

Crazyslinkz@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 21:36 next collapse

Arch, because it has what I want for gaming. Also its simple, lots of help in forums and community driven. Im not too big on rolling, but it’s really stable and works.

I have distro hopped a bit, used fedora, ubuntu, debian, and manjora. Stopped on arch as, I like my xfce set up with arch.

KISS - keep it stupid simple or simple stupid.

savvywolf@pawb.social on 17 Apr 21:36 next collapse

For my main desktop I use Mint because it just works, widely supported and Cinnamon is good (sadly no Wayland yet. ;_;). I also use Home-manager for my configuration because it allows me to easily just specify my config as a set of files I can check into git.

For my server, I use NixOS, because having all my configuration in a few text files is very nice to get an overview of what my server is doing.

enemenemu@lemm.ee on 17 Apr 21:41 next collapse

I used the big ones, ubuntu, arch, opensuse and (atomic) fedora. Fedora had the nicest out of box experience. Morover, I moved to podman, systemd, selinux, etc. And the atomic version showed me a new workflow with flatpak and distrobox (nowadays, I use nix oftentimes).

The best part about it is that I do not care about the system anymore. I do not even interact with it. I don’t install packages (besides the base layer and minimal modifications that are long lasting like installing openssl for GNOME iirc)

I use mainly flatpaks, if I need aur, I fire up distrobox, or use nix if I want to. And the best part is, I’d have the exact same workflow even without the atomic version. Even on another distro. I do not interact with it much.

Moreover, I am happy with all the choices fedora made with the base package and images. I do not have to do an informed choice like on arch. It just updates whenever I boot my pc. I do not need to read updates, they are just there, somewhere. I do not need to disable snaps or work around weird choices. I just start firefox, vscodium, a terminal and do whatever I want to do.

Edit: I actually wanted to switch back to opensuse just to support it but I guess I’d rather move to nix some day. Maybe with niri and cosmic.

giacomo@lemm.ee on 17 Apr 22:02 collapse

This is pretty much explains why I’ve been digging bluefin lately.

juipeltje@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 21:42 next collapse

I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn’t like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I’m hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it’s a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.

madame_gaymes@programming.dev on 17 Apr 22:50 collapse

Everything-in-my-life-as-code FTW

Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.

Also, if you run nixops, it’s much easier to work with if your dev system is also running NixOS.

juipeltje@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 07:26 next collapse

Yeah, i’m realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.

marnas@programming.dev on 19 Apr 00:11 collapse

What do you use nixops for?

madame_gaymes@programming.dev on 19 Apr 00:49 collapse

It’s for deployments and managing many environments/machines from a single CLI interface. You can do all sorts of things like push configs based on labels/groups, gather real-time data/logs, scale up/down. It’s great when you have a lot of VPS/VDS/VMs to manage and you’re not using a platform’s specific management tools.

I mainly use NixOS as a barebones backend, keep it as minimal and hardened as I can, then most of the projects/apps that run are done through something like Docker or k8s. So for me, it’s all about managing the underlying servers that provide the tools needed for a project to operate.

The tool itself is undergoing a pretty big redesign at the moment, but you can get the gist of it from the overview in the manual of the commands.

hydra.nixos.org/build/115931128/…/manual.html#cha…

marnas@programming.dev on 19 Apr 08:29 collapse

That’s fair enough, I also host some applications on a k8s cluster, but for the underlying OS I picked talos instead.

I use NixOS and Home Manager to keep my configuration as code and shared between my PC and laptop.

The only VM I have running NixOS isn’t actually doing all that much, and I don’t mind ssh-ing into it to apply new configs from time to time.

mesamunefire@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 21:46 next collapse

I use popos because I own a system 76 and it’s what I’m used to.

Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org on 17 Apr 21:49 next collapse

Mint here. It looks like Windows and runs the software and hardware I want. Simple as that.

SauceFlexr@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 00:52 collapse

Just installed it today. I had been using KDE Neon for the last 6+ months and really enjoyed it, but I had issues I couldn’t google my way out of.

Czele@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 21:51 next collapse

Fedora. Reason is probably that im used to it now. But if I have to make some points why then there they are:

  • nice balance between being up-to-date and not bleeding edge
  • new technologies. Fedora always pushes new technologies first such as wayland, pipewire, systemd… I like it. I dont have to wait 2 years until x distro rolls it. I get it now, sometimes with some problems but nothing that i couldnt manage.
  • When im trying out some software or building from source the documentation often includes specific steps for fedora (among debian, ubuntu and arch). Its really nice to not be a niche distro and get instructions tailored for fedora. Also some pre build packages are often in deb and rpm. -im used to dnf and its few handy commands like dnf history etc. Im sure that other package managers offer similar solutions but i know dnf and it feels like home
Panamalt@sh.itjust.works on 17 Apr 21:57 next collapse

Every single time I try something new I reinstall Fedora within a day, pretty sure it’s just Stolkholm Syndrome at this point

Ephera@lemmy.ml on 17 Apr 22:02 next collapse

openSUSE, because of the snapshotting. It’s zero-setup and just gives peace of mind when doing upgrades, as I can roll back even from the bootloader.

Tm12@lemmy.ca on 18 Apr 00:34 collapse

Maybe back to EndeavourOS/arch one day but openSUSE gives me less issues.

rutrum@programming.dev on 17 Apr 22:07 next collapse

NixOS. My primary reason for switching was wanting a single list of programs that I had installed. After using ubuntu for 5 years I just lost track of all the tools and versions of software that I had installed…and that didnt even count my laptop. Now all my machines have a single list of applications, and they are all in sync.

ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com on 18 Apr 00:43 next collapse

What does that mean? Like there is one calendar app?

SqueakyBeaver@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Apr 00:59 next collapse

NixOS configuration is done entirely through code, so all of your packages are in a list (although that list can be spread across multiple files; it’s a bit to explain)

I’ve found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go “oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore”

I appreciate the way things are configured a lot, but I would not recommend it unless you really like coding and you have time to tinker. It’s not too hard to get simple config setup, but I spiraled down a deep rabbit hole really quickly.

EDIT: If my comment for some reason persuaded you to use NixOS, I recommend you get a basic config setup before installing it. I’d also recommend you look at how annoying it can be to run dynamically-linked applications (i.e. you download a random executable off the Internet and try to run it, or you try to run something you downloaded with npm)

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 07:08 collapse

I’ve found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go “oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore”

While it sounds sexy and attractive… Not sure the amount of time needed to configure your NixOS is worthwhile. (Except if you have time to spare and want that learning experience !)

Just put everyhting In your personal notes and you have a similar “feature”?

apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 12:52 next collapse

Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd’ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back onto it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 22:55 next collapse

Yeah can’t argue against that, never tried NixOS !

Ging@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 21 Apr 02:54 collapse

Is the restoration method mentioned here really only achievable via nixos? How can you be so confident that you are truly reobtaining an “exact same system”?

Nixos consistently intrigues me because of what it seems to be accomplishing but I can never dive in because there seems to also be many warnings about the investment required and the potential for other more complicated and really nuanced drawbacks to arise.

Give it to me straight–is it offering a new approach of stability with the emphasis on reproducibility? If I’m a gentoo enjoyer hardset in my ways, what could I stand to gain in the nixos/guix realm?

apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml on 21 Apr 23:42 collapse

Your personal files e.g. ~/Documents are not recreated, you’ll still need backups of those.

caveats are you’ve got to use:

  • home-manager to generate your dotfiles.
  • something akin to sops to generate and securely store your private keys and secrets.

But all this can be written in the one flake, so yes nixos-install --flake <GIT URL>#<HOSTNAME> Is sufficient for me to rebuild my desktop, laptop or server from the same repository.

I’ve never used Gentoo, and I’m sure there are other methods of achieving the same level of reproducibility but I don’t know what they are.

Nixos can be as modifiable as Gentoo with the caveat being it’s a massive pain in the ass to do some things. I have a flake for making aarch64-musl systems which has been an endeavour, and… It works? I have a running system that works on 2 different SoCs. I do have to compile everything quite often though.

There are efforts to recreate Nixos without systemd, but that’s a huge effort; because it’s very “infrastructure as code”, you have to change a lot of code where editing a build script would’ve sufficed on arch/Gentoo.

As for nix vs guix, guix was described to me as “if you only ever want to write in scheme”, whereas nix feels much more like a means to an end with practical compromises spattered throughout.

L_Acacia@lemmy.ml on 21 Apr 20:22 collapse

The configuration of nix is not the time consuming part, most of the time it’s faster than other distro if you are a developer. The time consuming part is having an issue with a niche package, the only doc you have is the code and random github issue from 3 years ago that don’t mirror your config, and the nix evaluation doesn’t tell you which part of the config is the problem.

JovialSodium@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 01:08 next collapse

NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.

Using your calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.

Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what’s installed.

rutrum@programming.dev on 18 Apr 12:52 collapse

Tinkering, really. I did a bunch of stuff with wine and virtualization and troubleshooted across versions. One time I manually updated the version of sqlite in python’s std lib to be a newer version. I picked a non LTS kernel once. All these things compounded and bloated my system. And when I went to do clean up, I didnt have a record of exactly everything I installed, what I used and what I didnt. It was guesswork to clean up my disk or even remember the tools I used to get a project working.

This is solved with declarative configuration, which is the basis of NixOS. I believe VanillaOS 2 has something similar. Likewise, this is one the great benefits of docker, vagrant, ansible, etc.

hallettj@leminal.space on 18 Apr 01:29 collapse

This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.

It’s very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won’t irrevocably break things, and that I won’t build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It’s given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.

JovialSodium@lemmy.sdf.org on 17 Apr 22:08 next collapse

Void for desktop/laptop. These are the things I like about it.

  • Rolling release
  • Initial installation is minimal, and doesn’t foist a specific DE or other unessential software on me.
  • No systemd
  • Nothing similar to Arch’s AUR. I know a lot of people love it, but I do not. I mention as the distros are similar.

Debian for my server. But I plan to migrate to Devuan.

  • Stable and well tested
  • Huge package selection
  • Pretty ubiquitously supported. If for whatever reason what you want to run isn’t in the repo, .deb packages and apt repos are often available.
  • Minimal installation available.
RotatingParts@lemmy.ml on 17 Apr 22:10 next collapse

I use Kubuntu. I like the KDE desktop and I like a Debian based OS. If someone is going to make their software for Linux, it will almost certainly be available at least for Debian. If, say you want it for Arch, you need to wait for someone to put it in the AUR or build it yourself.

floofloof@lemmy.ca on 17 Apr 22:12 next collapse

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it’s very up to date yet reliable, package management doesn’t require me to get my head around anything complicated, automatic btrfs snapshots allow me to rollback if I mess anything up, and I like KDE Plasma and the YaST utilities.

