yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.
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- Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it’s snappy, reliable, and I don’t need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
- Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it’s still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop… I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.
edit: typos
I wonder what you will think of lmde its linux mint with a debian base instead of ubuntu (It keeps some stuff for eg the desktop updated).
LMDE is snappy as hell and stable as a rock
Never tried lmde but love to try it if cachyos started breaking down.
I’ve seen lmde mentioned on Mint website but if I recall correctly they also presented it like a somewhat experimental version?
I remember there was only lmde 6 with download to 32bit and 64bit
Arch.
Because of pacman. Building and writing packages is simple and dependencies are slim. Also packages are recent. And most likely “there is an AUR package for that”. Also stack transitions arrive early, like pipewire.
Also let’s not forget Arch Wiki, i bet you have read it as a non Arch user.
I administer Arch on 8 machines including gaming rigs, home server, web server, kids laptop, wifes gaming desktop, audio workstation and machine learning rig and a bunch of dev laptops. I also use ArchARM on RPi for some home automation.
Never considered switching since I switched from Ubuntu over 15 years ago.
I do have experience with several other rpm and apt based distros.
Different distros for different uses:
- Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
- Nobara for my main gaming PC.
- Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
- Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.
- Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
- Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
- It’s been around for many years and will be around for many more
- I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can’t resist the software selection available on Debian
Debian. Because it’s the best about “Just Works” (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.
BUT I’m also not a “numbers go up” geek. I don’t give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that’s just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).
If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.
(/soapbox)
My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don’t play the latest games anyway, I’m a PatientGamer, and I don’t do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.
It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don’t have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).
It all works fine, but one day I’ll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs
Arch with KDE on ThinkPad T460s (studying and bullshit pc).
Nobara with i3wm on home studio/gaming desktop. Switching to Arch on it one day but CBA at the moment.
Honestly which distro I use isn’t all that important to me these days so long as I’m getting decently new kernel updates. Depending on my use case that’s not even important. Used Debian LTS on a home media center for probably 8 years.
I’m currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.
I’m really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:
- There actually aren’t that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won’t hesitate to say “BTW I use arch” were as others don’t really bother.
- There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say “BTW I use arch”
- (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it’s because it’s actually a good distro that people like.
(This is mostly a joke jsyk I’m sure arch is a great distro)
In my experience, the only quirk of arch is its installation.
pacmanand the AUR are great and I really did not have any issues with stability. First time I tried arch I used a tiling window manager, custom menu bars and all that “hackerman” stuff, which was not stable at all and forced me to reconfigure and tweak my machine all day every day. Now I am using a full blown Gnome desktop environment and it is rock stable. My only wish is to have an/etcdirectory just like Intel Clear Linux.
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I used to use Arch btw.
Now I am on Nix, I just love shell.nix files. I haven’t spent much time on my configs yet, but once I finish them, they’ll be super easy to set up again, thats cool.
2 flavors of Fedora with KDE on it:
- Aurora-DX for some dev work on the side. Once you get used to distroboxing / devcontainers, it’s rock-solid and mean dev environment (saw some minor issues with how certain GUI apps were scaled, but that’s about it).
- Nobara for gaming (tried Bazzite and it’d prolly work for that purpose as well).
Unfortunately, had to keep Windows on one other machine (fuck you KORG for not providing anything working on Linux), but that’s limited to being a glorified music player now 😄
Idk if you can get korg working on wine.
Currently, Arch btw. I was on Ubuntu in the 12* days, but arch wiki had the solutions to every problem I encountered, so naturally migrated. I want to switch to NixOS but ran into some issues getting my finicky nvidia/amdgpu laptop to work. I might go blendOS as a holdover, it seems like a good mix of the two. Also I have some issues with Manjaro (tried for a while) but pamac cli at least handles all of my aur and pacman needs properly.
NixOS because it’s the only usable stab at sustainable system configuration.
this but since Nix is licensed with MIT and deals with weapon manufacturers, i had to go
GUIX!!!, it is everything
While I do get your sentiment, we currently see in Ukraine what happens if you don’t have a defense industry: You’re reliant on other countries to supply you in case a hostile nation notices that you’re lacking it.
