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Distrohoppers, what's your flavor this week?
I feel like a good Linux distro discussion is a good fit here.
I'm only half-joking about the 'week' part. Whether it's the flavor of the week or your 10 year distro, I'd be curious to know what you have installed right now and what you like about it.
I'll start. I've been moving all of my servers and even my desktop and laptop to Alpine Linux. It's fast, it's stable, has a wide variety of packages available and the package manager apk.
It's easy to configure with openrc. Easy to diagnose any problems. And honestly I haven't had a problem yet with musl that I couldn't work around. Gotta say I'm quite smitten with it.
I can't quit Arch (or bspwm for that matter). I've been on it for about a decade now and a few times every year I always get that same itch to just try something else, but I always come back. It almost feels like an achievement to be truly happy with a setup.
I swear that every time I do a new install "This is the last time. I'm keeping this one forever."
I do like Arch, I just manage to break it too easily. I'm not careful enough. lol.
I’m with you on that, arch is a hard thing to leave for me. Whenever I get the itch to try something else I usually just load up another DE, lately I’ve been messing around with Hyprland, which has been fun and different enough from my usual KDE.
I have been toying with the idea of putting fedora on my laptop, but it still hasn’t happened.
I fleshed out a nice hyprland build, and it will probably be my next step in the future, but it wasn't ready for me yet. Well, moreso Wayland wasn't ready I think. Gaming and window focus was a real issue. But it's definitely promising. It's a fairly easy transition from bspwm and my config is all in one folder, so it will be easy to go back someday.
I've been running PopOS since February and have been really enjoying it. I built a new PC back in Jan and installed Windows 11 on it since I intended the PC to be a gaming PC. Windows 11 was alright but got really annoying real fast with all the ads and random junk throughout the OS. I then just installed an old SATA SSD and threw PopOS on there since people told me it was a good choice for gaming. Haven't looked back at Windows ever since. I've been pleasantly surprised by gaming performance on Linux through Steam and Proton too. Outside of the Vulkan shader processing that Steam does when you launch a game through Proton, it feels pretty much like running the game under Windows.
However, the thing that kinda annoys me about PopOS (and this is on me for not really doing more research) is the fact that I have to wait for new point releases for major software updates like new GNOME versions. I think I'll jump to a rolling release distro in the future just to have the latest and greatest things faster haha.
Yeah Windows 11 just feels like one big ad. Feels so icky. Like, I paid for a Windows license AND I get the "if it's free, you're the product" effect at the same time? What a scam.
I don't blame you on getting away. And gaming on Linux has come a long way! Only thing keeping me on Windows for gaming is a lot of my 300+ Skyrim mods won't play nice.
If you want to go rolling release I would suggest OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Comes with BTRFS and you can always roll back to a working state if something breaks.
Yeah I've been doing a lot of research into openSUSE and it sounds really appealing to me. Think I'll set it up in a VM today and see how I like it. I think once I buy a higher capacity NVME drive in the near future, I'll switch over to openSUSE.
The Windows versions peaked out at Windows 7 SP1. That's the best Windows innovation so far, the perfect and minimal OS which has everything you need to run your applications but no bloat, plus you can turn off forced updates and telemetry!
You can't believe the number of Facebook fans who are still running these support groups to help each other with issues on Windows 7. But I guess it won't last long, at some point Microsoft will make it just too difficult for new software to run on that old OS. Hence, Linux Mint is my ideal choice of OS today which is pretty similar to Windows 7 in attitudes and minimalism!
With the new graphics pipeline the shader caching is not really needed much anymore. It fully eliminated the stuttering in Apex legends.
Ooh that's nice to hear. I've been playing a lot of No Mans Sky again and it runs almost flawlessly. The only time I see any sort of stutter is during the loading screen where it flies through space and star systems are flying past the camera.
Ya both Nvidia and AMD (mesa 23.1) support it. I game exclusively on Linux and have for 3 years. Love it.