DesolateMood@lemm.ee on 17 Apr 22:13 next collapse

Arch because I wanted to see what the hype about installing it was about and then i just kept it

ProtonBadger@lemmy.ca on 17 Apr 22:16 next collapse

I agree, only release schedule really matters, package managers are easy to learn… I don’t think the AUR is that special either, I’ve always found everything I needed no matter the distro, but maybe I don’t have exotic requirements.

I’m fine with most distros, though I don’t bother with the fast rolling ones anymore, I did for a few years but I don’t see the point for me. I’m happy with Fedora or an Ubuntu derivative and major updates are one command which is trouble free unless you’ve changed something in a non-standard way.

Now using Pop 24.04 as it’s on a stable base and I code COSMIC stuff, oh and they update kernel/nvidia/mesa on a regular basis (I use hybrid Gfx, Intel iGPU and NV offload). I’ll probably stick with PopOS or Fedora COSMIC spin/copr moving forward.

Use case for me is coding and gaming.

bazzett@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 22:19 next collapse

I’m well past the age where distrohopping is “cool” (and I don’t have the time for it anymore). So I take a pragmatic approach to choosing which distro to install on my systems.

  • Fedora Workstation on my main laptop because it’s the distro that works better on it, it has reasonably up-to-date software without the hassle and problems sometimes present with rolling releases, and I really like the native GNOME workflow.
  • Linux Mint XFCE on my spare laptop because it only has 6GB of RAM (I plan to upgrade it, but it’s not a priority right now) and sometimes I lend it to my mother and nephew, and XFCE is a very easy to use DE. Also, LM is stable and does not cause unnecessary problems, and has support for the laptop’s touchscreen right out of the box.
  • Debian 12 LXQt on a netbook which I use occasionally, mainly when I’m feeling like just browsing Gopher and Gemini.
  • Debian 12 32-bit headless on my home server, which is just an old netbook I got for free. I have my music collection on it, which I listen to via MPD. It also serves as the main node of my Syncthing setup.

I’ve used many others in the past (Arch, Endeavour, openSuse, Slackware, Slax, etc.), but right now I think that the Fedora-Debian-Mint combo is the best for my needs.

owenfromcanada@lemmy.world on 17 Apr 22:26 next collapse

I’ve used Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and Manjaro. All viable options. I’m currently using Mint on my daily driver, Ubuntu on my HTPCs, and Debian on my servers.

I liked the rolling release aspect of Manjaro, but I missed having a system that works with DEB files. I’m not a fan of flatpak/snap/appimage due to the size (I’ve often had to use slower internet connections). I settled on Mint for my daily driver because it has great and easy compatibility for my hardware (specifically an Nvidia GPU). It worked okay on Manjaro as well, but I’ve found it easier to select and switch between GPU drivers on Mint. And Cinnamon is my favorite DE, and that’s sort of “native” to Mint.

I’m using vanilla Ubuntu on my HTPCs because I have Proton VPN on them, and it’s the only setup I’ve found that doesn’t have issues with the stupid keyring thing. And Proton VPN’s app only really natively supports Ubuntu. The computers only ever use a web browser, so the distro otherwise doesn’t matter that much.

I’m using Debian on my servers because it’s the distro I’m most familiar with, especially without a GUI. Plus it’ll run until the hardware fails, maybe a little longer.

RightEdofer@lemmy.ca on 17 Apr 22:35 next collapse

Arch. Purely because of the Arch Wiki. I honestly think it’s the easiest OS to troubleshoot as long as you are willing and able to read every now and again.

Cyber@feddit.uk on 18 Apr 09:16 collapse

Agree.

Years ago, I was troubleshooting something (can’t remember what) on Ubuntu and realised the package had fixed the bug, but it wasn’t in the repos yet… like months behind.

Looked at Arch with it’s up to date repos, moved over and never looked back.

I’ve reported bugs since, watched the package get updated and seen the improvement on my system… now that’s what it should be like.

buffysummers@sh.itjust.works on 17 Apr 22:40 next collapse

I use Fedora. No real reason in particular (I do like yum/dnf a lot), I just think it’s neat.

I’ve used Arch in the past as well.

ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 17 Apr 23:10 next collapse

CachyOS, because I wanted something arch based due to the archi wiki and rolling releases.

My media boxes run Ubuntu, but that will change when they get rebuilt/replaced at some point, most likely to Debian

Drito@sh.itjust.works on 17 Apr 23:46 next collapse

After tried Alpine, NixOS, Archlinux…finally Im on MX linux because this is a no brain distro and I’m tired to search how to make things to work.

PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca on 17 Apr 23:51 next collapse

Bazzite because I get an immutable install that won’t let me accidentally fuck it up. It just works. All necessary drivers for my dock and peripherals are already installed and configured. It’s the very first time in my decades long Linux excursion that I have a user experience that is similar to windows in that sense, but without the enshittifcation of windows.

I genuinely enjoy video editing, gaming, and surfing the web on my laptop when it’s running Bazzite.

jimmux@programming.dev on 18 Apr 03:41 next collapse

I haven’t tried Bazzite yet, but I feel the same about the other ublue flavours.

I’m the most productive I’ve ever been. Tweaking everything was fun for a few years, but now I just need a distro I can trust, that comes with the tools to do anything.

I see rebases to Bazzite DX are available now. I might give that a go today.

Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 Apr 07:35 next collapse

I’m loving bluefin and I really want to go all in on the immutable stuff, but I’m having a hard time being productive on it. The devcontainers experience has been miserable (probably because I refuse to use VSCode and every other editor having poor or no support for it); I also had SElinux fuck me up when trying to build some complex dockerfile from a project at work (something that was supposed to just work took me two whole days of debugging - and I even managed to break bluefin’s boot process when I tried to mess with the SElinux configuration. This one was mostly due to my own inexperience with SElinux, combined with there being a lot less content on the internet about fixing stuff on immutable distros compared to traditional ones).

Rogue@feddit.uk on 18 Apr 10:38 next collapse

Yep, I’m with you. Project Bluefin is exactly what I want from an OS. My previous Linux experiences had all been awful UX, having to diagnose obscure issues and copy pasting decipherable terminal commands. Until Bluefin, nothing ever worked straight out of the box.

Bluefin’s main issue right now is a lack of good documentation. Like you, I’ve tried to get devcontainers working and they just don’t.

marlowe221@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 05:53 collapse

Honestly, even with VSCode, devcontainers are kind of just ok, at best.

They are very fiddly. The containers keep running when you close VSCode (which makes sense, and sure the resource usage is minimal, but it’s damned annoying) and you have to stop them manually. Meanwhile the commands in VSCode to work with/activate the containers are not super clear in terms of what they actually do.

Oh, what’s that? Need a shell inside the container you’re working in for testing things out, installing dependencies, etc.? Well, I hope you pick the right one of VSCode’s crappy built in terminals! Because if you want to use a real terminal, you are stuck with the crappy devcontainer CLI to exec into the container. A CLI that is NOT up to date with, or even includes, all the commands for devcontainers in the editor (which is what makes working with them in other IDE/editors such a pain in the butt…).

And this gets me…. What? A container I can share with other developers, sure, but it’s very likely NOT the container we are actually going to deploy in. So…

Yeah, I’ve also had a lot of frustrations with devcontainers in Bluefin. I really like what the Bluefin project is doing. The reasoning behind it makes a lot of sense to me. But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.

They do have Homebrew and Distrobox though, which helps a lot. I have ended up doing most of my development work on Bluefin on the host system with tools installed via brew, which is kept separate enough from the rest of the file system to still keep things tidy.

Overall, I think Bluefin is great and it, or something like it, may very well be the future of Linux… but the future isn’t here just yet and there are some growing pains, for sure.

j0rge@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 16:24 collapse

But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.

Both podman and docker are on the image, you could just use containers normally without using devcontainers if you want.

marlowe221@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 17:42 collapse

Yes! This what I usually do. I will develop on the host using tools installed via Homebrew, then package/build/test via docker.

And to be clear, I really love the ideas behind Bluefin and use it every day. I’ve just kind of given up on devcontainers, specifically.

Amaterasu@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 13:43 collapse

Not exactly a product from ublue but something in the same line:

Secureblue because of the reasons aforementioned for the ublue images where things are really darn rock solid out of the box AND because Linux is fundamentally behind in security and this project is trying to mitigate some of the big flaws.

trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Apr 13:01 collapse

I’m asking this because I haven’t tried secureblue: in what ways is Linux behind in security, and what does secureblue do to mitigate that?

And do any of those mitigations negatively impact usability?

Amaterasu@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 15:46 collapse

Some answers to your first question you can find here: …github.io/…/linux-hardening.html

For the second question about in what ways Secureblue do mitigate that you can find more here: secureblue.dev/features

The last question about usability, is very usable. If you use Bazzite you may have a similar experience. It is not like QubesOS that isolate all processes making it even not able to use a GPU.

trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 20 Apr 15:36 collapse

Thanks! That first link is an excellent resource for a security tool I’m working on. Specifically, gVisor, which I hadn’t heard of, but looks like an excellent way to harden containers.

I may rebase to secureblue from Bluefin at some point to give it a try.

hobbsc@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 12:27 collapse

Bazite and bluefin for me, too. been daily driving Linux since the mid-90s and this little cluster of distros is the best experience I’ve had. really feels like everything finally came together.

Montagge@lemmy.zip on 18 Apr 00:19 next collapse

Ubuntu LTS because I don’t have to fight with it

scytale@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 00:35 next collapse

I’ve been distro hopping for 15+ years but have settled with Mint for the last few, because I just want something that works. I’m too busy nowadays to bother with maintaining a distro, so I just want something that works out of the box and is easy to maintain. The laptop I use it on is connected to the TV as I use it to watch movies.

HouseWolf@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 00:38 next collapse

EndeavourOS because someone said it was Arch for lazy people, and I’m a lazy people.

I did use vanilla Arch before for a while, but just ended up being more work for the same setup with more issues from stuff like missing dependencies I didn’t have to worry about with Endeavour.

Only other distro I’ve used was Pop!_OS when I first tried out Linux.

portnull@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Apr 10:34 collapse

Same here: too lazy to fiddle around with stuff. It works, is Arch based, and satisfies my needs

whaleross@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 00:50 next collapse

Variants and derivates of Debian on my servers and other headless devices because no reason except I know it, it is stable, it works.

Been trying linux for desktop every five-ten years for the last twenty odd years and went back to Windows every time because it was too bad experience despite I really tried to like it.

Except this time.

Fedora KDE on my laptop, soon on my stationary as well. No more Windows for me.

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 07:18 collapse

I can’t stand seeing my father struggling with windows…I tried to make him switch, but he has old piracy blood in him and just want Windows things and pirated software, some which do not have any alternatives on Linux.

