75
votes
Which Linux distro do you use, and why?
So, according to my memory, I asked this question on Tildes "not that long ago."
Then I checked.
Chat, it was a LONG time ago. Excuse me while I crumble into dust.
Anyway, given that the Linux landscape looks very different than it did not that long ago in 2018, I figure we're due for another topic like this:
- Which Linux distro do you use, and, most importantly, why do you prefer it?
Debian. That’s it for everything (servers, Pis, desktops, laptops) with the one exception of Pop OS on my computer with a new Nvidia card that’s not well supported even by Debian testing. It feels like the least hassle possible. Great support from 3rd parties, very stable, no enshittification (like Ubuntu).
As far as I’m concerned the natural state of any computer is to run Debian. Anything else is an aberration.
Debian feels more today like Ubuntu did back in the days before snaps and heavy commercialization. It’s just straightforward and simple to use with common-sense defaults, and getting it to run with whatever DE you want is pretty simple to do.
Likewise. I use Debian for everything at home, and I use Ubuntu at work because it is the only "supported" Linux option by our IT. I'm not forced to use Windows, so I tolerate the Ubuntu-isms.
Well, I tolerate some of them. I disabled snap and held back all the apt snap packages. I use MATE instead of Gnome, which causes some headache, especially after system updates the keyring services get messed up.
+1 to this. I am also thoroughly in favor of Debian maintainers stripping out telemetry where they can, regardless of upstream's opinions. Arch was interesting but it got old having to constantly check release notes for breaking changes, and my setup broke through 'normal' updates within a month. Endeavour was finicky and not really any faster on my hardware for all the extra tweaking.
For folks who are on the fence ... I've been successfully gaming with Debian as my primary OS for years; from 2016-2023 with virtualized Windows (VFIO/passthrough) and since early 2023 without any Windows installation at all. It's not the absolute pinnacle of performance, but I'll happily tolerate a ±5% gap against the bleeding edge distros when it gets me such great stability. I also moved my (less technical) spouse over to Debian this last year when Win10 support ended. He has yet to have any issues, though I did have to help a little with the initial setup of a few games in Lutris.
The only downside so far has been Debian trixie getting a little cranky with my old (2012) Macbook Air. I have to recompile and relink WiFi drivers after every kernel upgrade; not sure why that stopped happening automatically when it's downloading all the right packages each time, and it worked fine under bookworm. I'm just glad to get a few more years of life out of the machine.
What GPU are you using? Presumably AMD?
Yessir -- 7900 XTX. Also AMD for the processor, Ryzen 9 9950X . Was running a 2080 Ti up until last year though.
EDIT: misread this as CPU, sorry. Rephrased.
I'm running Bluefin, an atomic distro based on fedora silverblue. The overwhelming majority of my apps are flatpaks, and those that aren't or the ones that I compile myself are running in a Debian container, so I'm kind of running Debian too? :D
I completely agree with you. Debian is awesome.
I started with Debian, moved to Ubuntu when everything in Debian stable was waaay too old to work and backporting stuff was annoying. Testing broke all the time and unstable was too unstable.
Then Ubuntu went over-commercial and I missed a few update windows on servers (ran a non-LTS version, my fault), got pissed off about it and now in back in Debian.
If I want something recent, I can just run it in a container so having the base system set at
stableis just fine for me.Linux is purely a server OS for me, as I've followed the ye olde adage for 20 years or something: Linux for servers, Windows for gaming and macOS for work :D
...Although I haven't had a Windows gaming computer for 10 years and instead play on Steam Deck and consoles because I don't want to mess around with drivers and windows updates on my free time. Steam Machine will be an instant buy if they ever manage to release it though.
For my main computer, my misgivings with Debian are crusty old packages. Bad enough I deal with those at work. Is this true, or just common misconception?
I have my "server" (strong word for it) set up with Ubuntu Server, which I don't love for the same reason as you said. Very tempted to swap to Debian at some point, don't care much about bleeding edge features there (most containers anyways...).
You can use Debian testing to improve that matter. It’s probably not very different than a recent Ubuntu. I use stable but I don’t do anything too fancy and will reach for a backport if there’s ever any issues.
The packages are generally older, yes, however:
Between those two, everything I need to be modern, is.
I use flatpak (whose performance is sometimes not great), and Nix (whose UX could use work), but it's good enough for me.
Same here. My only exception is the computer that acts as my personal LLM inference server and has an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 platform, which runs Fedora because running the latest of the latest in apps and libraries really makes a difference there. Each time I log in, I feel like I am on another planet. It is not bad or anything, it just all feels so foreign.
I’ve been curious about fedora. Using mint for a decade now and I have an extensive ansible playbook to bootstrap a blank machine so switching isn’t cheap in terms of effort, but I’m curious.
What little thing or feature do you love about fedora?
Another +1 for Debian for almost everything, been daily driving it for 15 years.
Old packages shmold shmackages. When you find a package where the age matters there will be a way to install the newer version that isn't too onerous.
Have you made the move to COSMIC on your Pop!_OS installation? I'm curious as to what your thoughts are if you have.
The computer is running Cosmic. No complaints. I don’t really fuss about with my DE or WM anymore.
I setup a family PC that is used for media/gaming with Pop!+Cosmic+Wayland and it's been quite good. Way less headaches than Gnome used to have.
I used to be full Debian on everything too, but missing out on updated packages turned out to be too much of a burden on my main computers. I tried Testing and Unstable.
Debian will forever have a place on my headless PCs, but on my desktop / laptop: Arch Linux has been stable.
I've been using Debian as my desktop for 20+ years now. I never was partial to Gnome as the default desktop environment though and while it isn't hard to change I wish more first-time users knew about their unofficial live images that offer other default DEs:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/
I use Linux Mint, and have for about nine years. It was originally an easy transition from the Windows world, and I've found that it does everything I need.
On the rare occasions I've run into an issue, there is a lot of help available for this operating system and the Linux Mint forums have been welcoming for those of us who aren't technically proficient.
Same. I am more interested in what I can do with my computer than what runs my computer. Therefore, I was content with Windows because of the huge software availability, especially games. It just worked.
