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Debian on server, arch of some kind for personal use
Servers are all Debian. Family member's laptops are all Debian. I used Debian on my laptops for 20 years, but when Steam Deck switched to Arch, I switched my laptop to Arch to force me to learn it. I have a file with notes of differences between Debian and Arch. Next time I buy a new laptop, I will probably go back to Debian.
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arch on my two laptops, and desktop. proxmox on my server as the hypervisor, and debian on the vm/lxc. my routers are running openwrt.
one of my laptops i use for testing, and i do switch distro's.. i've tried alpine, gentoo and i'd like to try openbsd. but arch is comfy
Server: debian
Desktop: mint
Laptop: pop-os
Nanopi for travel Jellyfin: Debian.
Yep. Debian. I like apt, and I like shit that just....works. I'm very much a form after function kind of person. Plus, Debian was the first Linux distro I became most familiar with at a young age. So what if a bunch of packages are on "old" versions. They work. The kernel works. KDE Plasma works. I can do everything I want to do without having to constantly be on the bleeding edge. If you prefer newer things, that's great. I prefer older, more proven things. That's also why I drive Toyota cars and old Honda motorcycles.
My Proxmox cluster runs...uh...Proxmox, which is based on Debian. NAS runs OMV which also runs on top of Debian. Laptops all run Linux Mint Debian Edition 7, and my 5800X3D/7900XTX gaming PC runs LMDE6 (will be upgrading to 7 soon). The only non-Debian machines in my house are my wife's iMac and Macbook Pro, and the Home Assistant mini PC.
That’s the same philosophy I’ve applied for a long time. Recently, I found out that gaming is an exception to the rule, though. While older versions are just fine for the most part, there are edge cases where that no longer applies. I also found out that I care about one of them. Until you hit that brick wall, there’s no reason to switch. Just keep on using Debian for everything.
Took me a while to realise that I was spending way too much time figuring out workarounds instead of actually gaming. I ended up using Bazzite in my gaming rig because it works so well for that purpose.
I've yet to run into major issues with gaming. But I'm curious what issue you ran into that caused the switch to Bazzite? I actually tried Bazzite briefly on my latest laptop acquisition (HP Spectre x360) before going with LMDE 7; I didn't like the immutable aspect. I'm a tinkerer at heart and can't handle not being able to get under the hood, so to speak.
It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.
All the other games were just fine though. If you don’t stumble upon one of these edge cases, there’s no reason to switch.
Hmmm.
Under LMDE7, the HP Spectre does great with the games I've thrown at it so far (BeamNG.Drive, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Universe Simulator, Minecraft, etc), but despite exceeding the minimum specs, it really struggled with running anything in RPCS3. Stuttering, frame drops, graphics simply not loading, etc... I ended up writing off RPCS3 in general as "too heavy for a laptop" and tasked my desktop gaming PC as the dedicated PS3 emulator - works great.
Sounds like I might have to give Bazzite a shot again on the HP. I use that laptop for a lot of things, including diagnostics software for my cars, but I also have a perfectly-capable AMD Thinkpad T14 G1 hanging around that needs a purpose, too.
It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.
What was the actual issue you ran into though? I didn't see it in your post. I believe you, but my curiosity is piqued.
Yeah, that post was getting way too long, so I made some cuts here and there. The issue was in the way SE2 detects hardware... or more like doesn't detect my GPU at all, throws an error about it and refuses to start. Under Bazzite it starts the game first 🎉, then complains that my hardware might not be good enough to run this game 🤯, but the beautiful graphics say otherwise. It's still in early access, so I guess this kind of strange behavior will be ironed out sooner or later.
I got tired of researching this issue in Debian, so once I got it up and running in Bazzite, I stopped reading about it. Honestly, I have no idea what's the key difference here. Is it the driver version, Proton-GE or something else? Who knows.
Anyway, I would recommend trying Bazzite. It has some pre-configured tricks that seem to handle weird cases like this.
I just use Debian
Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it's perfect for everything.
What is the learning/on-boarding curve for this?
I ask because my home folder has a giant just file I use to script everything. I feel like I’m 80% there to just migrating.
It's a very steep curve to start, with some additional minor steep parts along the way, but it's not a long curve. Once you got the core concepts and the basic language constructs, you've learned most of what you'll ever need.
Two nice resources: search.nixos.org is super handy, and you can search GitHub with language:nix and a search term to get tons of examples from other people.
Oh, and nix and just is actually a pretty common combo!
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And it's very handy for this, I have the same config for all my devices (desktop, laptop and server). Enabling and disabling different modules depending on the host it's deployed to.
Yep, exactly.
To be fair, if you use Debian, Arch, Fedora,... long enough, you also know how to tweak your machine for every purpose. In Nix, it's just somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you have to know how to tweak your system to achieve.... anything, and then it's the same tweaking mechanics for every other purpose as well.
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I love how this post doesn't even pretend that anyone may use anything but Linux. Classic Lemmy.
Self-hosting on Windows Server is a pain I don't need in my life.