Also, he’s getting old and he always talks about he don’t want to relearn a whole system. But everytime we see each other and talk about computers he trash talks how bad windows is…

Maybe that’s just something he needs… And boring distros are going to make him depressed? Dunno

Sorry for the story time, but you switching fully to linux made me think of my Dad in hope sometimes he will also take the steps to get out of there 😅!

ruplicant@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 11:26 collapse

with proton, pirating shit from windoes on linux is the best!

N0x0n@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 13:21 collapse

Yeaaaah !! I 100% agree on that ! However, this is a steep learning curve and sometimes a lot of tweaking/reading !

My pops just want to copy past a crack and execute… Yeah, I know…

ruplicant@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 14:41 collapse

he’s pirating his stuff, he’s already a cool guy in my book

yaroto98@lemmy.org on 18 Apr 01:06 next collapse

Garuda - because like endeavor it’s arch for lazy people, plus I got sold on the gaming edition by how much I like the theme and the latest drivers. But that’s just what got me to try it, what sold me on it is when I had a vm of it that ran out of hdd space mid kernel update. I shut it down to expand the drive, booted it back up and no kernels present. Fiddling around in grub in a panic made me realize snappertools auto snapshots btrfs before updating. I think only once in my life (out of dozens of tries) has Microsoft’s restorepoints actually worked for me. Booting to the snapshot was effortless, clicking through to recover to that snapshot was a breeze. I rebooted again just to make sure it was working and it did. Re-updated and I was back in action.

That experience made me love garuda. I highly recommend snappertools+btrfs from now on and use it whenever I can. Yes, preventative tools and warnings would have stopped it from happening, but you can’t stop everything, and it’s a comfort to have.

thirtyfold8625@thebrainbin.org on 18 Apr 01:12 next collapse

I use openSUSE because I want to see the license used with a package before installing it, and I can do that by using YaST. Also, it seems that version numbers are used consistently which enables elegant downgrading (I found that the pacman system is probably capable of supporting this too, but the operating system(s) that use it don't seem to use version numbers consistently and I've had a bad experience with downgrading in the past). I reviewed packaging systems other than rpm but it seemed that rpm while used with openSUSE was the most robust.

I also like having a bootable image with a streamlined installation process that is clearly supported by the operating system maintainers: I was tired of worrying about whether I set up LUKS correctly while setting up Arch Linux, and just having a checkbox for "encrypt the disk" makes me a lot calmer. Knowing that I can use a guided process if I want to reinstall the operating system also gives me some peace of mind.

It's also nice to get practice with an operating system that is more similar to "enterprise" Linux distributions: it's probably useful to get practice managing my personal computer(s) and at the same time get knowledge that is probably re-usable while interacting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise itself. However, this was not a primary consideration for choosing an operating system for myself.

Luckily, my choice can currently also get some support from https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/

I also like NixOS, but it doesn't seem to use secure boot by default, and I'd prefer to have that handled without needing input from me, so I only use it when that feature isn't available at all.

UntouchedWagons@lemmy.ca on 18 Apr 01:28 next collapse

Debian because it just works. I am interested in trying NixOS though.

commander@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 01:28 next collapse

Ubuntu at work since it’s well supported and we can expect any IT people to be able to deploy our packages.

Pop 24.04 because I think it’d be cool to see how performant and maintainable and customizable a desktop that isn’t GTK or QT based. Something sparkly without the legacy choices of the past to consider in the codebase. Plus even though I’ve never touched Rust, it’s so hyped that I’m interested to see how it all works out. It’s my gaming desktop that also has a Windows VM for occasional trying something out. Also process RAW photos with Darktable. Every now and then use Alpaca to try out free LLMs, handbrake, ffmpeg, image magick, compile something

Fedora, stable to me and it goes on my minipc. I run Jellyfin on it and occasionally SAMBA or whatever. I like to see how GNOME changes.

On a Legion Go, Bazzite with KDE. Steam and seeing how KDE Plasma progresses over years. Bazzite introduced me to distrobox and boxbuddy which I now use on the gaming pop_os machine too.

An old laptop with Linux Mint on it. I like to see how Cinnamon is. Used to favor it when I first tried Linux from Windows.

It’s been a long time but I also used to really like Budgie but I feel like everything is pretty solid at this point and I no longer care to chase modern GNOME 2 or Windows XP/7 UI design

D_Air1@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 01:37 next collapse

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/28eb2fe8-9641-46b9-961d-9d781073a960.png">

Finally time to bust this out again.

southsamurai@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 01:42 next collapse

Eh, it worked for me the best back when I was new to Linux, and I’ve never tried anything that was better, just different since then.

I went through the usual Ubuntu experiment, but their baked in DE at the time was just unpleasant. Tried manjaro? I think, it’s hard to recall if that was before or after that initial flurry of trying things out. But there were a half dozen that got suggested back on the Linux for noobs subreddit when win10 came along amd I was noping out.

Mint did the trick. Cinnamon as a DE did what I wanted, how I wanted it. It came with the stuff I needed to get started, and the repo had the stuff I wanted without having to add anything. It worked with all my hardware without jumping through hoops.

I’ve tried other stuff and like I said, nothing better, just different, so why screw around?

Tbh, that’s also how I feel about pretty much everything I tried though. If I had run into one of the others that happened to “fit” the same way back then, I’d likely still be with it because there’s really not a ton of difference in day to day use between any of them. The de matters more in that regard, imo.

Fizz@lemmy.nz on 18 Apr 01:42 next collapse

I look at distros as a base to make changes from. I can make my distro into whatever i want but its going to take varying amounts of effort depending on which distro I start with.

I choose Nobara because i really liked fedora and I wanted a fedora base but with someone(eggy) keeping up with the latest gaming tweaks and adding them. Ive been using it for 2+ years and so far so good.

MXX53@programming.dev on 18 Apr 01:57 next collapse

Fedora strikes a good balance for me. I come from arch and opensuse. I like the stability of fedora, but I like that it also gets updates faster than Debian. Most software I have found has Fedora considerations.

However, I have been using Ubuntu LTS for my self hosted media server.

AstroLightz@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 01:57 next collapse

ArcoLinux ArchLinux (BTW) because I love tinkering with computers.

Finding ways to automate tedious tasks is the fun part of the challenge. Scripts, systemd services, bash aliases are a great skill to learn. (Especially bash)

Also I’m too used to pacman and AUR to go back to APT.

sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today on 18 Apr 01:57 next collapse

I use Mint because I use lots of small project software that tends to only have packages for Debian/Ubuntu. Mint also works very well with an NVIDIA card. I’ve tried other distros but they fail to work well with nvidia.

When I get a new AMD laptop I want to try Vanilla OS as apparently it can use any package format but is also immutable which I like. I just hope they have the KDE Plasma edition out by then because I really don’t enjoy Gnome

CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 02:20 next collapse

Artix because it is more Arch then Arch according to Arch’s own goals: “focuses on simplicity, minimalism, and code elegance”. There is no way systemd is more simple, minimal and elegant than its alternatives. I don’t think systemd is bad, but I do think it is a bad fit and Artix is what Arch should have been.

bunitor@lemmy.eco.br on 18 Apr 02:23 next collapse

debian bc i want a rock solid system that i don’t have to worry about maintaining and i don’t give a fuck about the most recent versions of stuff

randomcruft@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 02:31 next collapse

Fedora… it took way to long to figure out how to remove all the software I didn’t need / want and still have a functional system. I will not subject myself to that pain again 🙂

kixik@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 02:40 next collapse

Artix (current)

  • Vanilla as much as possible (same as Arch)
  • Rolling release (same as Arch)
  • No systemd (my personal preference)
  • AUR availability (still an Arch derivative)

Guix (as soon as I have the time)

  • Similar reason as for Artix
  • Reproducible builds
  • Guile
  • Static configs
HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com on 18 Apr 18:25 collapse

If you’re OK with using non-free/libre software I reccomend the systemcrafters install guide

systemcrafters.net/…/full-system-install/

kixik@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 08:36 collapse

Read about it some other community, perhaps the guix one, and I was keeping it to help me in the future. It relies on nonguix repo which has its own recipes, but this one is nice. I wish I wouldn’t need any binary blobs, but sadly that’s not how things work. Counting on risc-v not just getting competitive hardware, but also motivating the surrounding hardware to follow.

I’ll definitely need it in order to use relatively modern hardware.

Many thanks !

Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 02:45 next collapse

Depends on the use case.

I use Nobara on my gaming rig because I wanted up-to-date packages without being on the cutting edge like Arch. And I also wanted all the lower level gaming optimizations without having to set it all up manually. Plus, KDE is soooooo nice.

Debian on my servers because I want extreme stability with a community-driven distro.

Linux Mint on my personal laptops, because I like having the good things from Ubuntu without all the junk. Plus the Cinnamon desktop environment has been rock stable for me. It’s my goto workhorse distro. If I don’t need something with a specialized or specific use case, I throw Mint on.

Arch on my old junker devices that I don’t use much because I like making them run super fast and look sexy and testing out different WM’s and DE’s.

Void on my junkers that I actually want to use frequently because it’s super performant and light on resources without needing to be built manually like Arch.

Ubuntu server if I am feeling stanky and lazy and just need something quick for a testing VM or container host in my home lab.

incogtino@lemmy.zip on 18 Apr 03:20 collapse

I’ve been on Mint with Cinnamon for about 5 years across desktops, laptops, and home server

I had to update a machine with a version of Mint that was EoL this year, so I just upgraded through several major versions in a row with no issues

It was interesting seeing how much more polished each upgrade process was

theacharnian@lemmy.ca on 18 Apr 03:12 next collapse

LMDE because it’s Mint and a recent Debian stable.

swagmoney@lemmy.ca on 18 Apr 07:54 collapse

lmde is kinda the goat 🔥

algernon@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 03:18 next collapse

NixOS, because:

  • I can have my entire system be declaratively configured, and not as a yaml soup bolted onto a random distro.
  • I can trivially separate the OS, and the data (thanks, impermanence)
  • it has a buttload of packages and integration modules
  • it is mostly reproducible

All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot /persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.

And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programmung work really well together, amg give me immense power.

highduc@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 06:31 collapse

Do you know about guix? Seems right up your alley.

algernon@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 12:25 collapse

I do, yes. I’d love to use it, because I like Scheme a whole lot more than Nix (I hate Nix, the language), but Guix suffers from a few shortcomings that make it unsuitable for my needs:

  • There’s no systemd. This is a deal breaker, because I built plenty of stuff on top of systemd, and have no desire to switch to anything else, unless it supports all the things I use systemd for (Shepherd does not).
  • There’s a lot less packages, and what they have, are usually more out of date than on nixpkgs.
  • Being a GNU project, using non-free software is a tad awkward (I can live with this, there isn’t much non-free software I use, and the few I do, I can take care of myself).
  • Last time I checked, they used an e-mail based patch workflow, and that’s not something I’m willing to deal with. Not a big deal, because I don’t need to be able to contribute - but it would be nice if I could, if I wanted to. (I don’t contribute to nixpkgs either, but due to political reasons, not technical ones - Guix would be the opposite). If they move to Codeberg, or their own forge, this will be a solved issue, though.