But Microsoft Corporation had to go and extract maximum value from users and user's data. Let's add ads. Let's force online accounts. Do you want some AI snooping on your files? Speaking of files, of course you meant to look for Management 430 - Assignment 6 draft.docx on the Internet. With Bing, right? How about we encrypt your drive with Bitlocker, do not tell you about it, and also store the keys so any state agent can open 'er up? Frustration was accumulating, but man is an animal of habit and switching to a different OS felt like a big task that I kept kicking down the road.
At some point there was a straw that broke the camel's back. A setting I had changed reverted back to Microsoft's preferred option. This user has their OS set to English - United States, therefore their keyboard distribution must also be EN-US. And even though the user has set their keyboard to ES-LA, clearly they are wrong and we at Microsoft know better. A quick web search revealed that yes, this is a common problem for some bilingual users since 15 years ago, and no, there is no clear reason why it happens or a solution.
I felt that my computer was no longer mine, and that change was needed.
My requirements were:
a) easy transition from Windows, b) stable and gets out of the way, c) big community for improved support, d) a running start with most of what I would need rather than a bare-bones setup, e) no history of engaging in anti-consumerist practices, or being strongly influenced by big tech ecosystems with a track record of user-hostile behavior, and f) ability to play my games and use my software or a close enough equivalent.
After researching, Linux Mint stood out as a popular distro that seemed to met my requirements. After some further research on Mint and determining that it fully fit my needs and was compatible with my hardware, I switched in Sep of '25 and haven't looked back.
Linux Mint here too. After years with Ubuntu, then Debian, I decided to give Mint a try and I haven't looked back.
I'm a linux power user at both home and work, and even I got tired with the little "quirks" of Ubuntu and Debian...old outdated packages, or customizations that were headaches to work around rather than improvements.
Mint just gets out of the way, it's slick, easily customizable, everything just works. I use it for game emulation, coding (C/C++/Java/python/javascript/node), general day to day use. I haven't had any issues with it yet. Can't recommend it enough if you're dissatisfied with other distros.
Another Mint user here, Cinnamon desktop. I can do all the things I need and want to do on it.
Video editing with Blender, image editing with Gimp, I can play MTG Arena (used to use Lutris to do this but have since switched to using Steam since it means I no longer have to manually fix what an update breaks).
No problems connecting to my thermal label printer or with using an arbitrarily large number of monitors. It just does what I want.
Edit: Oh, and I just remembered that my computer would sometimes crash back when I used Windows. Hahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhahah. Yeah, Mint doesn't do that to me.
NixOS! (and I'm excited to see there may be one or even two more of us in all of Tildes)
It became infinitely easier to work with once LLMs got the point that they could write derivations and flakes for me, but I would still recommend this to nearly no one, and will install it on every computer I own forever 😅
Yeah, the Nix error messages are not great...
Curious about the LLM aspect of it. I probably am on slightly deeper than most to nixos (commercial codebase, hundreds of instances 10s of kloc supporting nix code). I got my start with the project documentation ~ 3 years ago via the nix pills guide + nixpkgs manual. It seemed really comprehensive at the time and since then we got nix.dev which basically seems to answer 90% of the questions I see on the subreddit complaining about the docs.
I think i'm firmly in the minority of people that think that the docs are any good. Do you ever use them or is it LLM all the way?
Feel free to ignore, I'm just being nosey. NixOS 4 lyfe gang sign.
Both (I only to through my Kagi search limits if I have to do a lot of Nix), but if it's "oh hey LLM, I have this daemon, this is the --help, write me a nix module" it just nails it, and I'm done in 3 minutes, and not 1 hour.
That makes sense. I think for nix boilerplate where the only thing you are learning is the names of some symbols LLM efficient.
(edit) omg I wrote an essay. Sorry XD I have big feelings about NixOS, and could continue complaining for an hour. Still going to use it everywhere though.
I attempted to use the docs before, but I'd get stuck in iteration loops pretty frequently, which was a pretty huge time sink. I'm also not great at learning instructively: I pick up concepts a lot better through iteration, so for instance, I only really understood what flakes were doing after the LLM wrote a few overlays for me and whatnot.
Practical example of where the docs fell over: I was trying to stamp a build with the git SHA it was based on, so I could make sure I was running the correct version as a quick sanity check during development. Apparently you can pull it off of self.rev, but I couldn't find that anywhere in the docs, the LLM couldn't throw darts in the dark to figure it out, and the only place I found which explained how to do it was an old Discourse thread (noting that this is largely undocumented) with some example snippets I didn't understand. The LLM did, however, and was able to make a working snippet, which I now repeat whenever necessary.
I hope I'm an accomplished software developer at this point -- a decade in, and I've been handling distributed systems and whatnot across the full stack at various times, in various languages, across many platforms -- but Nix-the-language has been impenetrable and frustrating in a way that, Rust, Haskell, or C++ template wizardry across everything from routers, to kernels, to thousands of distributed servers, to game consoles, have not been. Some combination of terse syntax, a variety of alternative solutions to the same problem, and a surprising lack of decent code reuse features/standardization made me bounce off it repeatedly.
Another example: even though this will never be useful to me, I don't like hardcoding my system type (like, x86_64 Linux). But it seems like the blessed approach for this is to either rope in a third party library -- by copy/pasting it into every file it needs to be referenced into -- or else, copy/pasting an equivalent snippet into every file anyways. I was expecting that NixOS would operate my system like one giant program: it should have some way to let me define a utility somewhere, then easily and repeatedly import it into every flake (or whatnot) on the machine. In practice I don't think that's the case, and the conceptual mismatch had me smashing my face into the keyboard all the time, attempting to put the system into a state where I could reasonably understand + maintain it later (and ultimately, failing).
Thankfully the LLMs don't share my requirement to "understand" or "create supportable code", so they helpfully churn out whatever I need :3 one final example: I needed to make a package out of an NPM-distributed JS tool. At this point, I understand rough concepts enough to comprehend that this should be possible, but it seems far from trivial, especially to write it a script that permits simple, one click updating (with auto pinning of the various SHAs necessary). I've completely given up clobbering bash and nix scripts together, though, so I dumped the problem onto Claude, and it spat out what I needed in a couple of minutes. I would have likely given up after an hour and just shoved it into a global NPM installation otherwise.
