I’m very curious of which distro users loves the most that they have it on their daily hardware?
Mx
Vanilla Arch.
I use Arch for personal and gaming, Debian for self hosting and hacking, Alpine for containerized cloud deployments.
I use Arch for personal and gaming, Debian for self hosting and hacking, Alpine for containerized cloud deployments.
Pretty much the same for me: bleeding-edge Arch for my workstation, rock-stable Debian for my server.
If there were a universal answer to this, there wouldn’t be any others.
I myself currently use Debian (testing), have for some years now, but I have used other distros in the past too.
It’s alway weird to me that even though Ubuntu has the largest Linux desktop market share, no one admits to using it.
Anyway, I use Ubuntu because I was doing a lot of ROS development when I last built a machine, and getting ROS running properly on other distros can be a pain.
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Nobody has mentioned immutables yet?!
I finally dipped my toes into trying a new distro over the summer and have been really impressed with Project Bluefin. All the familiarity of Gnome for existing Ubuntu or Debian users but with a completely hands off rolling update experience.
The main drawbacks are the slight complexity of how the fuck to install stuff on an immutable system. In theory you use Homebrew for CLI apps and flatpak for GUI apps but I’m really not a fan of installing from sources other than the original dev.
Bazzite is immutable, it worked generally okay for me but I swapped back to mint because I had to use a smart card reader and getting it to work on an immutable was a royal pain
You can also run a distrobox and install stuff normally from whatever distro’s repos, then export the applications so they’re available like native. Works really seamlessly in my experience
Manjaro for my laptop, Mint for my HTPC, and Debian for my servers.
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Good to know! I was considering switching back to Debian or Mint, maybe LMDE. I’ll look further into it. Thanks for the tip!
LMDE is fucking fantastic
Try endeavoros and use flatpaks. That’s basically manjaro with the following differences:
- current with the aur
- doesn’t have a built in gui software installer
- no modifications-it’s basically just arch with the things you would have probably installed
I was thinking of switching away from Arch and back to something Debian-based. I’ve never been a big fan of flatpaks (I have a background of not having fast internet or much storage space, it’s just stuck with me) and I never used the AUR anyways.
I mainly tried Manjaro to try the bleeding-edge life, and while I do enjoy having more up-to-date packages, I do miss being able to install DEB packages. I think I might try Debian testing and see how that goes.
I’ve effectively gone that route of moving away from Arch to Debian and although it hasn’t been without some minor inconveniences from not having the most up to date software, I’ve been really happy with the change. I try to avoid flatpaks and for the most part have been successful, with like 2 or 3 exceptions so even if you’re not much of a fan, I’d wager you’d be fine for the most part without them.
Yeah, that’s my plan. I usually end up with a couple of flatpaks (or AppImages) for the things that I need up to date, but otherwise just go with most things from the repository.
OpenSuSE Tumbleweed is my current favourite. It’s user friendly with good system tools in Yast, it’s got good repos including community repos with lots of software.
Its also a rolling release but has been stable and reliable for me. Leap is their point release version if rolling is not right for you.
I’ve been using Tumbleweed for over a year, and it’s my main OS since I stopped using windows. I’ve dual booted Linux for many years but always mained windows up until Tumbleweed.
Previously I used to use Mint; it’s decent but switching to Tumbleweed (and in particular KDE) convinced me to completely switch from Windows. Everything “just works”, and I do a fair bit of gaming without issue with nvidia drivers, steam, and lutris.
For example I’ve been playing Stardew, Cyberpunk 2077, Distant Worlds 2, and Factorio recently - all in Linux and all without issue.
I use Gentoo and I love it. The installation process is a bit more complex than Arch but it doesn’t have to be if you choose the precompiled kernel.
The package management is extremely flexible and the community are great. I have a morning routine where I log onto my gentoo desktop before work and update everything; would compare it to raking one of those miniature buddhist sand gardens. Very theraputic!
Have got Debian on an old thinkpad too because it is too under resourced to compile everything. I think Debian is amazing for a solid, reliable distro if you have weak hardware.
Arch because I like getting the latest releases of packages
Yeah. It’s a pretty good linux distro for Beginners. It was my first distro tho. 😁
I’m sorry but it’s not great for beginners. It’s a rolling bleeding edge distro that does not break often but when it does you need to know how stuff works to fix it.
GNU Guix
Really depends on what you do and value. I use lots of kde software, so kde distros are my go to. then one big diffrence between distros is how they get updated. do you want the latest updates asap on the costs of stability, or do you want an effing never crashing distro but lag behind in updates a few months/years, or a middleground.
These are the two points i considered when i choose.
I started with Slackware in the nineties, have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed.
I could use anything really but these days my focus have moved; I kinda just want functional and well configured up front. Using Pop!_OS 24 alpha on my gaming/dev laptop, it works well/is well put together and I’m having fun writing COSMIC apps. I’m using Ubuntu on a few servers, I picked it many years ago and they’ve been through a number of painless upgrades.
Are you gaming on that comsic alpha?
Yeah, GuildWars2, Valheim, Pathfinder WotR, etc. those sort of games… So I’m a bit niche, some gamers have more issues than I.
I got a gnome-session installed for games that have problems with COSMIC but fortunately haven’t needed it for a while now.
LFS