Before I switched from Debian to NixOS, I experimented with Guix for a good few months, and ultimately decided to go with NixOS instead, despite not liking Nix. Guix’s shortcomings were just too severe for my use cases.

alt_xa_23@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 03:38 next collapse

Debian because it’s what I picked when I started, and switching sounds annoying

ohshit604@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 04:26 collapse

When i first researched Linux distros and learned that Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, etc were all derivatives of Debian I knew it was the distro I wanted to learn.

Granted the package manager does tend to fall behind and the Linux kernel is quite outdated on Debian 12 however, it works great for 99% of tasks (including gaming!).

lilith267@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Apr 04:02 next collapse

Alpine!

More stable then arch, but just as if not more lightweight and customizable. I have nothing against systemD or GNU but for my usecase I just want something small and simple

pastermil@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 04:21 next collapse

Mint: consistency, versatility, having all the Ubuntu’s benefits (being industry standard, somewhat) without the drawbacks (Canonical’s opinionated bullshit like snap)

Debian: stability, predictability, leanness

Gentoo: customizability down to compile-time level

cepelinas@sopuli.xyz on 18 Apr 04:49 next collapse

Bazzite because never breaks.

robador51@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 06:54 next collapse

I actually had it break, it wouldn’t go past the login after an update. Turns out it was a gnome issue. It was something like an accessibility feature I had enabled crashed gnome. So, technically it was gnome and it would’ve happened in any distro.

Other than that, bazzite, its perfect.

Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 Apr 07:21 collapse

I’m using it as my main gaming distro now but I still have it break sometimes. Mostly due to Bluetooth stuff, but I also need to shut down the pc completely whenever I leave it running on its own for a while because it just doesn’t wake back up if it sleeps - and I always forget to look into that after turning it back on.

DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 04:56 next collapse

Fedora Silverblue because I seem to break any system I have eventually, and this one’s still going.

Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 Apr 04:58 next collapse

I use my distro because my Arch friend in true Arch user fashion needed to remind me every day that I was using a Debian based distro. He’d rave about pacman being far superior to apt-get. Every time I couldn’t find some software I was looking for, he’d point it out on the AUR.

I had just swapped to Pop_OS!, so I grabbed Manjaro just to get him to stop. I fully expected to be back on Pop at some point, but I’d give it some time. After about a month I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of swapping again. That didn’t last long as the distro hop urge set in. So I tried EndeavourOS, because I kept hearing bad things about Manjaro.

Then I went back to Windows for a while because a game I was looking forward to playing wasn’t Linux supported yet. The game wound up being shit and Microsoft dropped news of their shady snapshot crap and putting ads in the start bar. By this time my Arch knowledge outweighed my Debian knowledge. Fedora and openSUSE were still intimidating, so back to Endeavour I went.

I broke my build and decided to try another distro, CachyOS. It was nice, clean, and fast, but the miscommunication with foss devs was high because Cachy mirrors update a fair deal slower than the Arch/AUR mirrors do, so I’d be making bug reports of a bug that was fixed two days prior. I thought about using Reflector, but didnt know where to even begin to implement it into Cachy. So now I sit on vanilla Arch and he’s using vanilla Debian. What a world…

chloroken@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 11:28 collapse

How do you figure that Fedora is intimidating?

Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 Apr 17:41 collapse

To be honest, at the time I didn’t even look at it. That old saying, “people fear the unknown”. I’ve wised up since then, though, and now I really want to try Nobara.

If I did decide to go for it, I’d probably opt for vanilla Fedora first to get a feel for it. The main reason that I haven’t tried it yet is because there’s one package I really want.

Wait, it was just added three weeks ago! Fedora has novelWriter now!

liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 Apr 05:26 next collapse

Arch on desktop/laptop because I’m very comfortable with it, and I can set it up the way I like.

Debian on servers because it’s stable and nearly everything has a package available, or at least instructions for building.

Same as OP, but I’m not likely to change them out. I’ve tried a lot of distros over the years and this is what works best for me.

eugenia@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 05:28 next collapse

I use Debian-Testing. It’s very stable, more so than most other distros IMHO (despite being -testing), and it has the latest packages.

DasFaultier@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 05:29 next collapse

Mint on my work PC, because my dear IT colleagues made the effort to provide standardized installations for us that are mostly carefree and can just be used; you can even get them preinstalled on a laptop or VM.

Debian on my work servers, because everyone is using it (we’re a Debian shop mostly) and there’s a standardized self service PXE boot installation for it. Also, Debian is boring, and boring is good. And another thing, Debian is the base image for at least half of the Docker images and alliances (e.g. Proxmox) out there, so common tools. The .deb package format is kinda sane, so it’s easy to provide our own package, and Debian has a huge community, so it’s going nowhere in the near future.

Ubuntu LTS latest on my home servers, because I wanted “Debian but more recent packages”, and it has served me well.

Not yet, but maybe Fedora on my private PC and laptop soon, because I keep hearing good things re hardware support, package recency, gaming and just general suitability for desktop use. There’s still the WAF to overcome, so we’ll see.

robber@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 06:17 next collapse

TuxedoOS because my so-called “Linux-Laptop” turned out to not run mainline Linux very smoothly. But I hate that fact that it’s Ubuntu-based.

I’d use Debian, Arch or dabble with Void if I could on my laptop, my servers run Debian or Alma.

nf999@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 06:30 next collapse

Void linux. Both on wayland + labwc desktop and radpberrypi 4 server with multiple dockers, and a bootable usb for my work laptop. Why? Its lightweight, rolling, rock stable, and easily extendable. I love runit for its simplicity. Love xbps package manager for its speed, and love the good and clear documentation.

elperronegro@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 06:47 next collapse

PopOs! Familiarity, stability and the fact that it fulfils 95% of my needs perfectly.

hyveltjuven@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 06:57 next collapse

Fedora because it’s boring in the best ways. Curious about NixOS though.

peetabix@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 07:00 next collapse

EndeavourOS on my laptop and Ubuntu on my home server. Still new to linux thought endeavour was a good choice to really get my feet wet with lessening the chance to screw things up too badly. Ubuntu because it looks like it just works.

lapping147@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 07:02 next collapse

Laptop is Linux Mint, because my wife also use it and i want my laptop to be as easy to handle as possible.

Servers are Debian, because it’s very light on my hardware. Mostly used for containers.

Species8472@discuss.tchncs.de on 18 Apr 07:18 next collapse

Fedora Gnome. I like it and it just works for my daily office use. I don’t have the time nor the mental strength to fiddle with different distro’s on a regular basis.

poinck@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 07:38 next collapse

Gentoo for my workstation because I need flexibility, security and stability there and Debian stable for my Raspberries running all the services I need 24/7 access to.

I don’t like all the spin-offs of the major distros. And no, Ubuntu is not a major distro it is based on Debian and they are known for some really bad decisions in past and present, eg: snap instead of flatpak.

Static_Rocket@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 07:41 next collapse

Arch. Started using it in high school. Never had a reason to switch. Now I’m just regularly frustrated by other distros trying to make things easier by abstracting simple configurations behind layers of custom scripts.

swagmoney@lemmy.ca on 18 Apr 07:52 next collapse

debian is bestian

haque@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 08:09 next collapse

I started off with ubuntu in 2009, switched to mint some years later, because of the cinnamon desktop environment which I liked better than the new ubuntu unity flavour.

This year I switched to manjaro with kde plasma. Just for fun honestly.

SeekPie@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 08:23 next collapse

Fedora because it has (IMO) the best vanilla GNOME experience. Every application is in the same theme and looks similar.

banazir@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 08:43 next collapse

I eventually decided on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few reasons: rolling release, because I like to stay up-to-date; non-derivative, not a fork or dependent on other underlying distros; European, for (perceived) privacy reasons; a relatively well known and large distro with a decent community, for troubleshooting reasons; backed by a company, though that has both its ups and downs; lastly, support for KDE Plasma.

I actually had trouble finding a distro that suited all my criteria at the time, but openSUSE is good enough for now and I am pretty much satisfied.

Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 09:15 next collapse

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it has been the most stable and flexible experience I’ve had that worked out of the box. I have tried a lot of distros over the years, and openSUSE has really held up.

Additionally, I use Nobara for a multi-purpose machine that I also occasionally use for gaming (that’s why Nobara instead of openSUSE: it gets me slightly higher %1 lows and is less effort to set up for gaming) and a Void Linux machine for programming. Nobara is pretty good, by far the best gaming oriented distro I’ve tried, but I do regret that it’s Fedora based. Void is really fantastic, but for some reason it only boots on my System76 laptop, so that’s the only device I use it on 🤷.

Void is an arch-killer for me; it’s faster, has huge repos, and offers a similar experience. I honestly prefer it, and would probably use it on most of my machines if it weren’t for the booting issue (it’s been a few months since I last tried, so things might have changed though). OpenSUSE is king for low-effort stability and flexibility though.

Well, those are my two cents. Good day y’all!

Aristotelis@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 17:59 collapse

What issues did you face on Fedora?

Spider89@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 09:23 next collapse

I like apt and is great stability for servers and unstable branch for desktops/laptops/Legion GO. (Debian with Xanmod).

the_citizen@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 09:27 next collapse

I used a bunch of distributions (like Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, Debian etc.). Then I created a distribution-like system with LFS -BLFS and now using itbecause I want to see how Linux works in a detailed way. It’s a little painful but it’s not a problem if you are a masochist person who doesn’t have to do anything else.

malkien@lemmings.world on 18 Apr 09:43 next collapse

Garuda on desktop:

  • wanted to try Arch
  • is rolling
  • has a custom KDE theme that I happen to like
  • gaming edition preinstalls a number of tools that I would install anyway

Fedora on work laptop:
20 years ago it was easier to find rpm packages for some enterprise apps, then just stuck with it

ChimeraOS on minipc:
does couch gaming well

Eclippsiss@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 09:47 next collapse

Fedora (workstation) is the first distro I actually managed to daily drive. Its modern, stable, and I didnt have to spend to much time in getting everything to work how I want it. Tried some distros in the past but they never stuck (Ubuntu, mint, popOS).

Curious about arch but I think I will stick Fedora for now.

Elkenders@feddit.uk on 18 Apr 10:42 collapse

I like Debian for the same reason.