Ha. Only the system hardcode: you know that's a flakes thing? There are some of us that have feelings about flakes. If you use "classic" nix, you just ignore it and builtins.currentSystem just handles it. Flakes also basically have no story at all on cross compilation which is what got me into nix in the first place (building stuff for embedded).
Anyway, I don't know if this is a useful comment, but I live in the nix repl. You can do so much cool stuff there! Want to explore the source of some some code?
:b pkgs.foo.src. want to read the source of some nix thing?:p pkgs.foo.meta.position. Want to dynamically inspect your options?nixos-rebuild repl -f whatever, and from there you can see both the real configured value of each option, all merged declaration sites, and all options definition sites for your config including your own options, and third party modules etc. The repl is really underrated in the community at large imo. Also a great way to try out a small expression and see what it evals to, and ofc you can always load up a file with whatever you have and play with it.Thanks for replying to my nosey comment! I enjoyed your essay. I also agree that nix lacks many conveniences for programming in the large that make it super annoying.
Augh, yeah, you're totally right. But if I switch away from flakes, then I no longer have a way to pin my transitive dependency tree, right? My background from build systems (maven, gradle, bazel, mostly) prods me to use lock files to implement strict, explicit dependency management. Letting versions float around has been a recipe for disaster ime, since a source code "rollback" no longer rollsback your actual binary; you're still pulling in any library changes that have happened since the original build. That wouldn't matter on a traditional system -- where one simply yolo's new packages into their OS, and they pray that full system backups can haul them back into production should the worst occur -- but I started using NixOS because I'm a complete control freak 😅
I just learned about this, actually! But mostly I've been instructing the LLM to explore that to assist with problem solving, since local agents work overwhelmingly better when they are instructed to iterate on a problem and get quick feedback (ime by default they attempt the Feynman problem solving algorithm, which fails periodically for larger and more competent models, let alone my local freebies). Pointing them at the local nix docs also helps, but the docs themselves are unhelpfully a gigantic HTML file on disk with no easy pointer to them (
nix-build --no-out-link '<nixpkgs>' -A nixpkgs-manualafaict?).Hah, np! It was cool to hear from someone that has real experience with NixOS/nix; please do share any other tidbits you come across!
Flake deps: imo flake deps are mostly lies. In order to not have 1000 instances of nixpkgs everyone is using follows. If you do that then morally you may as well have just taken pkgs as an argument, it's the same thing.
After that you obviously still want some pinning. Well there are loads of tools for that like npins or nixtamal. You don't need to give up pinning if you give up flakes.
Brought to you by the league of anti-flake revolutionaries. Sometimes it is hard to convince claude to join the cause.
Ooh, that's good to know. I think I'll use the
inputs.nixpkgs.legacyPackages.$;trick, though, instead of switching off of flakes, just because it seems like tossing aflake.nixfile into a repo is a pattern folks are using more and more often? I try not to swim upstream for this sort of thing.The adherents to older designs have succeeded before; I wish you luck! I'm going with the flow, so I can mostly just cheer y'all on from the sidelines 😊
Nixgang!
Oh yea, I am a NixOS user for a long time, I am from the times when nixpkgs and nixos modules were a separate repo on github. I have nixos on my servers, gaming pc, laptop, work laptop, I am pretty much assimilated.
I am 100% assimilated. Desktop, laptop, project, work servers, all Nix. I don't do anything beyond the system configuration and nix-shell. I know I am missing out on a lot, not using flakes, but it makes Nix feel so simple and approachable. One machine, one file. One environment, one file. It completely de-clutters my brain.
I've been on NixOs for 2 years and it's great! Update when I want and easy rollbacks and it's the first repo that convinced me to finally have my configuration in a github repo.
My only complaint which is basically a package deal and how NixOs works is how strict it is for running executables outside of the ecosystem. I sometimes want to run something from npm and sometimes steam-run is the only way. But then my package.json has steam-run in the scripts.
Take a look at nix-ld. You can also get quite far with patchelf / the auto patch hook if you have patience for looking at the output of ldd. Especially relevant with gui tools that link Wayland or whatever.
Thank you! I'll take a look at this next time I'm setting up my environment.
Ah! If I may ask, would it be helpful if I extracted out an example of wrapping an NPM-distributed tool for use in one's system flake? As noted in my essay above (😅), I've been using that to great success recently.
It's not that big of a deal and I am mostly satisfied with steam-run, and I have nix-ld to look at from the other comment.
So if you have an example ready to go I round associate it for curiosity's sake and maybe use it, but don't spend too much time on it for me.
I use Fedora with Gnome. I like Fedora, I don't really like Ubuntu, I use my laptop for both software development and recreation so I generally like it to Just Work™, which Fedora usually gives me!
Another Fedora + Gnome user here. I've always found Fedora to just work, without having to strip out fluff like Snaps. As for DE, I've tried alternatives, and while I like the power KDE gives you, I just can't get over the UI/UX. Gnome looks incredible and is so easy to use, while also offering a consistent design language that results in a lot of awesome apps that look like they belong.
Same here; my only gripe with Fedora is that the audio enthusiast ecosystem is very scattered across COPRs and getting a full music production environment needs a lot of setup and tinkering.
I ended up setting up Ubuntu in a Distrobox and just exporting shortcuts to everything I need, seems to work fine.
What setup are you using?
Currently on Bitwig, bridging my non-native VSTs with Yabridge, but mostly using Vital and the built-in plugins. Interface is just a DacMagic XS and a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M20X headphones.
I'm trying to keep it simple and only install what I need (although I already failed on the samples part, my Downloads folder is full of sample pack archives I will probably never fully triage).
Here to basically say, "Ditto to everything." I switched to Fedora Gnome from Arch (I think I was using Gnome in Arch right before I switched, but I used KDE for quite a while, too) after I got a Framework and, as you said, everything just worked right out of the box. It was a great experience.
I've been tempted to switch to NixOS or Fedora Silverblue, but just haven't wanted to mess with something so stable.
