Which one(s) and why?
Either Debian or Fedora + flatpak & KDE. I’m familiar with both and they just work for me. Distrohopping and messing around with my computer feels like a chore more than anything else these days.
EndeavourOS. I like the simplicity and minimalism of stock Arch, bloated distros bother me. I have been thinking of trying out Linux Mint again though, I used it for years and it was really good.
EndeavourOS is way too opinionated on i3 for my liking, and the theme is not great. Still it is very stable and offers a reasonable out of the box arch experience.
Do they customize it too heavily away from its defaults? I use KDE so I don’t bump in to that issue myself.
Not sure about KDE. On i3 they have it customized a lot and there’s some things I don’t like: when opening a terminal it will always open in a workspace assigned, by them, for terminals. The same with file manager windows, browsers, et al. I find it to be extremely irritating
Oh yeah, I get what you mean. There were a few tweaks like that in the KDE file manager too. Dolphin would open with a lot of extra features running like a terminal at the bottom of the window and extra information panes on the sides. They were all normal dolphin features that were just toggled on by default, so I was able to get back to a cleaner experience with a few clicks, but it sounds like that may be their MO: turn on ‘helpful’ features in the user space by default. That was the only app that had non - default settings in KDE that I found, it sounds like it’s not as customized as i3.
This is precisely where I am at. Endeavor for when I need a newer kernel and Mint for when I want something that just dang works without too much config and driver work. I suggest Mint to friends but love having AUR and yay.
The just dang works part of Mint is so nice. I do like learning and tinkering, but I have to say setting up my printer in endeavourOS was brutal! I had all the right software installed, but it ended up needing a single line of code pasted in to a file I never would have guessed on my own. I’ll paste the info here on the slight chance it will save anyone else from the trauma I went through 😅
Reference article: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi
2.1 Hostname resolution
Avahi provides local hostname resolution using a “hostname.local” naming scheme. To enable it, install the nss-mdns package and start/enable avahi-daemon.service. use sudo instead of doas if that’s the tool you prefer.doas systemctl start avahi-daemon.serviceThen, edit the file
/etc/nsswitch.confand change the hosts line to includemdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]before resolve and dns. It should look like:hosts: mymachines mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] files myhostname dns
Fedora
Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, Suse, Gentoo, Sourcemage, etc…
I’ve settled for Manjaro 6 years ago and never saw a reason to change. I’m also super happy with Debian on my server.
Don’t see Sourcemage mentioned very often. I was a Lunar Linux user for a very long time. I wish they had binary’s. Really awesome distros they are.
Give OpenSuSe Tumbleweed a go. I found it to be a more adult version of Arch with their build system instead of AUR.
Right now I am using Debian as well for my servers/workstation.
Mandrake > Ubuntu > Debian > Mint > Arch > Artix
Settled on Artix for openrc and all the aur goodness
Oh I forgot about Mandrake. I did dabble with that a little bit back in the day.
It was before I had a CD writer (or DVD drive!), and it came with Linux Format magazine. I think it was the easiest and most user friendly way of getting started at the time.
Xubuntu… It’s light weight and pretty much everything is kind of Debian or kind of redhat anyway…
The charm of rolling my own died off when I got old enough to buy better hardware if I wanted to go faster…
Bodhi Linux (when trying out on a 32 bit laptop) -> Xubuntu (main laptop) -> Linux mint (the distro I’ve used for the longest time, both on main laptop and a desktop got along the way). On the side, I briefly tried Arch first on a wm (as well as Haiku and TempleOS), and later, debian on that 32 bit laptop for earlier. That’s when I first went for a minimal install with i3. Later switched to Arch with i3 on tower, and just yesterday, Debian, also with i3 on main laptop.
My reasoning behind using these two different distros for essentially the same type of setup is that my laptop is more likely to be the only computer I have at my disposal when I urgently need it, so stability is more important, I can’t run the risk of having an update break it. I can be bolder and test more stuff on my desktop knowing I have a backup if mess up. Arch on my desktop is also partly because I use it to play games on Steam, and since SteamOS is based on Arch, I figured it’d have better integration.