Nice! I remember trying to game on my laptop in Linux back in 2019 and having an Nvidia GPU wasn't great. Glad to see that Nvidia has been improving their Linux support
Also settled on PopOS! A huge reason is because I have a System76 pang12 laptop and Pop is rock solid on it (whereas every other distro has had a few minor issues). If it weren't for that, I'd probably be on Fedora, I love vanilla Gnome. I am very excited for the Rust version of Cosmic DE.
I love vanilla GNOME too! I wasn't the biggest fan of the Pop!_OS customizations to GNOME so I installed vanilla alongside the pre-installed version haha. Haven't had any issues thankfully.
I might have to do that! I know Gnome 3 was super controversial when it launched (removing desktop icons, changing how windows behave, etc) but it fits how I work so well.
System76 has a page on how to do it actually, its pretty helpful. Has commands for GNOME and a bunch of others.
https://support.system76.com/articles/desktop-environment/
I daily drive Pop!_OS also. I really liked the subreddit for it too - it's one of the things I'm going to miss about Reddit. Hopefully system76 engineers can set up shop here on tildes as well, as it was fascinating following the development of the COSMIC DE.
If I can get a game running on pop it always runs much smoother than on my windows partition. Stellaris late game lag is especially noticeably improved. It helps that the system overhead is far lower.
Aside from gaming though I'm fully in love with pop shell. I couldn't go back to anything without the same tiling window manager and keyboard shortcuts for workspaces and moving windows around.
About a year ago I started using Fedora. Prior to that my only real linux desktop experience had been Ubuntu, which was ...fine, but left something to be desired. Fedora is great in my opinion. Stable, secure, modern features, keyboard driven workflow, and happens to be supported well on my laptop. I've done 2 version upgrades and they've gone very smooth. I think the only downside for me is that since it's maintained by Red Hat, it has a corporate-y element to it, but I think the feature trade off is worth it to me. Plus, I use RHEL for my work, so being in a familiar ecosystem is nice and has some synergy for me personally.
IMO the only RHEL-y issues of Fedora that make it worse than anything else are the package availablity, since there is stuff Fedora simply wont package for Red Hat corporate reasons, like drivers and some software. RPMFusion takes some of the edge off, but it's probably Fedora's one weak point now.
Ooh fun. I haven't dabbled with tiling window manager but I have been curious about them. I'll give it a shot!
I rebuilt my PC late last year and installed Windows 11, but I was running Manjaro before. Eventually I'll get tired of Windows treating me more like an asset than a user and I'll probably jump back to Linux, and at that time I'll probably choose something Arch-based again. I know it's a meme and all, but I've just had the most luck with drivers and such versus Debian or RedHat flavours.
It seems there's been some migrations from Manjaro to EndeavourOS this last year though, so I think I'll wait to see if the winds are changing or if it's a passing fad. I've spent some time distro hopping before, trying some more novel options like Solus (which I'd no longer recommend as most of its leadership has left). It can be fun, but eventually you need to settle down to get some work done.
On the server side, I run Debian for most game servers, and CentOS for work/production servers. Next year CentOS 7 is ending support, so I'll need to decide if Rocky or Alma make more sense at that point.
I use Arch, but endeavor OS is great too. If you do use it. You'll need to install many of the packages for gaming if you do that at all.
I'm still rocking my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install from 2019ish, on my Thinkpad x395, one of the first Ryzen Thinkpads. I went rolling because of wanting the latest open driver, and Arch/Manjaro were having too many breakages. Having AMD support in the kernel is so nice. I don't miss dealing with Nvidia/Intel hybrid garbage at all. But anyhow...
It took a bit of learning coming from Debian and RedHat based systems. Their package naming conventions are different from other distros. A lot of software doesn't consider OpenSUSE for packaging. Their equivalent to the AUR is really good, which also provides registries/compiles for other distros as well. The biggest hurdle is codecs, for legal reasons. The workarounds have refined a good bit (
opiis a great tool to install).Their commitment to BTRFS on root is paying dividends. Preconfigured
snapperdtakes snapshots at critical junctures and makes it easy to boot prior snapshots in readonly if there is update breakage. This was a killer feature that Arch-likes were missing.Their OOTB KDE implementation is one of the smoothest I've ever used. Only second now to the Steam Deck's.