Ha, I also have a Framework! I recently upgraded to the new AMD motherboard and I'm really enjoying it.
I have also been eyeing Silverblue. I'm sure at some point I'll end up switching to it, it just seems like a really neat system. But I have the same problem — everything just works now! It's hard to imagine tearing it all down and starting fresh haha
Arch Linux gang! Sitting pretty firmly in the KDE/Wayland camp since Wayland's become a lot more stable. Planning on playing with some smaller distros at some point on a couple low-spec systems I have around.
I use arch btw... (also with wayland but I currently have dual boot option with windows cause of 1 game which I haven't played in like so long... I should just switch over)
It can be really hard to let go of the Windows side. I felt like I was letting go of the One Ring when I cleared my drive to go full linux. 😅 Having grew up editing old lets plays on Windows Vista/8 with Windows Movie Maker, it was kinda wild to realize I had a strong nostalgic attachment to the Windows interface I never really considered myself to have. Glad I took the plunge, but won't pretend it didn't have some mindflayer tendrils over my psyche!
I, too, use Arch (btw).
I had attempted to swap to Linux for decades, but the lack of gaming support, then going back to school and requiring Office never really allowed me to swap. I graduated and immediately started the hopping. I'd first encountered Red Hat in the late 90s, but it wasn't free anymore. I'd been dabbling with mostly *buntu options, usually with XFCE, or with lightweight options like Puppy or Bodhi since I was usually attempting on a netbook. I finally found Manjaro, which won me over solely because of
pacman. I realized Debian's package manager (apt) just... didn't really make sense to me, and for whatever weird reason, pacman did.I had once managed to install Slackware on my pc around 2009 by having two drives connected, where I could swap back to Windows, print up a few more pages of what I'm supposed to be doing, then go back and try to figure wtf was going on. I was able to reach the cli after like two days of this attempt, and I never logged back into Slack. But, it held a special appeal that I hated about Windows: a fully customizable computer. Even Manjaro XFCE had too much bloat. My goal was Arch, and once that was complete, I realized I needed a WM not a DE, since the keyboard is such a powerful tool with many more buttons... and settled on i3.
I finally found a website that wasn't the Arch wiki (which is great, if you already know wtf is going on, which I definitely didn't) that went step-by-step through the installation. I actually had some hardware issues at the time, but didn't know that was the problem, and I ended up reinstalling many times in a short period. I even tried multiple other distros again, because the problem seemed to only exist with Arch, but eventually I figured it was the video card. In doing so, I started understanding what the commands were doing... now when I bork my system, I can honestly bootstrap in and usually fix the issue. I did a full and clean reboot last July for the first time since I made the swap to Arch (in 2019), and still basically brought over my entire ~/ without issue.
Fedora + KDE. It's a good blend of easy to use and new packages (which I care about for a few things I do). Haven't had many issues with it, so I haven't really looked into swapping. I like KDE pretty well, but also used GNOME for a long time and liked it fine.
I have used Ubuntu, Manjaro and Arch in the past. I didn't like snaps (felt slow, maybe I'm wrong) so Ubuntu's insistence pushed me away from it. Manjaro was OK, but it also just felt like secondhand Arch, so I moved to the real deal. Arch I was very happy with, until I had to set up a new computer and thought "no, I don't want to do all the setup again" (this was before archinstall script, that might have changed my mind). But Arch + i3 served me very well, while I was using it.
The only remotely tempting thing I see is Arch-like + dw{m, l}. I like that you can actually read the source, and I don't have to learn some new bespoke configuration to customize it (my main issue with i3; I wanted a tiling WM, but frankly have no patience for learning all the configs). I've set it up on an old laptop. I like it, but I'm not yet willing to put in the effort to customize and daily drive it.
Same, I switched from Pop!OS to Fedora KDE recently and I'm really enjoying it. I much prefer KDE to gnome, and Fedora doesn't seem any harder to set up and update and such than Ubuntu-based stuff was.
+1. This is the only combo that helps my laptop with weird ACPI hibernation issues sleep for a week or more out of the box. I fought against KDE's complexity for a while but I decided built in settings and plugins beat out Gnome extensions/tweaks that may break at any update. I don't really use any KDE specific apps other than its file manager. My only complaint is how often it updates. Feels like I'm having to download 10GB+ per week with about ten apps installed (2x flatpaks). Really stable otherwise.
Void and Alma
Void feels like FreeBSD but syntax is a bit easier. Super clean OS I’m sure classic Debian fans will like and no systemd. Comes in musl or glibc
The original creator was a developer for NetBSD, so the similarity is intentional. I found Void in 2018 and love it, but don't want to distro-hop my main desktop so that's still Debian.
Ahhh that makes perfect sense then. No wonder. Thanks for the trivia.
I switched from Debian to Void for these reasons, zero regrets.
Dang, that thread predated me ragequitting Windows in 2019. I used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed pretty extensively then until about 2022, when I formatted EndeavorOS as an experiment because I was sick of fighting Discord. Haven't switched back, it works well enough that I've been too lazy to pave over again.
Gave up on using fun distros on my Raspberry Pis, went back to boring Raspbian. It works 100% (tho I now get this weird thing with the ethernet port stopping working randomly, I suspect a hardware issue).
I really want to get roaming home directories going across the 4ish machines in regular use so that each person can customize the bejesus out of their desktop and not be tied to a single machine. But I really don't have time to futz with it at the moment so will probably just keep assigned machines with the kids sharing.
My wife gave Zorin a spin, but we were both irked by their rebranding of many things...which is great for a unified brand for newbies but is *really" confusing after the 4th conversation along the lines of "You can use KDE Connect to control the TV now" followed up with "What's KDE Connect? Is it like Zorin Connect?"
OpenSUSE is like the weird cousin that everyone ignores in the corner, but felt more refined than most other distros once you got the initial codec issues sorted out. Partially because their default is to install all the optional dependencies, so stuff tended to have less "why is that not working." Zypper is hands down one of the best package managers out there.
opi is the great provider yes.