Proxmox; you continue distrohopping but with less issues
How are you using it on your desktop?
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I don’t have a normal desktop flow, most of the time I’m just rdp’ing to Linux from other different machines/tablets. I used to have a native Ubuntu install with a lot of dockers and my programming job. Now I have a vm for the dockers, and a vm for work. But I’ve notice that I still like to distrohop and I’m continuously just downloading new distros to test. Just the vm is more convenient, and after some time you forgot they are virtual because everything works.
Arch linux. Minimal install, hyprland. $ROOTSYS* set to ro, ~/.cache and ~/Downloads to tmpfs. alsa, bemenu, wine-staging, lutris. Couldn’t be happier.
What does setting fstab do there?
Eh, did a little “oopsie” there, my bad.
Well what does setting it to ro do?
Fedora and I can’t point down a specific reason other than it kinda just works. Their jank, because every distro has some time of “jank”, feel more reasonable than other distros jank.
Mandrake > Debian > Ubuntu > Mint & Arco Linux & MX Linux.
These three distros are the chosen ones in my case. I’ve been using them in my main computers for a couple of years now. It’s the right mixture.
SuSE Linux (a German distribution), some niche, single CD distrubution, Debian for a while and, finally, since ~2006, Gentoo on my servers and since ~2015 Gentoo as my desktop.
Debian and its derivatives never felt right for me. I find too many drawbacks with binary packages (non-configurable build options, therefore dependencies that can’t be disabled, relying on humans to keep ABI compatiblity, trouble integrating my own packages or unstable versions) and I just don’t like systemd.
It’s weird, I’ve seen more than enough of those “Install Gentoo” memes, but I find it the most pleasant system to run in the long term.
I always preferred gentoos layouts over everyone else’s. I was a long time Sabayon user so other side of the house. Interested in trying out the Gentoo Binary’s here soonish
I’m probably going to stick with Arch, or maybe EndeavourOS.
I’ve hopped from distro to distro but I always keep coming back to Arch. The reason I use Arch is that it’s my weird sweet spot of “DIY” and “it just works”. It gives me a blank slate at first, but it lets me paint the canvas with whatever I want, however I want. It allows for some weird setups (like VFIO, for instance) and the wiki really helps with that. I don’t really use the AUR nowadays unless it’s for a package only available there, so I can’t say anything about that. I use Flatpak nowadays. Some people might prefer the AUR, that’s good for them! Right now it’s just not for me.
If I do distro-hop again, I’ll probably go for EndeavourOS just to have an Arch install that leans heavier on the “just works” side of things.
Debian, because it is boring, predictable, and I know how to tweak it to suit my use case
Arch. Or, rather EndeavourOS. I’ve lived with several distros (daily driver desktops, laptops, servers) for years: debian, Ubuntu, Gobo, gentoo, Redhat, CentOS, Arch, Artix, and EndeavourOS. Redhat was my least favorite, and EndeavourOS probably my most.
I’m currently running Endeavour on my desktop, Artix on my laptop, and vanilla Arch on several servers and ancillary devices. All of the Arches are basically the same day-to-day, except Artix; Artix is the lightest, but also the most work, and I probably wouldn’t choose it again.
I like Arch because - for me - it’s been stable and pain-free from dependency-hell, of which Redhat distros were the worst. I will not go back to any point release distro - rolling release has been so much better for me. The Arch wiki is the best source of Linux information on the internet, and the AUR has almost everything in it, and is easy to contribute to. PKGBUILDs are easy to write; it’s hardly any more work to put one together to install something and have it managed by the package manager, than to not.
I’m interested in playing more with some of the source-based distros like void, alpine, tinycore, venom, and kiss; my experience with gentoo leads me to believe I won’t be happy with any as daily drivers.
However, I’m very interested in Chimera.