[deleted] on 18 Apr 10:46 next collapse

.

secret300@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 10:58 next collapse

Fedora just werks™

Kirk@startrek.website on 18 Apr 14:31 collapse

Haven’t used the command line since installing Kinoite, it’s… weird.

secret300@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 18:18 collapse

I use gnome software all the time and since the new update it’s so much faster

RivNexus@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 11:14 next collapse

Bazzite. Just works really Convenient updates, and more straightforward features

I started using Linux with Arch as first distro Fedora KDE and Arch would be my other picks

communism@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 11:16 next collapse

Artix as my daily driver because of the AUR, and I like runit. I no longer feel the need to distro hop; I’m happy here.

lorty@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 11:26 next collapse

I’m used to debian, it was the first on the list of distros I downloaded to try and it worked right away, so I kept it. Overall, Pop Os is unintrusive and works, so it’s perfect for me.

chunes@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 11:28 next collapse

Ubuntu because it was the first distro (after Mint and PopOS) to boot on my eclectic hardware.

Croquette@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 11:51 next collapse

Laziness. I used Ubuntu, then tried a few distros based on it, and Linux Mint worked well enough out of the box.

I have a few issues with it, but i have easy workarounds so that’s good enough for me.

Swakkel@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 11:54 next collapse

CachyOS is making my old ass 2012 desktop feeling snappy again. I’m by no means a pro user and everything seems to work and god damn installing and updating stuff is easy and fast!

ColdWater@lemmy.ca on 18 Apr 11:56 next collapse

Vanilla Arch, because for me it’s the easiest to use and everything just works and never any had instability issue like other distros I tried

Nibodhika@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 12:01 next collapse

Home: Arch, because I’m a lazy ass who likes the AUR.

Work: Ubuntu, because the laptop they gave me came with it

Servers: I don’t have a particular distro I use for all my servers, it depends on what’s my frame of mind when setting the server up. But I’m considering learning NixOS for this use case.

recently_Coco@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Apr 12:02 next collapse

Mint cuz I’m a newbie and it was recommended.

I tried KDE Neon Plasma a while too and it was doing a weird stuttery jitter thing with the mouse that I didn’t like so I switched back.

Mint just hasn’t had any huge frustrating problems or anything wrong with it that I couldn’t fix in the settings menu. Just how I like it.

Fizz@lemmy.nz on 19 Apr 15:54 collapse

Have you done any desktop customisation? Mint can look as slick as KDE with a few tweaks.

NutWrench@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 12:03 next collapse

Started with Linux Mint. Added the KDE desktop. And I’m done. This distro does everything I want.

FweliXOX@lemy.lol on 19 Apr 08:30 collapse

TuxedoOS would be perfect for you if you don’t need all the remnents of cinnamon stuck in there. It even has the latest plasma version through extra repos/ppa.

absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz on 18 Apr 12:14 next collapse

I started on Ubuntu, tried 8.04 and went back to windows XP, tried 10.04 and stayed.

20.04 was my last Ubuntu, bounced around for a while, but I have settled on Mint. Been running it for 3 years now.

Mint isn’t too fancy, it is just there and lets me get my work done, very much the way Ubuntu used to be.

I’m running the 6.14.2 kernel, to get the latest drivers for my RX 9070, I’m playing around with local AI… Mint isn’t fancy, but you can do almost anything you want.

panda@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Apr 12:23 next collapse

Debian Stable.

I’ve used plenty of distros but Debian continues to give me a stable, predictable OS that allows me to get done what I need to get done with no real surprises. I have used it for many years and know how it works very well at this point.

Its my computing equivalent of a comfy and sturdy pair of well worn boots.

DrDystopia@lemy.lol on 18 Apr 23:58 next collapse

I don’t like changes, that’s why I like Debian Stable.

null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Apr 11:39 collapse

Yeah I daily drive debian stable.

With flatpaks and docker I never run into problems with my applications being too old or whatever.

fox@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 12:45 next collapse

Arch. I’m addicted to updating packages and Arch helps me stay sane.

nagaram@startrek.website on 18 Apr 12:46 next collapse

Pop OS

Lots of people were hyping it in 2019/2020 so I thought I’d give it a try as my first real Linux experience. It works great and has a Nvidia driver option when I need that. So I never really tried to switch.

Distro hoping never appealed to me, but I did try Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian 12.

I use Kali for work and considered swapping to XFCE DE but pop is fine.

wolf@lemmy.zip on 18 Apr 12:59 next collapse

Debian stable (ok, writing this on Debian Trixie which is not stable yet, but nonetheless works w/o trouble in a virtual machine).

I am using Debian for work and on my servers.

Why Debian? Because for my use cases there are no real alternatives at this moment.

  • I need stable support for Aarch64 and AMD64, which already rules out nearly every other distribution
  • For desktops I use a highly customized Gnome, which takes some work and my workflow depends on a few plugins, which rules out Fedora
  • For work I need some 3rd party software repositories which again rule out fast moving distributions and other non mainstream distributions
  • By now I think I run Debian and distributions based on Debian for nearly 3 decades, everything I need works stable and good enough at this moment and I accumulated a lot of knowledge about how things work in Debian
  • Some of my hardware needs workarounds (not because it is too new), and again I know my way around Debian and how to patch/fix things for my hardware
  • It is nice that I can use Debian for my desktops and my servers on all hardware I own, I would not want to have to learn different Linux systems for desktops and servers or have different versions of software (think Fedora vs. RHEL/CentOS/Alma etc.)

Every 6 month I’ll boot Fedoras live cd and play around with the newest Gnome/KDE, but seriously, for at least the last 5 years I never feel like essential improvements are pushed in the newest iterations of Gnome/KDE and I can happily wait the maximum of 2 years until they are released with Debian.

Saying that, I also own a Steam Deck and as an entertainment/media station I totally love what Valve is doing there. I would also be totally happy to run a De-Googled ChromeOS if it would support all the platforms/software etc. I need. For containers I’ll also happily use Alpine Linux, if it is possible, but again, I’ll mostly default to Debian simply because I know my way around.

In the end, an operating system is just a necessary evil to allow me to do what I want to do with a computer. As long as I have a stable OS which I can tweak to my liking/needs automatically and central package management, I am good. (Unless it is your hobby to play around with your operating system ;-)).

nibbler@discuss.tchncs.de on 18 Apr 13:15 next collapse

I’m mainly on Linux for over 20 years (still have one Windows Box for VR and some games, hopefully I can migrate this to Linux with the next hardware iteration). I was on Suse, Debian, Mandrake, Gentoo, Ubuntu, QubesOS (which does not self-identify as Linux-distribution) with Fedora+Debian Qubes. I never had those installed on my main machine, but also worked a lot with kali, grml, knoppix, dsl, centos, Redhat and certainly a bunch of others.

The absolute best for me, as working in it security and with different customers, is QubesOS. Sadly my current laptop is so badly supported by QubesOS that it burns 6h battery in 25 minutes and sleep/suspent does not work at all, so I’m currently on Ubuntu (which I hate for their move to snap and being Ubuntu in general)

lengau@midwest.social on 18 Apr 13:37 next collapse

Because despite all the people telling me I’m wrong, Kubuntu is still by far the best distro I’ve ever used. Rock solid, super fast, and continues to improve.

ReakDuck@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 13:53 collapse

I always unable to upgrade ubuntu based distros. I always need to reinstall

lengau@midwest.social on 18 Apr 17:19 collapse

The only reason my last machine didn’t get more than 10 years worth of in-place upgrades was because I decommissioned it as a desktop and turned it into a server, so I wiped it at that point.

ReakDuck@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 19:58 collapse

For me its because something new broke the upgrade feature.

Its always something different and I am unsure if its a me issue. It rarely worked but sometimes it did.

As soon as you change something on your Ubuntu by a little or lot, the upgrade is not possible. I feel forced to use rolling release because of my behaviour

procapra@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 13:44 next collapse

Over the past few years I went from using Debian Stable, to Debian Testing-Unstable mix (this is a supported way of using Debian look it up), to Debian Unstable/Sid on my main PC.

I think they all can be used for different purposes, and because they all use basically the exact same tools and utilities I don’t have to fiddle with figuring out the specific commands I need to run if I need to tweak a server.

7arakun@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 13:45 next collapse

I use PopOS on my desktop. I was looking to upgrade an old Chromebook and while researching my options came dangerously close to buying a MacBook Air. Decided to buy an android tablet instead for my portable computer and bought another SSD so I could dual-boot on my desktop.

It’s clean, somewhat macOS like in appearance but I actually have freedom to do what I want. Just in time for Windows 10 sunsetting too.

MellowYellow13@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 03:53 collapse

I use PopOS too, I am newer to Linux and was recommended this distro as someone that is into gaming. I’ve had literal zero issues and it has been running all my steam games smooth as butter. Linux is just awesome!

TheFadingOne@feddit.org on 18 Apr 14:01 next collapse

I’ve been using Arch since October 2019 and I’ve stuck with it because it has been a really comfortable experience. I really love the package manager. The packages are usually new enough to not cause me any major problems but are tested enough to not break anything. Regarding the latter point, mileage might vary. I have never had anything break on me that I haven’t broken myself (and I don’t update very frequently) though I know not everybody is sharing that experience.

1 year ago I also started using NixOS on my desktop and it’s been a very interesting experience. Design wise it’s pretty good but there are a number of things that really annoy me. Some days I’m really considering putting NixOS on my laptop and some days I’m leaning more to putting Arch back on my desktop.

Netrunner1197@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 14:04 next collapse

EndeavourOS - I jumped around distros a lot but always found myself coming back to arch. Then I found Endeavour which is just arch with the same basic setup I would always end up doing, so out of convenience I stuck with it

MrMobius@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 14:11 next collapse

My main reason to use arch is the exceptionnally complete and useful arch wiki. Though many pages are useful for other distros as well. With the archlinux and package install guides, it’s just a matter of time (and study!) until you know how to get around.

cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de on 18 Apr 14:53 next collapse

Mine may be the funniest

I used to always recommend people use Linux Mint as their first distro, but then it hit me, how can I recommend something I only installed for five minutes? So I got myself Linux Mint, it was 21.3 Virginia at that time, now I have more important things to do in my system and it has stayed.

I used Arch in my old laptop for 2 and half years, learned alot of things from Arch, also got to know some people in the Arch unofficial Matrix Room. But I have a new laptop and this is the story.

shertson@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 14:56 next collapse

Fedora. I’ve been using it since Fedora Core 1 and was mostly RedHat before that. I don’t have time to muck around with my desktop and Fedora almost always just works. I’ve had too many problems with Ubuntu and Suse and friends. And while I like Arch and Debian and others, I just want my desktop to be point and click. My days off tinkering on my desktop are long gone. Kids, house, work, wife, grandkids, other hobbies keep me busy. I save tinkering for my selfhosting adventures.

Raptorox@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 15:01 next collapse

Arch

Found it, love it

PragmaticOne@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 15:04 next collapse

Mint. Just because it works with zero issues on the desktop. Everything else is either Rocky, RH or Debian.

fratermus@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 15:24 next collapse

Why do you use the distro you use?