Kubuntu 25. I tried a lot of distros over the last couple years and every one had some weird pain points in what i wanted to do or stuff would take more time to setup than what felt worth it. Pop_OS and Mint were two I tried most recently since this is a gaming machine and those get recommended as "just works" for games, bur neither one was doing it for me. I ended up downloading Kubuntu just because I wanted to try KDE 6. I've run Debian on my home server for a decade so I'll always be biased towards anything built on it. I ended up loving the new plasma desktop in Kubuntu and it has been the easiest distro to just play games on. One command to install the nvidia drivers and pretty much everything just works.
Related, does anyone know why there is so much vitriol towards Ubuntu users in certain communities? I've pretty much never paid attention to linux discussions online. It's crazy how frequently I've asked about stuff in different discords and people suddenly don't want to help if i mention I'm using a Ubuntu distro.
Some people harbor some ill will towards Canonical for the way they've handled a number of things, or ideas that some Linux users don't like that Canonical has tried to make into a thing (snaps, for instance), and I consider myself in that camp (I disabled snaps and dislike some stuff), even as a user of Kubuntu currently. However, whether I used it or not, I'd never turn that ire towards any users and would always be glad to help when people ask.
The Linux community (as with any, but they are quite vocal in Linux) still has its subset of assholes that judge anyone that doesn't use Arch, or whatever. There are a lot of nice people too. But there's certainly an arrogant subset that acts in a very particular elitist way and Canonical and users of its products probably become an easy target for that gross behavior to aim at. They view what they use as superior and balk at the idea of helping someone that uses something "inferior". Lots of overlap with the reply-guy and "just use <thing>" crowd too
I suppose that makes sense. I am also in the camp of hating snap, but I've ignored it for so long I sorta forgot that its the default for a lot of Ubuntu stuff now. I'll take useless package manager I can ignore over a lot of the other issues I've ran into with Linux lol
Ach, sorry, I missed this comment initially. A bunch of people are elitist jerks, so the prospect of a Linux distro "for the rest of us" is inherently insulting. You get similar stuff for entry level/accessible tools in any niche hobby.
My personal beef is that Mark Shuttleworth is an asshat who puts IQ tests into his interview process, and only seeks candidates who were in the top 5% of their high school graduating class decades after graduating (here's one source, and another, but it's pretty easy to find other examples of this elsewhere), among several other pointless bro-esque, irrelevant questions. Typically this goes on to pervade the company culture, which I'd find citations for, but apparently Glassdoor is paywalled now ...
People likely apply to work at Canonical because they believe in the mission, and Mark Shuttleworth treats them like his personal clique of worshippers. Ubuntu is a middling distro and there are better alternatives in 2026 which don't support that man's behaviour. But something is better than nothing, so please don't take this as condemnation of your distro choice 😅 I still run an Ubuntu machine somewhere from back before I read up on the guy.
Yeah I applied to an opening at Canonical probably about a year ago now and dropped out of the process of my own accord once they tried putting me through a genuinely demeaning "cognitive placement test". The preceding parts of the process had indeed asked about what percentage you were in not only of your high school class, but also in individual subjects in your high school class (which I could only guess at). I cannot imagine how this process selects for anything but willingness to endure humiliation and wasting of one's time in order to get a job.
This wasn't why I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora (that was an unrelated build-up of minor annoyances and just being in the mood to distro-hop more than anything), but it absolutely tanked my opinion of Canonical as a company.
Fellow Kubuntu user, 25.10.
Very similar story to you; I ragequit windows, went through a couple of the more "beginner friendly" distros, didn't enjoy them so much and landed on Kubuntu back in 2021. I really like it; it does what I want, it's easily configurable and it just gets out of the way and lets me do what I need to do.
Would highly recommend.
As for people disliking Canonical and being rude - I've noticed that, but almost every issue I've ever had (read: anything I've ever broken by tinkering) has already been solved on the Ubuntu forum so it's rare I encounter it personally.
I use Gentoo because portage is the best package manager I’ve ever used
I'm basic, so I always just use Ubuntu. Though even at work, it seems like everything is Ubuntu. Personally, it works for my purposes, so I stick with it.
Though I wouldn't mind trying like Pop_OS or Bazzite. I got a laptop or two I could toss em on.
EDIT: And whatever my Steam Deck has. SteamOS, which I think is based on Arch? Idk, I just play games on it.
I am running Nixos on my work laptop. I like the convenience of just setting up a nix-shell with the necessary dependencies when I tinker with something. It's running hyperland which feels fairly slick. For my home computer I recently just installed Debian. It is just solid. I figured that if I needed to run some software that wasn't in the regular repo I could just as well either run it in a container or flatpak OR just build it from source.
Mint. It just works, no bullshit. I run a very lean desktop setup, mainly just a browser/video/music player, no gaming. I come from a Windows world, but always on the NT side of things (NT-2000-7-Mint) I ran windows 7 until way past the bitter end. At that point it was either go to Linux or Windows 10 and I just couldn't do it. Linux Mint it was. I don't want to have to mess around with stuff, I just want it to work and Mint for 3 years now has done that.
Been using Arch all round since 2021 and recently jumped to CachyOS on my gaming PC.
Enjoyed all the customizing and fiddling at first but lately there's no major issues and I don't even have to open the terminal much besides a package install or update.
And not the biggest fan of KDE but its the easiest if other people need to use that pc.
For my workstation is either MATE or xfce.
I barely had any arch Linux experience, but tried CachyOS. Easily the best distro I've ever used. I've pretty much got it installed on all my computers except for one laptop, and that uses Linux Mint.
I'm pretty much sticking with CachyOS. For me it's just incredibly robust yet simple to use (all the simplicity of Ubuntu with the speed of Arch Linux and somehow even more stable than both in my experience).
I know the question was about Linux, not *nix, but if one's only exposure to *nix is Linux, I'd highly recommend trying FreeBSD to get a sense of that "old school" Unix feel. Additionally, if you're ever looking to build a headless appliance that continues to "just work" with little to no upkeep, the BSDs are the way to go.
Fedora Bazzite, their "Kinoite" KDE variant.