I'm finally beginning to feel a bit of the hefty cruft from 4 years without a fresh start. A lot of the defaults that are still in place have been replaced with better options. I have lots of misc junk strewn about from playing around with stuff. One afternoon I'm gonna take one last solid backup of home then give the system a solid wipe.
Now that the AMD support is more stable (and other distros are shipping 6.x kernels), I might distro hop for a bit to get a feel for what's changed. I think I'll refine my ansible setup scripts to automate full backup/restores again. It's harder to do on a laptop than a server, but it saves so much hassle. I've needed to switch back to Raspbian on my pi's....need that first-party stability for server stuff. Maybe I'll give a .deb anotber go.
Heck yeah, OpenSUSE is my second choice. I run it at work on all of my big boy stuff. Leap for my servers and Tumbleweed on the work laptop. Rock solid for enterprise. And I love that I can rollback to a previous state. The BTRFS integration is second to none.
I've been running Arch for a couple of years now. On the other hand, I've hopped through several window managers:
Overall, Wayland has been more stable in my experience. For example: on X, the display defaults to 60hz. (I'm not sure when this started---I only had this experience after switching to Wayland and back again) I can just run
lxrandrand change the refresh rate to 144hz every time I reboot, but KDE just works, all the time.Annoyingly, KDE only lets me use 60hz or 144hz, whereas my fork of River could switch to 120hz (which is also useful for viewing 60fps content without stutter, but in my experience, I've never noticed this); on Wayland, hitting frame pacing is much more important because of [very complicated reasons] :)
I've been trying to migrate to KDE/Wayland from X, but Zoom is killing me. If you or anyone else knows the secret sauce to force am app to XWayland I'd be thrilled.
Clearing the
WAYLAND_DISPLAYenvironment variable should work. If you're running it from a terminal/command line, you can just runWAYLAND_DISPLAY="" [command]. (If this doesn't work, you may also want to tryenv -uWAYLAND_DISPLAY [command]---this will remove the environment variable instead of setting it to the empty string.)From the KDE application launcher, you can right-click on an application, go to "Edit Application" and then the "Application" tab, and put
WAYLAND_DISPLAY=""in the Environment Variables input. This may or may not work; I tried it out for Discord and it didn't work, but it looked like it should work for Zoom installed from the AUR---other package managers may be similar.Thank You!
For any plasma devs reading, this would be an amazing right-click option.
"Launch with XWayland"
Right now I'm dual booting Ubuntu and Mint on my Framework. They're both more similar than they're different to me so I need to just pick one over the other.
I'm messing around with a bunch of old distros for my retro computers but FreeBSD has delivered the best combination of being able to boot on an old school BIOS and feeling pretty sturdy from a compatibility standpoint. I know it's not Linux, but it's close enough...
I like BSD. I just somehow manage to break it. Multiple BSDs. I’m frustrated by the lack of available software sometimes.
But if I were going to “slap this on a thing and not touch it for 5 years”. Like a firewall. I would go with BSD and trust it to just happily exist.
Reading through threads like these always makes me feel like a normie for just sticking with Ubuntu on my Linux machines...
There’s nothing wrong with using what you’re comfortable with!
A friend tried to get me to use NixOS for a while on my work machine but I just found it too obtuse and didn't have the same kind of community support as other distros. Say what you want about Ubuntu but pretty much everything for Linux will have thorough Ubuntu documentation.
Haha same. I went down so many rabbit holes of window managers and packages and wound up on the most Vanilla Ubuntu distro that’s been happily running for years now.
Speaking from the perspective of a hardcore "everything-in-terminal" kind of computer user, there's very little worth more respect than just getting your work done without mucking about with silly neurotic yakshaves. It's just a hobby for most of us.
I run PopOS my my lab’s workstations and Manjaro on my laptop and home machines.
I love PopOS for the lab as it’s easy to run, maintain, and familiar enough to my lab members that they can be productive. Upgrading between releases has also been excellent, which was almost never the case with Ubuntu. Being based on Ubuntu also means I can always find the software we need.