I’ve used many distros over the years (and test spin up many in virtuals to see what they are like) but keep coming back to Debian. I also like vanilla ice cream.

demunted@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 15:26 next collapse

Ubuntu. Started in the Slackware days, tried a lot of distro’s. Got used to debian commands/layouts etc. still happy to move to Centos for security focused installs. I find Ubuntu has a ton of support and general updates that fix anything I can find broken.

SolarPunker@slrpnk.net on 18 Apr 16:21 next collapse

Arch (EndeavourOS but it’s the same with an installer, basically): AUR, great Wiki, great community and fresh packages. I’m always open to new stuff but all of this is really hard to beat.

tiddy@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 16:33 next collapse

Nixos because… I feel like were already loud enough of a crowd everyone should know its benefits lol

Mwa@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 16:35 next collapse

PC: Cachyos love the aur and the compiler optimizations + they compile or put aur packages in their repos which saves time by not making you compile anything

Laptop: Linux mint easy to use and stable

Phone: Android (does it count??)

AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net on 18 Apr 16:44 next collapse

I dual boot Fedora and Arch. Fedora was just a fluke because it seemed like one of the most mainstream distros, and I was a Linux noob.

I liked Arch though because the Arch wiki is so useful for a beginner to learn from, even if you’re not on Arch. At first, Arch seemed too complex and difficult for me, as a beginner, but when I kept finding myself at the Arch wiki when troubleshooting, I realised how powerful good documentation is. I installed Arch with a “fixer-upper” type mindset, with the goal of using the greater power and customisability that Arch offers to build a config/setup that worked for me (learning all the while). It was a good challenge for someone who is mad, but not quite so mad as to dive into Gentoo or Linux From Scratch

originaltnavn@lemm.ee on 18 Apr 17:08 next collapse

Debian Sid, the unstable rolling release branch of Debian. It has the worst of both Debian and Arch!

On a more serious note, it allows me to have a somewhat standard Debian system with bleeding edge tooling.

korthrun@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 17:25 next collapse

The amount of software available in the package manager, without adding external repositories, exceeds that I’ve seen in any other distro I’ve used. Even with epel, I feel like others fall short.

The ability to modify the build time flags of software while still using the package manager is also huge. I hate when ffmpeg doesn’t have speex support because some upstream dev figured it was a corner use case.

It’s me, I’m the target demographic. I’m the one asshole who wants to build ffmpeg with speex support, clamav without milter support and rxvt WITHOUT blink support.

There are some pretty great userspace helpers too. Things to ensure your kernel is always built with the same options. Things to upgrade all your python or perl modules to the new interpreter version for you. Tools for rebuilding all the things based on a reverse dependency search.

Slotted installs are handled in a sane, approachable, and manageable way.

The filesystem layout is standards compliant.

I recall someone on /r/Gentoo saying something like “Gentoo is linux crack, when you get a handle on it, nothing compares.”

When I boot my laptop into fedora/arch/mint/etc (or really any non-bsd based distro), I feel like I’m using someone else’s laptop. There are a bunch of git repos under /usr/src for the software I wanted that wasn’t in the package manager. I need to manage their updates separately. Someone else has decided which options are in this very short list of GUIs. I’m using whatever cron daemon they chose, not the one I want. Why is there a flat text log file under /var/db/? Why won’t you just let me exist without any swap mounted? $PATH is just a fucking mess.

AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 17:38 next collapse

I use bazzite. I prefer fedora (that’s what I have on my laptop) but the Nvidia drivers consistently give me trouble with fedora on my desktop. I’d get it stable for a little bit then something broke. eventually I got tired of it and tried bazzite since I had heard it was better in that regard. I love the out of the box Nvidia support as well as the HDR support with no extra steps. I’m really not a fan of immutable distros in general, I think rebuilding the ostree everytime I need to install a system package not available in any other way is super annoying, but it just works and that enough for me right now. I also enjoy some of the software it comes packaged with, like btrfs snapper and a very comprehensive ffmpeg build. I’ll probably switch away from it to try something new this summer, but at least until my finals are over I just need it’s stability.

Gabadabs@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 18 Apr 17:51 next collapse

I’ve been using Garuda for… Two or three years? I’ve done a lot of distro-hopping looking for something that won’t just break on me. I used Ubuntu for a long time but kept running into situations where it would break, such as boot loops. Eventually I settled on Garuda because it ships with newer software and Nvidia drivers, which is helpful because I use my PC for gaming. I have stuck around because it’s garuda-update command automatically makes a backup of your system out of the box, and you can select to boot into a backup in grub then restore it really easily. There have been a couple times where something has broken on an update, but when that happens I can immediately restore the backup, and I don’t even need to remember to run a backup manually. I do feel that the default theme is a bit gaudy so I swapped it to a default KDE, but other than that I’ve had pretty much only good experiences with Garuda.

iopq@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 17:51 next collapse

I can set everything up from two config files. If I want to set up something on my laptop I got working on my desktop it’s just cut and paste.

Guess my distro

hasnep@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 18:20 next collapse

Guix! Nah just kidding, it’s gotta be the snowflake one

mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org on 18 Apr 22:09 collapse

Guix!

captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works on 18 Apr 18:41 next collapse

On my main desktop I’m using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn’t run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who’s implementation of KDE?

I’ve spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I’d rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I’m not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I’ve been around long enough to go “Remember PeppermintOS? You don’t, okay.” So I’m looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I’ve never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I’ve tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don’t know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

JTskulk@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 19:25 next collapse

I use Debian on machines I don’t want to fuck with or have change much.

I use Endeavour because it was recommended to me for the bleeding edge hardware I had just bought for gaming.

BradleyUffner@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 19:53 next collapse

It was the first one using Wayland by default that worked on my machine out of the box.

VitabytesDev@feddit.nl on 18 Apr 20:13 next collapse

Arch: I have the most up to date computer in the whole world, I have the AUR, no one can stop me

switches to Debian

Debian: My packages are so stable, nothing can break the eternal peace of my system’s packages

switches back to Arch

jim3692@discuss.online on 19 Apr 09:31 collapse

I have Debian on a laptop that I don’t use that much, and I use Nix package manager for managing the apps I use.

Running Arch was a nightmare, as I was updating once every 1-2 months and I was getting lots of conflicts.

VitabytesDev@feddit.nl on 19 Apr 23:11 collapse

I update daily and never had issues with packages.

jim3692@discuss.online on 20 Apr 12:34 collapse

I mostly use it for accessing my servers when I leave home. So, no need for constantly updating it. I prefer to install the OS and forget about maintaining it on that device.

daggermoon@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 20:16 next collapse

I use Arch (btw) because CachyOS was giving me issues.

Mwa@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 16:08 collapse

Fyi you can put cachyos repos on top of regular Arch

daggermoon@lemmy.world on 20 Apr 05:37 collapse

Yeah, I did that a while back on endeavourOS. That’s how I first learned about Cachy OS. I decided it’s not worth the extra time spent troubleshooting for me.

Mwa@lemm.ee on 20 Apr 07:19 collapse

Oh okay

zarenki@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 20:44 next collapse

The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.

That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.

I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.

For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

aurorachrysalis@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 21:34 next collapse

I dual boot Fedora KDE and Arch.

I’ve used Mint before and I’ve little to no qualms with it, but I wanted to move away from X-11, which has no GUI isolation. Hence the switch to Fedora, which has a smooth Wayland experience and also happens to have SELinux out-of-the-box.

link42@lm.preferlinux.de on 18 Apr 21:55 next collapse

Arch on the Desktop, Debian on the servers for peace oft mind.

zebidiah@lemmy.ca on 18 Apr 22:42 next collapse

I run SteamOS on desktop hardware because I hate windows and it solves almost every Linux gaming problem out of the box…

Gg901@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 06:42 next collapse

Is there an official build for general release, or are you running a steam image built for a handheld?

zebidiah@lemmy.ca on 22 Apr 04:40 collapse

Yep! It’s the SteamOS 3 beta… It’s got some bugs and some weirdness to it, but it’s not terrible at all

loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Apr 07:14 collapse

How?

zebidiah@lemmy.ca on 22 Apr 04:44 collapse

Steam deck SteamOS iso installer! It’s actually surprisingly stable for basic tasks but it is pretty locked down so you can’t really break it unless you really try. And it seems to run better if your pairing it with amd cpu/gpu hardware

ECB@feddit.org on 18 Apr 22:59 next collapse

I use opensuse (tumbleweed and slowroll) because I just wanted to try it out a few years back and it mostly just works.

If I were to reinstall today, I’d probably use fedora again, since it’s much easier to use things like Waydroid.

Tapionpoika@lemmy.ml on 18 Apr 23:32 next collapse

I use Mint. I had a phase with different distros, but when I had my son, and he turned 3, I installed Linux Mint for him. Little by little, I started using it myself. Today my son is in the military service and I still use Mint.

Headbangerd17@lemmy.world on 18 Apr 23:42 next collapse

Wanted to try out wayland and fedora was recommended as the best experience for that during those years. Discovered the most polished, stable and smooth Linux experience I’d had to date. Mostly used ubuntu distros and arch before. Never looked back. Upgraded to Silverblue to try out the future of linux. Haven’t changed anything since. Been about 3 years now on Silverblue.

Fizz@lemmy.nz on 19 Apr 15:48 collapse

How do you install packages on silver blue? Are you stuck with flatpak only or can you get system packages as well?

Headbangerd17@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 15:55 collapse

Flatpaks are the preferred option followed by the Fedora toolbox container. Then you can make a distrobox container if what you want can’t be satisfied by the first two. You can also layer packages with rpm-ostree but this should only be as a last resort.

There is a bit of a learning curve with regards to how you should approach package installs, but once you learn it and get comfortable with the container options it’s pretty smooth sailing.

Fizz@lemmy.nz on 19 Apr 22:30 collapse

Can you explain layering packages in the ostree? Say if I know that im always going to want something like vencord installed then can I add it to the ostree and it functions as if I used dnf?

Headbangerd17@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 23:04 collapse

It’s basically a drop in replacement for dnf.

As simple as sudo rpm-ostree install vencord. Then you reboot and it’s there. That’s assuming it’s already in the repos. If not, I’d recommend you look into distrobox. It allows you to install apps from any other distro in Silverblue. You can add them to your menu and have them behave as native apps.

Fizz@lemmy.nz on 20 Apr 05:09 collapse

a drop in replacement for dnf is exactly what I was hoping for. Having to restart kinda sucks but shouldnt matter since im going to setup the box once and then it be done.

PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 00:58 next collapse

Ubuntu. It was reccomended to me by a few of my mor knowledgeable friends, and I haven’t had any major issues with it. The operating system is doing what I need it to and I just can’t find any motivation to want to change.

