wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned, so I’m keeping windows for it specifically.) this’ll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn’t love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.
and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you’ve tried but didn’t like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I’ve seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.
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I’m on Pop_OS and really like it. I chose it because i have a 2080, so the nvidia specific package is great for me. No WiFi issues, but I almost always have it hard wired, so not much chance to have it go wrong
My first distrobution was the good old Ubuntu for a laptop that I used for school. I stuck with that for 2-3 years. During that time I really, really wanted to try out new distros, but I didn’t want to lose my files and such, so I just stuck with it. During this time I also changed my desktop’s os to Ubuntu, but I am not sure when I did it.
After I got a Laptop due to the previous being old and broken, I tried out Arch Linux and grew to love it more than Ubuntu, so I changed out my desktop’s os to that as well when I got a new ssd and was migrating to it. I used Arch for another year or two, before my laptop had a disk failure and I had to reinstall. I installed Debian onto it, since I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to go through the mess of installing Arch again. And then later I also installed Windows on it with dualboot for games that didn’t want to work with Proton.
So basically I now use Arch on the desktop and Debian/Windows on laptop.
I have a few machines, which run:
- Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it’s fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it’s 2004.
- openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
- Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
- FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I’d give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
- Gentoo (WIP) - I’m just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
- crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.
Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.
Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.
The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.
Debian, Mint, Arch (by the way).
Had Ubuntu as my main driver for about 2 years but didn’t like Gnome and had more trouble with an Nvidia card than on Mint or Arch.
Fedora is top of my to-try-list but I’m not a distro-hopper, so who knows when I’ll have a use case.
Linux mint it just works.
slackware
Debian on servers, EndeavourOS on general PC (mainly because the aur is so good)
I run Fedora on my gaming PC (KDE) and my ThinkPad (GNOME/Hyprland). It’s a rock-solid distro. Some may think the release cycle is too fast, but then just don’t upgrade right away.
Distrohopping is an addiction for me. As soon as I get settled, I’m ready to bounce. I want my gaming PC to stay where it is, but I might hop my ThinkPad around. Maybe. Fedora on it is fantastic.
Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.
this is actually what I’m going to be giving a go! I have very little experience (I have servers that run Debian and DietPi, but I get help with those) with linux but I’m really excited to give the KDE version a try. and I’ve been trying to learn, too, because also my partner is going to be moving to a dual boot setup as well. been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot too, especially while my desktop is out of commission.
do you find that anything is missing in Bazzite for you?
I really like KDE. As a long time Windows user, it feels so much more natural than Gnome.
The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.
The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.
I just installed Bazzite over the weekend on my main computer. It’s definitely not the smooth experience that Windows is, but I’m hoping I can get used to it and keep using it.
It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!
NixOS on my Laptop, Desktop, Gaming Machine, and around 10 servers.
Still have two servers on Arch, waiting to be migrated, and I’m really itching to but NixOS on the Steam Deck as well.
Slackware
Hey I want to try out slackware real bad (for my own, religious reasons. Praise “Bob”).
So anyway I was wondering, I’ve heard it’s more difficult than your average distro, mainly in the sense that dependencies are not managed by a package manager like the dnf I’m used to, but then I’ve also heard they have tools for that now. Before I try it out I’d like to ask a few people like yourself how they manage dependencies, and if there are any other tips you’d like to share.
Slackware was my first real distro (many moons ago), glad to see people still enjoy it.
Gentoo
Kinoite has my heart forever
Arch KDE and SteamOS.
Debian stable on Thinkpad 1 and Debian testing on Thinkpad 2. Testing is nice because Gnome is a slightly better version. Stable is nice because it doesn’t bother me about updates.
What don’t you like about gnome?
I didn’t particularly like the layout styling in Pop!_OS and being so new to linux, I didn’t know how much I could change aesthetics wise. KDE looks more appealing to me, I don’t know if it’s because it looks like windows, but that might be a factor? it’s the default on the distro I wanna give a try (Bazzite) which also has nudged me in that direction.
I wasn’t expecting so many people to have used Debian for things other than servers. I have it on a server myself, but I decided I needed something more set up for gaming already on my desktop. what led you to Debian specifically? the stability?
Pretty much. I used mint for a while, then Ubuntu, upgrading every October and April. Then I tried Debian on a laptop I didn’t want to update often, and realized it’s not really missing anything that Ubuntu has.
Although I think the main thing that lead me to Debian was some issue with snap that I was having