I like Manjaro for home: it’s easy to install (Arch is fun, but sometimes I want to just get something working right away), has all the benefits of Arch (the AUR is amazing), and has excellent stability. I run both on stable and testing branches to contribute bug reports.
I've been playing with AlmaLinux in the hopes of running a RHEL clone in my environment as a stable base that matches external LTS releases (Debian doesn't) and isn't Ubuntu. I figure between Distrobox (in EPEL) and Flatpak (i believe in its core), it should be doable and fairly modular. It also feels like for the work I might as well stick with NixOS which I need to get back to tweaking, especially with the new 23.05 release.
I've been in Windows lately as I have just wanted to focus on games and studying after work (Ironically, a Linux cert lol), so I've been neglecting my NixOS config that I need to dial in as my main base to deploy to all my computers.
I really miss the old school versions of Red Hat. There was just something about them that was always so cool and "stable feeling" to me. How are you liking Alma so far?
It's slick, mostly because it's just a GNOME distro (running the basic workstation). I haven't finished building everything out, but it feels like what I'm used to with Fedora, which is pretty good.
I definitely plan to keep it around for any VM use I need.
I triple boot OpenSUSE/Alpine/Windows at home. I can definitely get in moods where I like the “just works” aspect of Windows. But I do make it a point to use Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC which is waaaay better than standard editions.
AlmaLinux was the standard replacement for CentOS at my last job(Hosting NOC) and it’s pretty stable and boring (in a good way). You kind of need that for servers.
I can’t for the life of me get into NixOS. I haven’t quite wrapped my brain around the inner workings yet. Not that I don’t think the concept is great. My brain just wants to do it the old way I guess.
The best way to get to the inner workings of nixos I think depends on what type of person you are. If you are a programmer type, I really recommend doing something like installing nix on whatever distro you currently have and messing about with the repl. Before going any further, I want to say that I deliberately ran all of these examples on a box running arch linux + nix. You can just dip your toes in! Let me show off something dumb: I want to package a shell script, but not only that, I want a function that given someone's name produces a package that installs a shell script that greets them, and I want to figure this out on the fly
Maybe that isn't compelling. Maybe you like experimenting with different versions of a package that doesn't match what is on the system, but you'd like the install to be native and not conflict with what the system is providing. Ok, here is me wanting to get a version of
fishthat doesn't match the version in nixpkgs:Now in both of the above cases, I'm just building stuff in the store, which to be usable just gets symlinked to discoverable places by slightly higher level tools. There are many linux distributions, there are even multiple distributions that give you atomic roll forwards and backwards package sets, but nixos and guix stand alone as being supremely hackable by dint of creating a composable package abstraction which
Nix / NixOS is not without its downsides, but everything else seems basically crippled in comparison once you climb up the cliff into productivity.
I really appreciate you taking the time to explain further. Seems like it can be a very powerful tool.
I don’t know about you. But for me understanding a concept kind of follows this pattern.
I’m just waiting for my Nix “aha!” moment I think.
I've been using regolith for a while on my work computer. I had i3 on fedora on a personal old thinkpad but a distro update broke the mouse and keyboard and I just haven't had time to fix it. Regolith is nice to just skip the configuration and have something ready to work right away.
I am awaiting wayland to be ready to seriously use though, so that will be my next undertaking.
I've had a good experience with Wayland and Sway. But I don't have a lot customization going on.
I've never paid attention to Regolith. I just checked it out and it looks like a really nice, streamlined experience. I will probably put it on my Ventoy USB and play with it this weekend.
My experience with distros that come with good eye candy seem to start having issues after a few updates. Has this happened with Regolith or does it seem to stay solid after updates?
seems ok so far. I don't think I've taken a full distro update yet though
I’ve put Regolith desktop on PopOS (it can be installed on any ‘buntu) and I like it a lot. It’s really easy to run, the shortcuts make sense, and it uses Gnome flashback on the backend for easy configuration. If you are on a ‘buntu or derivative it is a really easy (and un-doable) way to try out i3.
Been running EndeavourOS on my laptop now for about a year and a half. Honestly really like it. I used to run it on my desktop along side windows, but decided it wasn't really worth keeping, as I mostly use my desktop for gaming now. I do miss it though, maybe one day when certain anti-cheat devs decide Linux is worth it.