All that follows is my personal opinion, but for ease of writing, I’m gonna present it as facts.
Once you have grasped the advantage that Nix offers, all the fundamentally different solutions just seem s o inferior. When I first tried NixOS on a decommissioned notebook, the concept immediately made sense. Granted, I didn’t understand the language features very well – I mostly used it for static configuration with most stuff just written verbatim in
configuration.nix, though I did use flakes very early on because of Lanzaboote. But just the fact that you had a central configuration in a single language that was able to cross-reference itself across different parts of the system absolutely blew me out of the water. I was a very happy and content Arch user, even proficient enough to run my own online repository that built from a clean chroot for AUR packages (if you use Arch with AUR packages on multiple systems, check out the awesome aurutils!), but after seeing the power of NixOS in action, I switched over all my machines as soon as I could - desktop, virtual servers (thanks nixos-anywhere!), main notebook and NAS.People often praise the BSDs for their integrated approach – NixOS manages to bring that approach to Linux. Apart from GUIX System that I never tried because Secure Boot was a requirement when I last looked at other distributions, none of them have tackled the problem that NixOS solves, and it’s not even certain if they actually understand it. Conceptually, it plays on a whole different level. No more unrecoverable systems, even with broken kernels – just boot the previous configuration. Want to try changes without any commitment?
nixos-rebuild testgot you. Need an app quick?nix shell nixpkgs#appit is.Plus the ecosystem is just fantastic. The aforementioned
nixos-anywherereally helps with remote provisioning, usingdiskoto declaratively setup filesystems and mounts, you havedevenvwhich is a really good solution for development environments, both regarding reproducibility and features, and many more that I can’t mention here. There is nothing comparable, and the possibilities are unlike in any other ecosystem.It’s not perfect for sure though, and documentation is sparse. The language concepts which allow one to “unlock” the most powerful features are different from what most people know.
I was lucky enough to have some downtime at work to get into the system a bit deeper (this was still for work though, just not my core skillset) by implementing a “framework” for our needs which forced me to not just copy and paste stuff, though I definitely did get inspired from other solutions, but to actually better understand the module system (I think?), thinking in attribute sets, writing your own actual modules, function library and so on. But in the end, it was definitely worth it, and I’m unaware of any other system that would allow what Nix and NixOS allowed me to build.
100%. Took me a good year to learn it well enough to be confident with what I was doing but I’ve now got it on everything with a single flake for all my hosts. I love that my user profile is configured the same everywhere. I can add a new tool or config or alias or whatever and it’s the same on every computer.
I’ve now written a module to define all the services I self host and from that it generates both nginx config and DNS config on different hosts.
The main advantage for me though is I only have to solve problems once. Once it’s there in the config I’m confident it’s solved and I won’t need to worry about it again. My previous server was 10 years old and there was stuff configured I’d long forgotten about how it worked or even why I did it.
Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.
I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it’s what I’m comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to “just work” most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.
Ubuntu server is primarily because it’s incredibly easy to get support when you need it.
yeah i love linux mint just works
What distro do you use
I daily drive secureblue.
and why?
Long story short; I love me some security. Unfortunately, My device is far from ideal for running Qubes OS. From within the remaining options, secureblue comes out on top for me.
No Void here?
Oh well… I surely don’t use it because it’s popular…
- Runit
- Pkg manager
- KISS
- Up to date / rolling distro
- But stable
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I was thinking the same thing, but I don’t like void because it doesn’t have every package I want And they only offer old or extremely specific ones.
I went into void as my first DIY distro, mainly because I wanted to mess around with window managers and it was a very good experience. Runit made my underpowered laptop boot into linux in like 4 seconds, crazy fast. XBPS package manager was always really really fast too. I like the fact that nearly everything you need is in the official repo, instead of having to delve into the depths of something like the AUR. I also managed to make a contribution to the repos with the help of the community on the IRC chat rooms which were very noob friendly. Overall just a solid experience.