I don't love Redhat as much as I once did, but it's well-maintained and I can goof off playing almost any games (that don't require DRM I was going to hate in principle anyway) without having to think very hard.
Is Bazzite an official Fedora project? I thought it was just built on top of their immutable distro foundation.
It's not an official Fedora project, it's a derivative of Universal Blue for gaming, which in itself is a derivative of Fedora Atomic, which is an official derivative of Fedora, but the original Universal Blue images were a derivative of Fedora Silverblue (which was Fedora CoreOS for servers with a Gnome desktop environment added), which created Fedora Kinoite as a derivative replacing Gnome with KDE.
It's all just a big ball of wibbly wobbly turtles all the way down.
Gentoo, because:
USEflags let me put less stuff on my system, avoiding things I don't want or need (some dependencies, "features"), instead of apps having every possible feature compiled into themFor installations on other people's laptops that I don't want to have to maintain too much, I've turned to KDE Neon, which users can relatively easily update themselves.
Fedora with Sway.
I really like Sway. I really dislike that I basically have to build a DE around it. Really wish that something like "Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager" gets popular so I can just swap my preferred WM into an existing DE.
Alpine. It's a fairly recent move to there from debian and I'm very much liking the straightforward nature of things, the speed and not having to deal with systemd. For a desktop it's reasonably austere behind the scenes but I have it and kde running on a couple of boxes, including an old surface pro, and it just works.
Debian felt the same when I moved to it sometime around 1999-2000. It doesn't anymore.
The start was red hat 5.2 in 1998 or so but I can't say I stayed there long.
Fwiw my professional life looks more like carpentry than tech.
How is the experience on surface pro? I have an old surface pro 3 that I put Arch on but it's a bit long in the tooth and power management is a headache, though I love the display and overall it's a pretty comfy device for light browsing and pdf viewing
I'm familiar enough with Alpine from container management but I haven't used it extensively
It's fine as a laptop, which is what I want. Everything except the touchscreen works out of the box and I haven't bothered with it. It is possible to get it working.
The battery in it is ancient so I can't really comment on power use.
Nobara which i guess is fedora with glorious eggroll's nvidia drivers and the gaming apps already installed
How is nobara working out for you? I had been using nobara for a few years (also with a Nvidia card) and I started experiencing more and more issues which pushes me to look into other distros.
I was pleasantly surprised with my move to bazzite, all the points of friction I experienced with nobara simply no longer existed.
At the end of the day my gaming time has become so limited that I'm basically only using my steam deck at this point, which runs on steamos.
had one issue with an update, but rolled back (super nice option windows doesnt really do) at bootmenu and really dont have any problems i dont make.
I think you hit the nail on the head there, I do enjoy tinkering with things and very much in the process of learning how to work with linux. I am very much the architect of my own destruction!
Started out on Ubuntu back in 2007, wanted the GUI for an old laptop. Switched to Debian somewhere around 2012, and haven't looked back. Are some of the packages old as fuck? Yes. But it's also bedrock stable, I think my longest uptime was just over 4 years before I finally updated that kernel. And I know how to use it. I tried Gentoo, Arch, and Pop over the years just to experiment. But Debian forever has me in its clutches, and I'm happy to be in them.
Pop_OS! 24.04 with KDE. I had worked with COSMIC for a bit, but found some features still missing from the configuration that was causing scaling issues with my monitor setup (2K and 4K). Mainly around optimizing for gaming seemed to favor KDE or GNOME, so I tried KDE first and was happy with it.
First of all ... Debian on all the servers. 'Cuz, duh.
I run Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) on my laptops and workstations. It is Linux Mint w/o the underlying Ubuntu BS and bloat.
This has been my primary OS for 3-4 years now. Prior to that, I mostly ran PopOS, which I did and still do like, mostly, but had a few semi-catastrophic failures on it that have made me gun-shy, and since I switched to LMDE, I like it even better.
PS: If anyone on the Mint team sees this, I'd be all in favor of Mint switching to LMDE as their flagship version...
I got Kubuntu on my desktop right now because my Windows 10 broke in a way that I'm not wiling to fix. KDE Plasma is the desktop environment that just works and has everything so I could go on with my activities without interruption.
KDE Plasma is so impressive. It is not nearly as popular as it should.
EndeavourOS has been my daily driver for a few years. When I first started out, I chose to go for an Arch derivative on a recommendation because I didn't like the
aptpackage manager on Ubuntu & co., so I went for Manjaro. Manjaro is Manjaro, so I eventually switched to EndeavourOS.I'm happy with it at the moment but I won't lie, I'm a little bit interested in CachyOS's promises of better performance. If I had to switch, I'd either go for CachyOS, pure Arch or try Fedora. I'm happy so long as KDE is there.
I finally switched from Manjaro to EndeavorOS a month ago. I thought it would be a back up just in case Manjaro didn't straighten out, but as soon as I got it installed, I couldn't leave. (Manjaro is still sitting on another hard drive, but I expect to wipe it.) When I was looking for another arch-based OS, it seemed like (other than building Arch myself) the only choices were Cachy and Endeavor. I settled on Endeavor because I find their support system (wiki, support apps and community forum) to be exemplary and the overall vibe to be fantastic. Couldn't be happier.
Opensuse Tumbleweed here. My reasons to use it:
Archlinux since like 2010! Mainly I like to be able to control everything about my OS and understand it deeply. I use it for my main laptop and my home server.
Currently main PC is running Kubuntu 24.04 LTS with Cinnamon instead of KDE. Mostly just because I chose it a long time ago, it worked well enough, and now that I've had enough inertia of using it on my main PC for this long, it's going to be annoying to switch if I decide to do so at some point. I am thinking about trying AwesomeWM on it tho
Couple of other machines I have (laptop, low-power living room TV pc) are running MX Linux. I like their way of doing things, their built-in MX tools, and I'm at the point where I think I prefer XFCE as a DE. At some point I might go MX on my main PC too.
I run an OPNSense DIY router, an Unraid server, and a DietPi (very lightweight Debian running on an old Dell micro PC) print server.
