After trying dozens of distros the enjoyment of the new faded and I just wanted something that installed with the minimum amount of fuss and was stable as a rock. The distro that has best fit that combination of attributes (at least on my machines) has been Linux Mint.
Kubuntu 22.04. All my games run like butter without much tinkering. I learned most of my Linux stuff on Debian or Ubuntu in the early days and most of what I need comes in .deb form.
I started using Kali Linux earlier this year. I’m by no means a hacker but it’s the first version of Linux with a UI that clicked for me. It’s built off of Debian so I’m pretty familiar with its package management and it’s been really easy to get a barebones version running on different computers.
Debian 12 have been rock solid for me. Use it for gaming with my Nvidia card and the driver installation have been painless and easy. Mainly been using it as a normal desktop using Gnome and gaming with Steam.
Was previously running Arch based distribution ArcoLinux, but was getting tired of the updating maintenance and config file conflicts.
Debian is just stable and a few updates a week. Flatpak fixes the old packages that repository have for those applications I just “need”.
I might as well ask here:
Im running arch on my Desktop. Mostly just to Experiment a bit, nothing to serious, Laptop is ubuntu, and both are dualboot with Windows for Gaming (nvdia gpu in both).
The Main reason to use arch was to play around with Windows Managers like hyprland. However I get the feeling that some stuff is simply missing and or configured wrong on the System.
Is it a better idea to start with something like endeavor with sway and start ricing from there?
Ubuntu usually provides you with system working out of the box. Same goes for Fedora and its spins. Arch is DIY distribution, which means that the "missing" stuff you have to install/configure yourself. archinstall gives you just a basic start.
If you don't know your way around bare window managers, then yeah, it would be a good idea to try with things preconfigured: EndeavourOS should give you that, Fedora Sway spin also.
Or you could bite the bullet and try to provide the missing things yourself and learn in the process. What are you missing?
Its more among the lines of "oh shit, this should probably work" but does not work. For example copy and pasting, some audio stuff. It just feels like a lot and i often feel like im just bruteforcing until something works well enough until it doesnt.
I like most of it, but some stuff just feels very time consuming, just to get basic features working. I want some of that, but some basic comforts would be nice.
It's easier to install when using DualBoot.
EndeavourOS is just what I needed when I started to DualBoot with windows, besides being just easier to install, some games I play still require Windows, like most dx12 games since they're currently broken due to some driver error in the latest Nvidia drivers.
I love Arch and can't see myself using anything but it, but I don't have the patience to do a manual install every other week or so because I got bored or am to lazy to actually fix my system, especially while dualbooting.
Debian Bookworm. On my laptop and all my servers.
I'm a seasoned professional Linux sysadmin, so getting a distro installed has never been a problem for me (thanks to my first proper distro being Gentoo).
In the end, it's the stability and "knowing what to expect", that always makes me come back to Debian.
I don't know how you deal with non rolling releases on your machines you actually use for work. By the end of the lifecycle all the tools are ancient
ChojinDSL It depends on your use case. In my case I mostly manage bare metal servers running certain services or docker.
For servers I don't want rolling releases. That just means stuff is going to break on a regular basis. In my opinion, Arch Linux is the worst offender here. I don't know if it's gotten better since last I used it. But with Arch Linux the problem was, that you had to keep up with the updates. If you forgot to update some machine in a while, it could happen that you missed some update that changed some critical things, and everything else already moved on, and the only way to fix it was to hunt down the intermediate package version and try to install that manually, or just wipe and reinstall.
As far as "ancient" tools is concerned, it depends on what those tools are. Bugfix and security patches is what I'm most interested in on a server. Just because there is a newer version of software out there with some new features, doesn't mean that I need those features, or that they're relevant.
For the cases where I need something newer, there's docker, flatpak and backports repos, (if not third party repos for certain tools).
For servers I don’t want rolling releases
Yeah I wasn't talking about servers.
Workstation:
Used to love gentoo, but it kept breaking on me.
Went Ubuntu until they went stupid, then arch for a while but again, breakage.
Debian works, I have to spend 0 energy on it, and I can layer on different vms and lxc for whatever other distros I want.
Server:
Was freebsd because it was perfect and jails were next level shit but people keep putting out software that was obnoxious to install without docker, so debian as hypervisor/zfs and freebsd for most apps, debian for the obnoxious ones. Perfect system.
i've been distro-hopping a lot and always come back to linux mint. It's that one distro i can't fuck up when fiddling with things. it just works
Using Fedora
What I like: When I plug my laptop into HDMI it remember the audio settings so if I last had the audio go out of the speakers it defaults to that.
Crux user here. I like the port tree system and simple package building recipes. It's also a distro that kept things very simple over the years despite the rise of dbus and systems. Also the mascot.
