yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.
Bazzite for personal stuff because it looked neat and just worked after installation with a small learning curve. Due to interia I went with bluefin on the work computer for the same reasons
Artix because I love Arch and the AUR but networkd kept causing my home network to act like the mad hatter’s tea party with IP assignment.
I use Ubuntu because it’s the most popular and well-supported.
I’m going to be switching to Mint at some point because it’s basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don’t trust Canonical anymore, but it’s hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I’ve been using Ubuntu since 2017.
I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I’m going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.
Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it’s easy.
Arch with KDE on ThinkPad T460s (studying and bullshit pc).
Nobara with i3wm on home studio/gaming desktop. Switching to Arch on it one day but CBA at the moment.
Honestly which distro I use isn’t all that important to me these days so long as I’m getting decently new kernel updates. Depending on my use case that’s not even important. Used Debian LTS on a home media center for probably 8 years.
I use Debian. The current release has pretty up to date software. It’s super easy to install ( I don’t have as much time to fuck around with my OS as I used to). And it’s stable as fuck.
Debian. Used to use others but realized they all just added crap I didn’t want, or could add myself with a simple script.
I was a Slackware then Fedora, then Ubuntu as my daily drivers (whipe trying other distros, or Kali for specific purposes) before settling here.
PCLinuxOS.
Stable and rolling for regular people OS.
Heard that distro while looking into wikipedia.
Alpine:
- Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
- Extremely lightweight
- Very customizable
- After setting it up I find that it works very well
- Decently sized repo
- OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)
I wonder how hard is it to download apps on Glibc-free systems, On Systemd-free systems ik there is Flatpack and stuff , asking this bcs many apps on Linux only work on Glibc.
I personally haven’t ran into any yet, tbh I have more issues with SystemD dependent apps (Also keep in mind Alpine packages and maintains apps in their repo so they don’t require GLIBs/SystemD)
Ohh, so only open source apps and closed source apps that work on non glibc/systemd then ig
I managed to get Steam working with some work, heroic games launcher worked with no extra effort, and everything in the repo is good (Alpine is independent)
Is that usable for regular Joe or enthusiast grade?
I wouldnt call it enthusiast grade, every day usage is easy but installation can be tough (it gives you a barebones system).
Then that is not for me yet.
2 flavors of Fedora with KDE on it:
- Aurora-DX for some dev work on the side. Once you get used to distroboxing / devcontainers, it’s rock-solid and mean dev environment (saw some minor issues with how certain GUI apps were scaled, but that’s about it).
- Nobara for gaming (tried Bazzite and it’d prolly work for that purpose as well).
Unfortunately, had to keep Windows on one other machine (fuck you KORG for not providing anything working on Linux), but that’s limited to being a glorified music player now 😄
Idk if you can get korg working on wine.
Mint, first one I tried, and works just fine. It’s xfce with i3wm.
Different distros for different uses:
- Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
- Nobara for my main gaming PC.
- Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
- Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.
Began moving all my hardware to Linux this year since none of them will run win11 without fk-about-ing - and I just don’t want to. So my server, media box and laptop are all cut over, only my main desktop left on windows a bit longer but it’s goose is cooked too.
I’ve tried dozens of distros over the years but I’ve settled on Fedora KDE.
The why:
- Skipping x11 and head straight into Wayland so I don’t have to worry about that in the future.
- I wanted something more up to date than debian-based and less cutting edge then Arch-based.
- Stability and support of being in the RHEL family
- Flatpaks
- Tried to get on with gnome to get away from the ‘start menu’ paradigm but ended up getting on with kde better.
In my opinion skipping x11 Will make compatability worse.
I’m currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.
I’m really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:
- There actually aren’t that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won’t hesitate to say “BTW I use arch” were as others don’t really bother.
- There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say “BTW I use arch”
- (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it’s because it’s actually a good distro that people like.
(This is mostly a joke jsyk I’m sure arch is a great distro)
In my experience, the only quirk of arch is its installation.
pacmanand the AUR are great and I really did not have any issues with stability. First time I tried arch I used a tiling window manager, custom menu bars and all that “hackerman” stuff, which was not stable at all and forced me to reconfigure and tweak my machine all day every day. Now I am using a full blown Gnome desktop environment and it is rock stable. My only wish is to have an/etcdirectory just like Intel Clear Linux.
Primarily I use Arch on my desktop (and by proxy, my Steam Deck which runs SteamOS), which is what I’ve landed on after a ton of distro hopping. The idea of Atomic distros catches my eyes, but for me in its present state there are too many steps needed in order to make deeper changes (for example, installing a kernel module) - but I quite like SteamOS on my Deck since I know it will always be in a “consistent” state, for example.
On servers I run a mix of Rocky Linux and Debian.
