Been on Debian for the better part of a decade. Won’t be changing anytime soon.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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Debiaaaaan. I used Arch at first but it changed too much and broke things too frequently for my liking. With Debian I don't really care about whatever I'm missing out on but it's stable as hell which means it does exactly what I expect it to do, every time.
EndeavourOS (arch BTW)
By the way...
Fedora, the KDE spin.
How is the initial setup? I remember there being codec drama which put me off trying it.
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mint but i had to update the kernel to get some games to work, it was a little intimidating but i ended up getting it to work just by googling and following what other people did in forums
apparently mint is more for ease of use and stability, and less about being cutting edge
mostly debian
I think I went Ubuntu > Xubuntu > Mint > Lubuntu > Kubuntu > Arch (LXQt) > Arch (DWM)
Mint was great as a relatively new linux user. LXQt is fantastic on old hardware. After KDE I really wanted to try a tiling window manager, really enjoying it so far.
Bazzite on main PC because it just works and I don't want to mess around with nvidia drivers.
Almalinux for home server and anything I need to spin up short term.
Nobara KDE spin on my desktop endeavorOS on my laptop but might switch to vanilla arch on there soon
I have two devices, one runs Arch and the other runs Gentoo. Arch because I got used to it a while ago and really like the flexibility, and Gentoo because I took it as a challenge and ended up liking it.
CachyOS btw.
Just slap proxmox on it and use them all
Ubuntu
Ubuntu LTS on server
NixOS
Declarative configuration is so good
I like the idea of NixOS but didn't like how it worked in practice. The custom language for configurations was annoying, the errors it spat out never made sense to me, I couldn't run binaries compiled for a regular linux distro, docker didn't seem to work properly, some stuff needs to be setup in a shell.nix file instead of the global configuration file for some reason. I would probably get the hang of it eventually but I just couldn't be bothered, the annoying shit outweighs any potential benefits tbh.
Yea, the custom lang was annoying, got used to it, but like, why not just take something already made instead of making yet-another-language.
I luckily rarely have to run binaries, but when I do, I chuck the games into lutris, and non games something like steam-run.
Not sure about shell.nix, too vague to talk about. I will say though, that I found direnv + lorri + shell.nix (or flake.nix) very useful, lets me cd into a dir and all the packages needed for that project are available, without having to install them globally, other people will also benefit from this if shell.nix and .envrc are checked in to git.
I would probably get the hang of it eventually but I just couldn't be bothered, the annoying shit outweighs any potential benefits tbh.
Yup. I didn't have too many annoying problems for it to outweigh the benefits. I also have a server, so that weighs on benefits.
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Guix, but it's not for linux newbies I think. Although it's completely libre, too much in fact, it didn't have some drivers I need for my laptop so I needed to non-libre it a bit...
Debian is very beginner friendly and very stable, but stable means the software is pretty old compared to other distros. Security updates are timely and everything no trouble on that front, but often I wondered why some app didn't have some feature only to find out it does, for over a year in fact, but the version implementing it hadn't made it through Debians QA yet.
I think it's a really good place to start, but if you find it "lacking" you may want to look into alternatives.
Also remember you can multi-boot, so you can try different distros, or set up a virtual machine to testdrive some distro. It's not terribly difficult but does require some time.
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Zorin, because it's very slim for my shit ass laptop. To be honest, it gives me grief sometimes, and I thought about switching until the other day when I needed to turn my laptop into a router, and it only took me about 2 clicks, because it was built into the network manager.
i usually just use debian but im lazy lately so i started using mx (debian with some convenience tools), no complaints
For servers, I'm a CentOS refugee who is stuck with Oracle Linux (*shudder*) because of work reasons, and because I didn't want to get in on the whole Rocky/Alma diaspora. For desktop, I still like Fedora, and for WSL, I think I'm running Ubuntu because fuck it, why not. Fedora was my daily driver for my work machine at my previous job; GNOME on Wayland was buggy as shit back then, but it was still a step up from Windows 10 randomly installing updates and rebooting my machine because I got up to get coffee or to pee. It also helped not having to fuck around with Cygwin to use rsync and scp from my dev workstation.
Debian on my desktop. Fedora on my laptop.
Fedora on my laptop, I switched because I wanted to use the Plasma cube but I think I ended up getting GNOME, which works well enough so I don't mind.
I put Mint on an old laptop for my kids. The laptop is so old windows stopped supporting WiFi drivers for it, but it could connect to the internet with Mint out of the box.
And I've got an old Dell off a guy I put Debian on. I went with xfce so it uses less than a gig ram at idle and I plan to use it as a server once I can figure out docker
NixOS
KDE Neon but I might move to fedora or ~~KDE Neon~~ Tuxedo OS eventually
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Alpine. It’s pretty lovely, but usually when I’m setting something up for someone else it’s either Debian or Fedora.
I've been using Linux as my daily driver for over a decade and after distro hopping for a few years, I finally settled on Linux Mint because for what it's worth, it just works. It's pretty close to a Windows environment, it's built on top of apt, and it's got good driver support for Nvidia. It comes with mostly useful default software and Nemo is a good file browser.
Haven't used it on the desktop since forever. On servers I use a mix of AlmaLinux and Ubuntu.
Arch, but I don't really use desktop linux very much. On servers I usually run debian
Arch, btw. And Guix. And Fedora. And Debian. And some more.
Almost every computing device I own runs Linux.
Fedora Asahi Remix with Guix Home which I moved a lot of my configurations and software to for my laptop. Proxmox + Debian + Docker for my server, I have a few things on a Guix System VM but haven't had time to move anything else nor have I started it up in a while.