I have another "test" machine that I'm currently trying out CachyOS on also
I do still have one Win10 box around and that's simply for music production because there are a lot of annoyances/caveats/etc for my particular setup that makes me avoid Linux for that purpose for now
All servers run Debian, except firewalls which run OpeBSD, and desktops run Ubuntu which is of course Debian on the inside. I guess I do a lot of embedded stuff on Raspberry Pi OS, which is based on Debian again.
I used to on Slackware back in the day but I’m not about that life anymore.
As of late, I've been running NixOS and Guix System with nongnu packages. The immense learning curve can't be overlooked, but once I got the model down, the strategies for long term maintenance of a system that doesn't match the project leader's vision on other distros became blatantly ridiculous. Sure, oftentimes getting my desired behavior requires shooting blindly in the dark, and I definitely don't use the full capacity of these systems, but I'm setting up an HTPC and haven't felt this optimistic about getting underdocumented daemons upright in a while.
Are you running them together, or are you running two different systems? I have been tempted to switch from NixOS, because even after five years, the configuration language, the home manager vs none vs flakes is driving me up a wall. I don't think anyone can deny that the Nix language is abysmal, and the Guix scheme config looks so clean and well documented.
How is setting up packages that do not exist in the registry? With Nix it's such a pain.
I find nixos to be very painful, but everything else in that space (Ansible, &c) so much more painful. So nixos it is.
AI is very good at writing nix modules en doing refactors, as long as you know what needs to happen on a high level.
Definitely different systems, though supposedly guix-on-nixos is quite alright(? I don't buy it). I have one system with systemwide home-manager and one with userlevel home-manager, after waiting for a few years for flakes to mature, and installed the Guix system a month or two ago. I haven't been as adventurous with Guix, so unfortunately I haven't had to build my own packages yet, but it does seem similar to Nix's process, speaking based only on docs and hearsay.
Has anyone tried/got thoughts on Omarchy? I have heard good things but not pulled the trigger myself.
The technical side looked promising, though I have heard mostly negative things about the projects creator nowadays.
Not sure if this is derailing, but I have a pretty similar result in my setup that I cobbled together without too much fuss from Fedora with Niri and DankMaterialShell.
I'm very impressed with how DMS is getting along as a "Desktop Environment for people who don't want a Desktop Environment".
The same setup should also be easy to setup with Arch or Nix instead of Fedora.
Arch, of course, though my lineage dates back to Mandrake Linux and then a long stint on old Ubuntu with some Windows side quests along the way. Been running Arch in some fashion since 2016 but only recently started to daily drive it. Oh I also successfully booted Linux From Scratch and then never touched it again.
I like Arch just because it really works well for me. I've built up a knowledge base of common problems I've faced and solutions but I rarely have to touch it lately because things just... work. I've got btrfs and snapper set up so that does give me some ease of mind as well. It's also got a lot of inertia, most commands are muscle memory at this point and I've got about a 95% confidence that if something breaks, I can fairly quickly identify the issue and fix it or workaround it. And I also just like problem solving too, I think I'd be bored with an OS that I didn't have to tinker with.
I primarily use Debian or Alpine for all my servers though. Debian is just really nice and stable for the most part and is like a good Clydesdale. Alpine is tiny and great for SBC projects or anything lightweight - I have a couple containers running Alpine as a base. A surprising amount of power in such a little distro.
Rockin Bluefin Linux. It's Fedora with Gnome but immutable so it just works and stays working. With other distros I was running into issues with nvidia drivers and my Samsung g9 49 inch monitor (it's a problem child).
Bluefin is beautiful and functional. I have Forge tiling manager on there as well.
I'm running origami linux with cosmic de on a laptop and it's also great
Right now only regular Ubuntu on server and desktop. It's mostly worked very well. I don't tinker too much and "just wants things to work", and Ubuntu has worked very good for me there.
My desktop runs Debian, I wanted something that just worked and wouldn't need much tinkering to work. I use it for gaming as well as general browsing and light programming, I haven't had to do any major repairs on it even when I changed my CPU and motherboard out last year.
My servers use Alma, I originally used Rocky but found out that it didn't support using Leapp to upgrade between versions. I think Rocky has added it in now, but my default container template is already set and I don't want to make more switches.
I do run Void on a few smaller personal devices. The 2010 netbook I snagged for free has a 32-bit CPU, and Debian dropped 32 bit support with the latest release. Void is rolling so there's no releases, although I know that didn't stop Arch from dropping support a while back. Still, it's a fun little distro that works great for low-power devices.
Finally, my wife uses Mint. She started using Linux before we started dating, and as a non-techie Mint is probably the best choice for her. If it works, why change it?
You sound like me lol
I did Leapp from Alma 9 to Alma 10 and it worked super easy and had zero issues
Void makes me feel safe and clean. I always feel like I’m going to scuff up a new pair of shoes when I install something on it. It’s like I don’t want to mess it up lol
I was a long-time Arch user, but switched to Void a few years ago primarily because I was sick of how systemd basically consumed the entire Linux ecosystem. I'm a strong believer in the old school "do one thing and do it well" unix philosophy, and I appreciate the ability to pick and choose my system components, as opposed to having one monolithic do-everything subsystem lurking in the background. It's not what I would recommend for a casual user who just wants to dip their toes into a possible replacement for Windows 11, but it's definitely the right choice for me--the only way I'll ever go back to a systemd distro is if there are absolutely no alternatives anymore (let's hope that never happens).
My Linux Journey was
Ubuntu->Mint-> GalliumOS and Fedora on 2 different machines-> NixOS(Laptop only)-> PopOS!(Desktop) ->NixOS (Desktop AND Laptop).
Mint is always gonna be the first immediate recommendation, I’m using NixOS because I wanted something different AND I could strip it to what I really need, since I ran it first with i3wm on the Chromebook that had GalliumOS on it.
Nowadays I use it because of Ephemeral Shells, atomicity and rollback.
I’m fighting against the immutable nature though, I don’t like immutable Distros but NixOS’ positives makes it more tolerable.
It’s not an OS I’d recommend but despite sucking at Nix syntax and getting it to do what I want, I’m feeling the most comfortable using it than other OSes, barring LMDE perhaps but I would think of it as a fallback rather than my main distro.