On my Server, I run Ubuntu 22.04. Should probably update, but I can't really be bothered with potentially screwing something up. Not in the fixing mood as of late.
Having just switched server distros it's a nightmare. Wait as long as you can and also doing the job will take longer than you expect whenever you do it would be my two takeaways.
Yea, I've ran a few servers before and honestly the last time I did a server "Upgrade", I ended up renting another server, migrating everything over and decommissioning the old server. Was honestly almost easier. Less of a headache, and a fresh install of everything.
My first distro was Red Hat 6 way back when. I feel like I owe it to Fedora but I just can't get along with Gnome. I might have to try the Plasma spin.
Unchanged for 3-4 years now it's Manjaro and Windows in a multiboot that I kinda despise. I mostly need the Windows for gaming, so any friction is annoying. And boy is there friction.
Unchanged for a year or more, I also wanna spin up nixOS one of these days and see if that is for me. And fix my multiboot to solve a few pain points that I have. I'd like to be able to boot into windows by restarting linux, without interacting with grub in between. Or for Windows to "restart" not into grub but into Windows. Not even sure it's grub that I'm running tbh.
But yeah, nixOS is what I'm leering at. Not sure if I qualify as a distro hopper.
I can’t seem to do a Manjaro install that isn’t broken from the start or shortly after updates.
Been meaning to try Artix with OpenRC but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Valve has basically 'fixed' linux gaming since them if you don't do multiplayer.
Sadly Windows multiboot is still your best option if you do.
It's not only multiplayer. Some things just don't really work with proton. Or at least I can't get them to work, even looking at protondb. And some games aren't on steam. Unfortunately the multiboot is not really negotiable for now, but I do most of my gaming on linux.
I'd be genuinely curious to know what titles.
Bottles and Lutris both work really well to solve even some of the most finicky games, and make managing non-steam games much easier.
Manjaro Gnome edition. :)
I used Arch for a long time, but I started moving away from systemd. I landed on Gentoo and learned a lot about scripts and such.
Yet, I see little support for SELinux in both, and that is my new curiosity.
Not exactly a distro hopper. I have Manjaro on my laptop just because I am lazy, and I'd rather try something else than fix stuff. I tried installing other distros that didn't work, Manjaro was the first that agreed with the hardware so I kept it.
My desktop is Windows because I was tired of gaming on Linux. I know it works -- Proton, Wine, and Lutris are excellent. But, in practice, it is often harder than Windows, especially when you're outside Steam, and even more so if you're working with "alternative" copies of the games.
As much as it's not recommended for your primary, I've been enjoying the recent Nyarch Linux. It feels very similar to Endeavour, as might be expected, but with (IMO) a better update reminder.
EndeavourOS has been my go-to for a while. Really want to try vanilla arch but still can’t work up the courage to give it a shot haha
Honestly, the Arch wiki is very well documented. If you follow the steps exactly you should be fine. If you mess up, start again from the top.
But you do have to have a certain willingness to break things and start over. If you have any questions feel free to ask! I don’t know everything but I’ll do what I can. :)
Thank you for your offer!! :)
I'll probably give it a shot at some point soon, got relatively decent at fixing kernel shenanigans when I was running Manjaro. Lots of instability on there!
Manjaro KDE. I'm absolutely amazed how smooth and polished it is. I've installed it on an old "unusable" HP Pavilion G6 with 6 gigs of RAM and an I5 CPU for my eight year old niece, and she is absolutely amazed that her old laptop works like brand new. Previously, it was trying to run Win 10, with constant BSOD and overheating. Also installed Scratch and some other educational software alongside and she's more than happy.
MX Linux has been my goto lately, it just has everything I like about the debianesque world.
I distrohopped for about a decade before settling on Void Linux for my go-to. It's basically Arch Linux with a slightly more powerful package manager, runit instead of systemd, and more granular packaging policies. Very comfy, almost as stable as rolling releases get, and the project has survived numerous near-total-collapses of organization without notable degradation of quality.