Gaxsun@lemmy.zip on 19 Apr 01:50 next collapse

EndeavourOS. It’s the only one I tried that worked with my sound card out of the box strangely enough…

waspentalive@lemmy.one on 19 Apr 03:08 next collapse

Debian/KDE because I like the way I can customize (1 panel on the left with everything) No features removed just as one gets used to them. (looking at you gnome) No breaking changes to the desktop gadget api every update (you gnome again) Nice big repo.

WalnutLum@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 03:35 next collapse

Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I’ve ever had to type out.

shmanio@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 09:00 collapse

How long have you used it and how is it?

I’m pretty curious about those kinds of distros, and don’t really like how nixos is completely hosted on github (and all the drama that constantly comes from the community, and the bad documentation for many things, …).

However, guix seems such a niche project that I feel like it can’t really be used.

WalnutLum@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 09:26 next collapse

About a year and a half.

To be honest it’s not “easy” to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.

To use it like any other distro you’re going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.

Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.

There’s also The toybox

WalnutLum@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 09:42 collapse

Some additional nice things about guix:

Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.

Shepherd is hands down the best init program I’ve ever used. It’s just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.

The OS documentation is built into the distro, with “info guix” you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.

ronflex@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 03:51 next collapse

I primarily run Linux server distros for what I like to do. I usually do Debian since it’s a nice base to just add whatever on to (sudo isn’t even installed out of the box) so I have been working on a customized install script but if I don’t feel like messing around too much I just go with Ubuntu and avoid using snaps for anything I care about (especially Docker, like wtf is with the snap version of Docker). I like the default toolset of Debian based distros and not having to screw with SELinux.

Wolfie@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 06:00 next collapse

Because it’s not Windows. So fed up with it. Used Debian. But as of late gotten annoyed with them and everything seems to lead me towards Arch. Dunno. We’ll see. Just a bit scary to switch as I’m used with apt and not Pacman or whatever it’s called :P Need to learn to make backup on the system in case something breaks etc

LeFantome@programming.dev on 19 Apr 06:43 collapse

You are going to want to use the AUR, so you need yay or paru (not just pacman). You can either still use pacman (for non-AUR stuff) or just one of the others for everything.

They all use the same switches.

geoma@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 06:40 next collapse

EndeavourOS because of the AUR

LeFantome@programming.dev on 19 Apr 06:56 next collapse

I favour Arch because I prefer everything I want to install to be in the package repo and for it to be a version actually new enough to use.

But I actually use EndeavourOS because it is 99% Arch but installs easily with full hardware support on everything I own (including a T2 Macbook). It never fails me.

And now I have realized that I can use Distrobox to get the Arch repos and the AUR on any dostro I wish.

So, I now have Chimera Linux on 4 machines because it is the best engineered distro in my view. The system supervisor, system compiler, and C library matter to me (not to everyone). All these machines have the AUR on them (via distrobox). Best of all worlds.

cr78bw@anonsys.net on 19 Apr 07:30 next collapse

@aleq

I'm using #endeavouros with Gnome on my Desktop at the moment, just because I wanted to try Arch with all the priorly mentioned arguments, rolling release, Wiki and so on.

I started with Slackware in the early 90s, SuSE and Red Hat (Fedora today) just for fun and self-education, even though Slackware wasn't fun at all. This distro brought me nights without sleep and full of tears. 😂🫣

I tried a couple of times to switch to Linux on the desktop but never got it to work satisfyingly like Windows with all my private and business applications and games.
So Linux and I had an on and off relationship over decades. I wanted to love Linux so badly, but it was never reasonable to run it on the desktop.
Let's see how we're going to end, Arch/Endeavour and me.

On a server I would not switch from a Debian-based distro, just because I'm used to it and I would also prefer stable instead of rolling releases.

lazorne@lemmy.zip on 19 Apr 08:08 next collapse

Bazzite, Aurora, Proxmox and Ubuntu Server.

RealisticDoughnut@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 15:17 collapse

One of these is not like the others

PanArab@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 08:46 next collapse

  • SteamOS: because it came with my Steam Deck.
  • LinuxMint: because it is an Ubuntu-derivative and widely used which makes finding solutions and packages easier and I like MATE.
Evrala@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 08:57 next collapse

Steam OS on Steam Deck. Fedora on Framework13 cause reliability. Garuda Mokka on Framework16 cause pretty and it just works.

May move from Garuda back to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed or CachyOS at some point.

accideath@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 09:02 next collapse

Nobara: Has all the gaming features I want on my gaming pc (like gamescope) and is htpc capable. Also, it’s based on Fedora, which I’m familiar with.

Fedora: I like gnome and it’s always fairly up to date and rock solid. Great on my laptop.

Have considered switching to openSUSE though. It’s German (as am I), it’s the first Linux distro I ever used (on my granddad’s PC, more than a decade ago) and I’ve heard a lot of good about tumbleweed.

CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 09:42 next collapse

Pop OS. Don’t use much of its custom features since I have installed sway on top of it and did some custom edits, was thinking of switching to another distro but they announced COSMIC, which looks very cool. Why not stick with the distro that could have the best experience with it?

chaoticnumber@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Apr 10:56 next collapse

My gaming rig is on arch because i need the aur. I use my gaming rig for a bit of development too, dependencies are super easy on arch.

All my laptops, work and personal, run fedora kde because its rock solid and has the best “just works” features while still being a technical distro.

My servers are either alpine because its lightweight and easy to harden, debian for the stability and minimalism. I do have a few arch servers, but those are for testing and they get spun up, do the work they need and then killed.

DietPi for my raspberry because its debian based and has a plethora of automations to do what ever you like with your raspberry. Works on desktop too, well.

Lastly, mint, on my surface pro 5, because it is my obe device that is meant to just browse and be a portal into the internet or to play some movie or something while we are out for vacations or stuff like that.

There are many other distros that I like and use, but I use these the most. I love how each linux distro has its stregths and weaknesses, each their own usecase, you get to finetune what you need to make your life easier.

squid_slime@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 11:15 next collapse

I was running only arch on my surface pro 7 and my amd desktop, then last week after an update it seemed gnome and Linux surface kernel weren’t playing nice and had bricked the install. I have switch the laptop to Debian but I tend to stick with arch, like op as I am used to it, I now run Debian as it is known to be stable.

I would love to find a new distro but for me its the sunk cost fallacy, I have put so much time into learning arch and to repeat all that - this new distro would need to offer something wildly different.

bhamlin@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 11:16 next collapse

Slackware: because I’m old and arch is too trendy.

floo@retrolemmy.com on 19 Apr 14:43 next collapse

Geez, I haven’t heard of someone running Slackware in at least 15 years. I mean, I know it’s still around, I just haven’t heard anyone say they were running it.

bhamlin@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 15:45 collapse

It’s much more… manual than others, I’ll admit. For me anymore it’s a labor of love.

floo@retrolemmy.com on 19 Apr 15:55 collapse

Yeah. I remember, lol

Tapionpoika@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 15:55 collapse

👍🏻 Slackware was my 1st distro. It was before kernel 2.0. Now I use windowslike girly distros…

bhamlin@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 17:39 collapse

Let’s be honest: nearly all of them now are windowslike girly distros…

anomoly_@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 11:18 next collapse

I installed Manjaro about six months ago because I’d never tried it. I like it so far and it has yet to get in my way enough to make me want to change.

HumanPenguin@feddit.uk on 19 Apr 11:47 next collapse

i been linux only for over 30 years now.

I tend to use Debian stable. At least for the last 15 or so.

The reason is simple. I use it as my main PC and the stability is my main priority.

The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.

But honestly while that was a pain in the past. Now for the vast majority of things I use. I find flat pack or appimage downloads work perfect ally.

The only exception is ham radio software. Here I tend to compile later versions if I need/want them.

Other negatives

I’m really not hugely into gaming. But use blender a lot. Due to this I use Nvidia cards as they are far better supported by blender.

Installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers is a bit of a pain on Debian for newbies. But once you know the process its simple enough. Just not obvious for beginners. The community drivers are still very limited thanks to Nvidia s weird ideas.

absentbird@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 11:59 next collapse

Same, I’ve been using Debian only for the last 15 or so years. I love the stability, and the old software isn’t hard to work around when newer versions are needed.

I hate the lack of support from Nvidia. I prefer AMD cards though, and they give zero trouble.

HumanPenguin@feddit.uk on 19 Apr 12:17 collapse

Yeah. Unfortunately blender is still noticably faster on Nvidia cards. Due to cuda and optic support.

I only have a 4060 though. Next time I upgrade, give. How bad the 50s release is. I will look again and compare higher end amd stuff. Likely a few years away though.

absentbird@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 12:22 collapse

I use my GPU mostly for gaming and computer science. I will say that ROCm from AMD is seriously giving Cuda a run for its money, and it’s fully open source. AMD cards also tend to be better per dollar.

HumanPenguin@feddit.uk on 19 Apr 12:37 collapse

Agreed. As I say blender is less fast on amd. Atm

I don’t play games much. 0ad being the main exception.

But yeah I’d never advise a non blender user to go Nvidia.

Tapionpoika@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 15:49 next collapse

What was you 1st distro back in last millenium?

HumanPenguin@feddit.uk on 19 Apr 19:15 collapse

slackware followed by red hat mothers day 2.0 also used LMDE for several years

Hadriscus@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 18:03 collapse

How does the nvidia card fare on linux in general ? on a Wayland session ? I have a 4070Ti running Windows atm, I use Blender professionally and I know it runs the best on Linux because of compiler shenanigans I can’t be arsed to understand, but this is one reason I’d like to switch to Linux (…again!). I’m interested to know if you run multiple color-managed monitors by any chance

0xf@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 12:05 next collapse

Cachyos, since I like archlinux and the things it comes with I would install on arch. There’s even a few things that would have to be compiled from aur that’s in their repository pre-compiled.

Aggravationstation@feddit.uk on 19 Apr 12:36 next collapse

Debian, on servers and a desktop. I spent a long time using Ubuntu so I’m used to APT and Debian is suitably lightweight for my not amazing hardware. I also like the non rolling nature of it.

RealisticDoughnut@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 15:16 collapse

You’d love PopOS then, with its working nature and privacy-focus.

Aggravationstation@feddit.uk on 19 Apr 16:22 collapse

I’ve tried PopOS as I have a machine with an Nvidia card but every tine I’ve done the first apt upgrade it nukes grub and won’t boot again. Probably something I’m doing wrong and it has been a couple of years since I last tried.

scheep@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 12:49 next collapse

Linux Mint is a nice and easy distro that is quite good :D

MrFunkEdude@piefed.social on 19 Apr 17:07 collapse

I've been using Mint for a year now and I just got a second laptop and the first thing I did was Wipe Windows 11 off of it and install Mint.

It does everything I need it too.

scheep@lemmy.world on 20 Apr 09:56 collapse

honestly mint really a very easy distro, I enjoyed using it too. Fedora and other distros also seem pretty cool

questionAsker@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 13:11 next collapse

Arch. Why?