The job security.
I was excited when I bought an Amiga 500, and ever since then the main thing I noticed is that the EXCITEMENT of getting a computer was always over-ruled by my ability to exploit it's powers and use it.
So my perspective is that all computers and operating systems SUCK. But some suck less than others...
So using Manjaro KDE, it sucks less because it's very simple and easy for me to install whatever I like - having AUR available, being able to search with pamac to include repos, AUR and Flatpak (even snap if I was that desperate).
KDE also gives you super powers to ~~fuck up~~ modify your desktop experience and shortcuts.
It's been good to me for 6 years now. After going Ubuntu>Mint I was excited to leave Debian and try something else, I never made it to the Redhat camp (always interested to try Fedora) and hopefully will never feel the need.
So yes, what I like MOST is - it mostly just works. And when it fails, the forum is awesome.
While I know it's not the best distro, I don't care to re-image, I left that life behind with Windows.
Manjaro-
I love the fact that I can have "Stable" and "Unstable" kernels installed simultaneously. It's a nice handy way to recover or narrow down if an issue is related to the kernel. They've done an excellent job with the default Grub settings to allow this as well as side-by-siding with Windows if I want (which made transitioning from Windows to Linux easier).
I use EndeavourOS, Gnome on my desktop and KDE on my laptops. I really like the AUR and the integration with yay. Started with Ubuntu about 7 years ago and had always used Debian based distros, moved to Arch when I wanted to learn more about Linux and now I use EndeavourOS as my daily driver.
On my servers I use a mic between Debian 11 and 12
Easy installation, just works™, and it's basically a Debian Sid so it's relatively up to date. Siduction!
Easy support for the newest Linux desktop technologies, like Wayland and Pipewire. I fun Fedora.
Been using Linuxmint as daily driver now for 2-3 years. I can do all my remote work needed (Outlook using Prospect Mail, MS Teams, Slack, Zoom, Libre/OnlyOffice).
Also Steam gaming on Linux has vastly improved incl everything that works with Proton. RocketLeague and a few others I always play run perfect within proton, and I've found lot of Linux native A-titles like Tomb Raider, Dying Light,Payday2 and Warhammer that all run awesome and gave kickass graphics running natively.
TIMESHIFT has been a life saver a few times when I was messing with various AMD graphics drivers (kisak) and custom kernel like XanMod. Knock on wood it's been almost a year since any major issues though. But I know I can roll back a day or two (or max, a week) and have everything restored and running within a few hours. It's awesome.
Devuan testing branch and Artix for consistent stability and updates/upgrades.
MX Linux AHS because of xfce, it's fast, stable, use a recent kernel, no systemd.
xubuntu. stable and apps are reasonably up to date. i'll probably switch to mint with the whole snaps thing though. fedora is the one distro i never tried in my distro hopping phase though so...
Rock stability. Everything works. I run debian oldstable, even bookworm is too much for me at the moment. Yes, seriously. I tried to connect to my work office using azure web client and the keyboard layout was wrong. When I went back to debian bullseye, it worked as expected. By the way, this bug also happens with arch and fedora.
I have installed arch as well because sometimes I just want to play with things. I'm very interested in immutable systems, but NixOs is too difficult for me and I'm afraid I will spend too much time on it.
I use Ubuntu LTS. It's stable, things just work, and it's got 10 years of free support. That's a very long time to not worry about my machines.
I don't get it. You end up with ancient packages and have to install ppas to get modern tools, or write code that can't take advantage of modern tools and have to do workarounds
No PPAs, no workarounds. Just Docker, Snap and Flatpak. OS upgrades become trivial. Nothing breaks.
$ sudo docker ps -q | wc -l
17
Currently running 17 containers.
E: If you haven't looked into VS Code's "dev container" feature for software development, you should check it out.
This is a similar reason as to why I use Debian as my base operating system and for just about every service I run on my host, the processes are containerized using Docker. It gives me the flexibility to choose the best “operating system” that supports the software I want to run at the release cadence that suits how I want to consume it for a given piece of software, and the base host OS is just that and nothing more. Upgrades to new Debian releases are non-events and I get no surprises with my apps in containers.
I can upgrade the underlying container base operating systems as I need which I choose Alpine, Debian, and Ubuntu based on which fits my needs. Alpine gets updates quickly, Debian is good for core services that I would normally run natively on my host, and Ubuntu hits well for wide support of almost every other service I need. So I get a stable base with the option to go as quickly as I need if I have a need for a newer package. It’s not always about having the newest software, it’s about stability where it counts.
Exactly. I haven't used PPAs, pinning or backporting for many years now. Docker, Flatpak and Snap take care of nearly all use cases.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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