I don't see anyone here saying "actually I use BSD" so it seems to have been a safe assumption
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I've converted everything to NixOS (Desktop, laptop, nas and 3d printer, rpi with home assistant) only my router is still pfSense (and thus BSD). It just makes configuration and updating so much easier from one central configuration. And I don't have to remember what and how I installed something. It's just there in my flake.
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I use NixOS on everything ! This way, I can re-use parts of my configuration as a base, and customise only the few things that need to change from one machine to the other.
The only exception is my Steam Deck. I trust Valve on that one, and my usage of it is so different from other computers as to make 95% of my config entirely irrelevant anyway.
1 Fedora (laptop)
1 bazzite (old gaming desktop)
N+1 Debian on everything else than can
Fedora KDE for anything I need a GUI for, Debian for anything headless.
I've used damn near everything else in 30 years of Linux, but I'm pretty sure my tombstone will run Debian.
Yes. Mint. Way enough, and I haven't figured out why I should like disto hop yet.
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Fedora just works for me in every case except NAS where I have TrueNAS, so Fedora it is and I installed it even to couple of people and they also like it.
The machines I use regularly are all some form of ArchLinux (currently mostly CachyOS). Machines I use rarely I stick to LTS distros with few updates. Machines I don't maintain myself I try to stick to immutable distros that just update themselves every once in a while (less chance of breakage).
I do, but it's more out of laziness than anything else. I hate having to remember sixteen different ways of doing things, so I tend to configure all my stuff as identical as reasonably possible. Is this the best way of doing things? Probably not. But it keeps my blood pressure down.
Debian on my servers. No drama, it just works.
Fedora on my laptop and desktop. Still solid, but quicker updates.
I use Arch (btw) on my desktops and laptops.
On my servers I'm halfway through replacing Debian with openSUSE.
My desktop and servers have different use cases and I interact with them in different ways, so there's little confusion for me.
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Nah. Debian for servers, Fedora for desktops and Arch for funtimes.
Slackware on desktop, laptop and mini PC, Debian on anything smaller
NixOS home server, gaming PC will soon move to Bazzite from Windows 10 (whenever I'm done working on my home server). I'm trying Bazzite for that machine because I use it more like a game console hooked up to the TV and don't need the same level of tweaking and customization.
Yes, Debian. It's called the universal operating system for a reason.
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Yes, because nixos and distributed git-based dotfiles, would be so much work to have a second setup for no real gain, I do investigate other distros regularly though
Kind of.
Fedora on workstations. Debian on servers
No, Arch for laptops/desktops. Debian for servers.
I use arch btw (on everything).
So yes ... my laptop, my home server and even my wife's laptop.
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Debian always. Stablility is good, good is stability. But i am open to trying fedora in the near future
Thanks to hyprland, I've fallen in love with Arch. Sure it works on other distros, but the AUR is great for easy configuration. I'm running it on my container server, my laptop, my gaming rig, and my OneXPlayer(portable gaming rig). That said, I have been eyeing CachyOS because of the kernel optimization plus it seems easier to install.
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yes. Everything is Fedora Silverblue, except servers they are ubuntu on proxmox.
My hobby is gaming, linux is just a means to do that hobby, not a hobby itself.
For me, I am running EndeavourOS on my laptop (for its rolling release updates and its customisability) and Debian on my homeserver (for its stability). I have also set up a secondary laptop with Linux Mint that is now being used by somebody else for its ease of use :)
My main server runs Ubuntu Server (I'm thinking about switching it to Debian), and my laptop and desktop both run Arch Linux. Generally, I pick whatever I think is best for the given usecase — things like stability, package availability, documentation, security, etc. are considered.
I used to have Ubuntu everywhere, then changed to Debian for servers. Now that I'm using bazzite for my gaming rig, I really liked the idea and went to fedora silver blue on my work laptop. I'm the near future I want to re do my home lab, bit not sure yet what, unfortunately to many open questions concerning storage left.
yes, it's Arch all the way for me. it's flexible in the way that I can configure it for any system I need, and I usually know what I want from it.
my installations on my desktop and laptop look fairly similar, but my server and test computers can look different depending on the hardware specifications they have.
plus, with BTRFS snapshots, if anything breaks I can simply roll back to a previous version of the system.
Laptop arch
Web servers Debian or fedora.
Looking into slackware for self hosting
Every now and then I try something else (usually live usb from ventoy) just to see how others evolve. I like endevour, but I always en up with debian minimal install. Only on mylaptop I add xfce4. It's just rock solid. For my wife's laptop it's elementary, only because of the looks just to make her move from windows to linux painlessly
No, I've got nobara on my gaming rig, batocera on my wife's retro console that's just turned into a kodi device, and proxmox on my server
My main desktop is Mint - I feel like most of the random pieces of software I find myself wanting to run are built for Ubuntu or at the very least a lfh distro.
My server and random devices run NixOS, and I'm acrually considering combining all the config into a monorepo...
My Raspberry PI I think runs Raspbian though. I should see if I can nixify it.
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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