I’d like to settle on a distro, but none of them seem to click for me. I want stability more than anything, but I also value having the latest updates (I know, kind of incompatible).
I have tested Pop!_Os, Arch Linux, Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu. Arch and Pop being the two that I enjoyed the most and seemed the most stable all along… I am somewhat interested in testing NixOS although the learning curve seems a bit steep and it’s holding me back a bit.
What are you using as your daily drive? Would you recommend it to another user? Why? Why not?
I’ve tried basically every reasonably maintained distribution, and keep coming back to Arch. It just feels right. And it just works right too. The package manager is excellent, and that is one of the things that makes or breaks any distribution for me. I also love that it comes with nothing, so you know what you get, and it’ll be setup how you want it. With other major distributions, I spend a considerable amount of time removing things first, which is something I just don’t want to do.
I’ve been trying out NixOS recently. I really appreciate what it is trying to do, but the complexity of nix-command is quite overwhelming
Arch Linux is my go-to distro because I can literally install it in half the time that it takes a lot of others. I also like that it is very lightweight.
Fedora. Mainly because I work at a RHEL shop and I want a daily driver that is somewhat similar to my work environment.
The recent RHEL drama hasn’t changed any of that?
Not really. As I understand it, RHEL is restricting access to the source code of proprietary things they developed. Does it go against open source principles? Sure. Does it make sense from a business perspective? Absolutely. I was actually surprised that this wasn’t the case before.
If I had to choose, I’d go with openSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s a solid distro overall. Arch, Debian and Mint are close though! I’ve been thinking to check out NixOS and Garuda for a while, but I haven’t had the time for that yet.
I have been a Linux user since the Red Hat Halloween release (back in the twentieth century) and have run SUSE, Slackware, Red Hat, Arch, Debian and countless of their forks. Currently I’m settled on Pop!_OS 22.04 NVIDIA for my daily driver laptop with a built-in Nvidia GPU. It is rock solid and can run my three displays, each with a different resolution and refresh rate, without ever missing a beat. For everything else I use Debian and most of my clients run either RHEL or Oracle SEL on their production servers.
TL;DR: Pop!_OS daily driver and Debian for everything else.
Arch has been my go to for almost 10 years now, and it was one of my favorites for 5 years prior. These days I rarely have any issues from updating. I have to use Ubuntu for work and I dread every distribution upgrade. I got lucky and the last one worked on my work laptop, but usually something stupid breaks.
I run arch on my laptop, my previous laptop, and my server. The install on my server is 7 years old now, and started life with an entirely different CPU brand. I won’t say I’ve never had to do any manual intervention, but the answer has been a Google search away pretty much every time.
I use Arch BTW
I’ve been using MX, formerly known as Mepis, for over 15 years now. It’s the most stable release I’ve ever used, and their repos are pretty up to date. The community is great also.
mint for my laptop running awesomewm and lightened it up a bit - To have a no-thrills always works never complaints machine.
fedora server edition plus awesomewm for my desktop
Manjaro - because everyone else seems to only be voting for Arch itself here. Manjaro is actually very stable, but I did sometimes have some trouble with AUR updates clashing. I like it because it stays relatively up to date and I don’t have to do any major reinstalls or upgrades. I’ve been on it for a few years and never have lost data or was not able to get it started (even if it did need a manual kick-start once or twice). Like any distro, over time you become savvy around what to use and what to avoid.
I thought we’re supposed to just mention what we’re using and why. Should we also tell others why they should not use what they’re using? That could start the distro wars all over again, just when we all became united in our differences ;-)
I use Manjaro only because it makes others upset.
Also, I installed it a few years back and it just keeps working fine for me.
draft - am I allowed to type “chromeos”
I mean you are allowed to, I just will have lots of questions, starting with Why, and moving on to no really why.
Debian and Mint are my favorites. I love the included games in Debian, the UI for both (Using cinnamon), and their ease of use.
The blue A-shaped logo distro just clicked for me. Don’t think I’ll ever get tempted to wander.
Arch for me, I use Aur as a crutch to avoid compiling and managing source projects, i love pacman and rolling releases, and it’s very easily customizable (ofc once you learn the system).
I wish I could have the AUR without the rolling release, or more realistically I use arch without utilitizing the rolling release. I’m on such shitty + spotty + capped at 100gb I only update my system once a month. Haven’t had problems though, so I guess im not complaining. Updating my windows VMs is significantly worse
If you are looking for stability with latest updates, then Gentoo. But I won’t recommend it to a distro hopper.
Besides than Arch and Mint are my general recommendation.
Debian is always my go-to. Is the users are coming from Windows I might say the DE to Cinnamon.