  1. Arch Wiki
  2. Pacman
  3. Community (therefore AUR)
Harrk@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 13:13 next collapse

CachyOS! I was on Mint before this and had a bunch of issues running games. I think this was in part from going from NVIDIA to AMD (9070 XT).

Decided I had enough and instead of doing a simple Mint reinstall, I gave Cachy a go. I’ve had a little issue here and there but the experience has been beautifully smooth compared to Mint. It’s now set up better than I had it before and I’m over the moon with it haha.

mintiefresh@lemmy.ca on 19 Apr 13:15 next collapse

I have been using Tuxedo OS for the past few months.

I just wanted to use something that was Ubuntu based with KDE.

KDE Neon sounded a bit too bleeding edge to be used safely as a daily driver. And Kubuntu is maybe a bit too conservative for me.

Tuxedo OS seems nicely balanced between that and so far it’s been great.

phpinjected@lemmy.sdf.org on 19 Apr 13:51 next collapse

trisquel and I love it

Dogiedog64@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 14:24 next collapse

I recently moved to Fedora KDE Plasma after years on W10, simply because I don’t want to use W11 and its AI bullshit. So far, it’s been a great time, and I haven’t noticed any major performance issues, so I’m happy with it. Having to update everything every few days is pretty novel though, and ‘sudo dnf update -y’ makes me feel like Hackerman, king of all Hackers. I think I like the customization options most though. I get way more control over what happens on my PC than W10 ever gave me, and it’s all wrapped in a very user-friendly GUI. Overall 8.5-9/10.

Hadriscus@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 17:58 collapse

yay I want to install Fedora Plasma when I get a new drive, see if I can gradually switch (for real this time)… Plasma has a new pen tablet utility for Wayland, and since I use my tablet exclusively… when my Windows 10 is EOL I will switch for sure. Good to know it runs well for you

Dogiedog64@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 18:35 collapse

Yeah, I also use a pen tablet for some stuff, and it handles it decently well. One issue I’ve run into with it is that if I turn my monitor off while the tablet is plugged in, there’s like a 50/50 chance the monitor won’t load video unless I turn the tablet on too. It’s funky. Otherwise, getting my RTX4070 up and running wasn’t too hard. It’s a good distro for idiots (me).

Hadriscus@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 18:37 collapse

Fantastic. Thanks for the feedback.

jadsel@lemmy.wtf on 19 Apr 14:25 next collapse

Primarily Garuda these days. It’s basically Arch with some user-friendly additions. The major reason I tried it on a then-new gaming laptop was the actually really good IME hardware detection and minimal fuss NVIDIA setup using their latest drivers.

I was having enough headaches trying to get graphics actually working properly on the Debian-based distro I had been using, that I said fuck it and tried something that would hopefully get things working for me so that I could at least see that configuration to figure out where I’d been going wrong. Then I liked it enough that I have mostly just stayed there on this machine. (Did finally get things fixed on the other side, though.) But, I was already fine with Arch, which probably helps.

aspoleczny@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 16:03 next collapse

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Recently I bought cheap Surface-like x86 tablet on a rather recent hardware, and running Debian and its cousins required more tinkering than I was willing to do, so I decided to go with a more modern rolling release. Tried Arch for a few months, bricked it from mixing stable and testing branches, tried Fedora, and finally settled in Tumbleweed. I like it for being on the bleeding edge and exceptionally stable at the same time, perhaps thanks to robust OpenSUSE Build Service automated testing. And it is from a European company, that can’t hurt.

DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works on 19 Apr 16:13 next collapse

i use gentoo because i love the package manager and how in control i am of my desktop and for servers even though not linux ive been using open bsd because of secure it is and lightweight helps squeeze out little bit more performance from mt shit vps lol

737@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Apr 16:39 next collapse

Arch and Fedora; package managers and repositories.

crmsnbleyd@sopuli.xyz on 19 Apr 16:40 next collapse

It’s Debian. It’s well-supported by software and super stable and open.

meh@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 19 Apr 17:01 next collapse

debain, with xfce if i need a desktop. mostly because i started on xubuntu. started learning sysadmin stuff when all i could afford was a potato with salvaged computer components shoved in it. xfce considered that excessively over powered. ended up loving the way i set up my xfce env, and probably wont change it much over the next 20yrs because theres no need. so when cononical got extra gross it was easy to just move to debian and carry on with my life.

Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works on 19 Apr 17:05 next collapse

I currently use Bazzite on my old laptop, just wanted to try out immutable distros and I like to stream games from my rig to it sometimes so completely functional steam was a nice addition. Plus learning about flatpaks and app images over installed packages has been interesting.

Then on my servers Debian/Proxmox and usually Ubuntu server in LXCs for more updated APTs then Debian, though I mostly run docker for my web apps rather then native APTs.

I work for a company that has a java program that functions on Linux but is nowhere near the level of support provided for mac/Windows, so I’m the Linux guy for our dept and when a customer is running into issues on a distro I’ll spin up a vm on my homelab and see if I can rum through an install and get it functional.

So far the only one I literally couldn’t get installed was Slackware lol I even figured out how to get it functional in ChromeOSes Linux subsystem.

jcr@jlai.lu on 19 Apr 17:14 next collapse

Using void linux because it has no systemd init system (it uses its own “runit” init system) ; and it is a natutal development after using Debian for a long time and wanting to understand more about gnu/linux system.

Also, it is very reliable with a lot of packages. It is standard enough so using info from arch, debian or other distro works.

But the origin was I could not understand how systemd was managing the system and it felt really contrived to go around it, so I began using void and that’s the story.

davidagain@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 17:50 next collapse

Why do you use the distro you use?

People said Ubuntu is easy, but I prefer green to orange so I went with Mint.

qaz@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 18:17 next collapse

I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it focuses more on KDE than GNOME, is quite stable, and has snapshots to roll back to in case something does go wrong. I don’t want to mess with my OS, I just want it to work reliably. I do use Debian on some devices (like my server) but the software (especially in terms of GUI apps) is very outdated and it doesn’t come with the other features of OpenSUSE out of the box.

WQMan@lemm.ee on 19 Apr 18:20 next collapse

EndeavorOS;

Gives the benefit of having latest up-to-date packages for gaming, while negating the downsides of having to configure the OS or graphics driver upon installation.

Honestly, if think EndeavorOS comes with full UI support to download stuff from AUR and Flathub, I think it would become a pretty solid OS for any casual user looking to get into Linux. (Well, unless they are religiously against Arch. Then again your casual user probably don’t even know what ‘Arch’ is or care enough to be religious about it.)


Also yea, usually you run Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable on servers unless your company paid for some licensing.

uberstar@lemmy.ml on 19 Apr 19:04 collapse

Fellow EndeavorOS enjoyer here, I love the hand-holding it does for you at the beginning (calamares installer, pick whichever DE that tickles your fancy, access to AUR and other goodies by default), but then basically beyond that point, you’re on your own. The fact that it’s Arch based also means that 9.99 times out of 10, you can always consult the Arch Wiki for any issues.

It’s like an Arch Linux starter pack that gives you the option to take off the training wheels at any time lol.

peterg75@discuss.online on 19 Apr 18:39 next collapse

Manjaro, because Arch-based, rolling release, but with a dev test cycle to try to eliminate breaking patches.

Shanmugha@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 18:41 next collapse

Arch, moved here from Ubuntu when I realized I have a good idea of what I want installed and have no need for a bunch of things to get bundled into the OS

Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de on 19 Apr 18:45 next collapse

I wanted a mainstream option but not Ubuntu, and one that was preferably offered with KDE Plasma pre-packaged.

So I ended up deciding between Debian and Fedora, and what tipped me to Fedora was thinking: Well SELinux sounds neat, quite close to what I learned about Mandatory Access Control in the lectures, and besides, maybe it will be useful in my work knowing one that is close to RHEL.

Now I work in a network team that has been using Debian for 30 years, lol. Kind of ironic, but I don’t regret it, now I just know both.

And fighting SELinux was kind of fun too. I modified my local policies so that systemd can run screen because I wanted to create a Minecraft service to which I could connect as admin, even if it was started by systemd.

gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 19 Apr 19:05 next collapse

Mint CE for my desktop (might distro hop soon for multiple curiosity based reasons, all my data is on non-os drives anyway) - easiest to just get working when fast-swapping, IMO

Debian for my server - it’s the flavor of Linux I’m most familiar with over the years & for my server I dont need any of the shit Ubuntu does

STEAM OS for my Steam Deck (I use it as a TV PC so desktop mode is common with it), because it’s really good for that purpose

brax@sh.itjust.works on 19 Apr 19:27 next collapse

I jumped from Ubuntu over to Arch because I was getting fed up with all the things I wanted to do being unavailable in Ubuntu, but all in the Arch repo or AUR.

I’ve been using Debian-based distros for like 25 years, so it was definitely a bit of a change, but it didn’t take long to adjust. I’m glad I made the change.

HipsterTenZero@dormi.zone on 19 Apr 20:55 next collapse

A bunch of nerds on lemmy suggested it and I haven’t found any problems with it that make me want to go for another. I use Fedora KDE

A7thStone@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 21:16 next collapse

I was given a CD set for SUSE 8.2, then bought the 9.0 book set from a book store because I liked it but wanted the hard copy to reference when I was messing things up. I’ve tried a ton of other distros, but keep going back to Suse because I’m used to it.

[deleted] on 19 Apr 21:43 next collapse

.

analoghobbyist@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 23:25 next collapse

I’m relatively new to Linux, so I’m testing a few distros via VMs right now. My main desktop runs OpenSUSE Leap with KDE Plasma and I love it so far. I’m also trying Fedora 42 with GNOME, but I’m realizing I don’t like GNOME. I’m running Linux Mint Cinnamon on a 2016 MacBook Pro, which is pretty nice too. I also ran Debian stable for a bit. OpenSUSE is my favorite of the ones I’ve tried.

monovergent@lemmy.ml on 20 Apr 00:33 next collapse

Debian stable:

  • Works on all of my devices, none of which are newer than 2019
  • Compatibility with all of the software that I use day to day
  • I like my system set up in a very particular way and the stability makes upkeep simple
  • I was a holdout on older Windows versions before I moved to Linux, so getting new features at all is already exciting
nullpotential@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 20 Apr 05:06 next collapse

Arch has a combination of great documentation and great packaging. I use Debian on a server but for daily use, everything I need is on Arch.

midtsveen@lemmy.wtf on 25 Apr 14:24 collapse

I have been using Linux since early March 2020. I chose Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions for two main reasons: stability and my strong familiarity with the APT package manager. The APT man page is deeply ingrained in my memory.

Today I run Debian Stable/Testing and also Unstable, on all my computers 4/4 on Debian!