However, of late, I've been convinced that the NixOS model is likely to be "the future", and so I've been forcing myself to crash and burn repeatedly on my spare computer with it. The current goal is a netbook that boots into a framebuffer console, using tmux or similar for window management. I feel close, I can almost taste the sheer, stable, restrictive, declarative glory.
I made the switch to Linux Mint this year after being a lifelong Windows user. I held onto Windows 7 until the last day, but things were starting to break. (I've been behind a PFsense box for years, so I wasn't too worried about security as long as I had an up-to-date browser.) There was no way I would even consider Windows 11 as an option, so I finally took the leap to Linux. The transition has been very painless, and I haven't looked back. I am not a gamer, so choosing Linux was a no-brainer. I've found ChatGPT extremely useful when I've needed help figuring out how to do something. This is it, the year of Linux on the desktop! hah
I've distro hopped several times this year already, but I always come back to pop_os. It just works for me. However, I am seriously thinking about giving NixOS and/or VanillaOS a go.
I have my qualms with Canonical and Ubuntu but I'm currently running Kubuntu 22.04 LTS on my living room PC, main gaming/primary PC, and a couple of other less-used PCs. I like KDE and Ubuntu is popular enough that I just chose it for the fact that it would be extremely low-friction. I've disabled snaps because I dislike them and am thankful that despite Canonical's choices, Linux remains a place where you can just customize an OS even if the OS maker makes choices you disagree with. Abandoned Windows for daily use and went full-force Kubuntu. I only keep Windows around on other devices for special use cases (photo editing and music production).
I'm running Unraid on a home server (miniPC).
I'm running diet-pi x86 on an old Dell 3020 Micro as a print server.
I am so glad to (at home) not be faced with Windows every day. I was never sure I could make the leap, but with proton, 90% of my home PC use is now Linux and it just feels so much better.
Unraid was such an awesome experience when I tried it.
Loved how easy it was to configure a docker container.
I wish I could NEED it so that I could justify buying it. But I haven’t quite gotten to building out my home entertainment server yet.
I didn't really need it but happened to have the extra funds available so decided to get it after doing the 30 day trial and yeah the ease of installing and configuring docker containers, plugins, etc. makes it so nice. Being able to have new apps up and running in just a couple of minutes is awesome
I want to try the Fedora Sway spin but Arch is just too convenient
I'm currently running the Fedora Cinnamon spin. Fedora works great, and while it's not a rolling release there are major releases (with new DE versions) every six months, which is a good compromise for me. Upgrades also worked without problems so far, from Fedora 34 to now 38.
The Cinnamon spin is also fine, it came with good defaults. I might try KDE in a while though, just to see how Wayland works these days.
I tried debian again, and since then I haven't changed a thing.
Lol, I have Debian with DWM, the only problem is, I havnt used it in 2 years since I got my phone, I do all my internet browsing on phone apps, and I havnt needed to write a document in some time
So I forget all the DWM shortcuts, I dont even remember how to open dmenu or switch desktops even though in DWM they arnt called desktops and called something else I forget
I jumped back to Windows for gaming after using a variety of distros for about a year. I stayed on Arch for a while and really enjoyed it because of the AUR and all of the documentation. However, if I decide to switch back to Linux it'll probably be to Ubuntu or Mint solely because of how little work I'd have to put in to maintain it. I'm no longer interested in ricing and customizing everything to fit me perfectly; I just want something to work out of the box and those seem like my two best bets.
I was messing around with blendOS in a VM today. I find it interesting. It's Arch based. The premise of it, is that it runs applications from other distros via containers. Similar to Vanilla OS.
Vanilla OS, as I like the clean aesthetic of the screenshots on the website and I find the idea of an atomic/immutable OS interesting security-wise. And since it's Ubuntu-based there's likely some good documentation about most stuff online.
lxqt on the latest stable lubuntu. It's not the most polished experience -- a lot of the lxde utilities are in the openbox menu, but they don't exist in lxqt form yet, so they don't do anything. There's not even a screen locker -- I am using i3lock for that. In terms of appearance though, it looks great after some very minor tweaking. I don't like that java jars that have a tray icon don't appear in the tray, but it's not a deal breaker.