I only touched Arch via SteamOS but that barely counts, same with CachyOS.
Fedora with gnome.... I like it so much I shoehorned into my son's laptop as well.
It works flawlessly, it's fast and easy to use.
I used Debian for an year before fedora and I kind of liked it but while I understood it was super stable (and I was for real) I needed something slightly more up to date :)
Bazzite, based on Fedora. It’s extremely stable, updates are very easy and you can always roll back. Gaming works great. Using Gnome since it gets out of my way, which is nice.
I use Gentoo and Arch, btw!
I used Gentoo since around 2010. When I bought a new motherboard for my desktop this year, I switched to Arch, since it is a bit like Gentoo but there is no need to compile everything. I used Arch on my notebook (that I use like once a month) for last two years so I knew what I'm migrating to. I like rolling release distros as you are kinda on the bleeding edge all the time and don't need to upgrade to newer version of the distro itself.
I started with Linux around 2001 with Mandrake or Mandriva or what it was back then - just tried it on my PC while in high school. I completely switched to OpenSUSE in around 2008 when IDE connector in my expensive laptop died and Windows XP couldn't boot from USB drive (it cut off/restarted USB during boot, duh!). Since then I'm Linux only. I went from Suse straight to Gentoo - out of curiosity and to learn along the way. And learn I did! Gentoo was great and still is. I still run it on daughter's PC and on my three DIY servers. But once I do reinstall on any of these, I will go with Arch.
I have installed SUSE and later Ubuntu to my dad's desktop and while he was sceptical in the beginning, he is happy now - everything (he needs) just works.
I have recently installed Ubuntu on another relative's gaming PC when we upgraded motherboard and Windows failed to activate no matter what I did. I got fed up and just installed Linux. This relative bitches about, but actually uses the PC without any problems, including gaming.
And this year I installed Ubuntu Mate on yet another relative's weak notebook. He had Windows 10 there which wouldn't unlock for him - "Wait for 2 hours and try again" - it didn't work even the next day or another week. So I got fed up once again and now he has working laptop. In near future, he is getting Arch, as Ubuntu LTS is too slow to pick up on modern games and needs (protontricks, for example) and I'd like to switch him to rolling release.
Yet another relative asked me about upgrading from Windows 10 to 11 on his old PC. I said it can't run it (10 years old CPU which is still powerful enough for his needs) so there may be another Linux desktop in a few months/years.
I stick with well known and long running distros - be it some Ubuntu flavor for relatives or something adventurous like Gentoo or Arch for me. I know there are things like CachyOS or even SteamOS, but I like my PC be a desktop, not gaming PC (SteamOS) and I don't want to invest time into something short-lived (CachyOS). I may be trading in some performance by doing that, but gain some stability and probably future-proofing in exchange.
I also own Steam Deck, so I run SteamOS (Arch) there, of course. And I have some Raspberries running here, so Raspbian/RaspberryOS there (Debian).
I run Arch btw
EndeavourOS (based on Arch btw) + KDE, mostly because I want Arch and I've used it from scratch before, but I like the easy installers as I've gotten older and this one seems like it's much better than Manjaro as that broke after running it for years due to docker stuffs and could never quite figure out what the problem was other than some kernel issue. EndeavourOS hasn't had that same problem yet.
Debian, because I started with Ubuntu and never saw much reason to dislike it, but I just wanted a more paired down version.
Linux Mint Xfce on my main computer. Cachy OS on the new gaming setup.
CachyOS for my daily driver, Kubuntu for the family, and Ubuntu Server for my home lab and self hosts. I use Arch btw, but switched to CachyOS this year so I don't have to fuss over a lot of the odds and ends.
I think it is a nice middle ground between the standard ironman old-school Arch install and adding in some smart optimizations/QoL features Arch just doesn't have baked in from the start. I know many love it or hate it, but I have grown to enjoy it on my desktop. It has successfully taken over to be my gaming machine so I could sundown using Win 11 which was a huge plus in my book. Runs games, software, and anything I throw at it with ease.
Mostly Arch or CachyOS. Those tend to be the ones that work the best in general and are the easiest to mold into what you need. I used to use sway, nowadays Cosmic Desktop.
I have great respect for Fedora for their better security stance and sometimes gravitate towards that. Mostly for anti-USA reasons (not sure if valid, didn't bother to research that much since obvious alternatives are easily available) I've been staying away from it lately.
I'm a 15+ year old Windows user that switched to CachyOS full time (no dual boot either, I'm going all in) about a month ago after I had to build a new Pc. I wanted to get off of Windows since support for 10 was ending and I did not want to use Windows 11 and it's abhorrent use experience. The main driver was sheer hatred toward Microsoft that started when they told me my PC was now garbage because it doesn't have a TPM chip, despite everything working flawlessly. The second driver was just not wanting a bloated OS hogging system resources. And the last driver was pure support for open source.
I considered many options, especially Mint since I'm a beginner, but I just came to the realization that I don't mind tinkering with my system at all and ultimately learning how to unbreak something is more valuable in the long run than praying every day that nothing ever breaks. Not to criticize anyone who doesn't do that, it's totally understandable to not want to think about your OS. That's the beauty of Linux, you have choice!
Funny thing is, CachyOS has never broken except by my own doing (and I wouldn't even call them breaks, just things that I didn't know how to fix and was scared I'd make the problem worse in my blind attempts to fix it). But the 2 times it happened I easily rolled back to a previous snapshot via snapper, which Cachy sets up for you automatically on install. It just feels so nice to know that no matter what happens I'll probably be fine with a rollback.
Another thing that helped my mindset, and something I encourage everyone to do, is to just have all of my files in a drive that's not the system drive. That way, even if I somehow nuke my entire system, my files are safely secured on my other drive. To be honest I think a solid backup structure is what brings anyone more peace of mind regardless of the distro they choose. This applies to Windows as well, you never know when something will break.
Aside from that, performance has been stellar, games work wonderfully, and the system is very bug free. Bugs I do find are typically software-specific, not OS-level. I even got some ancient Japanese visual novels working through WINE which was shocking since they're even annoying to get running on Windows (have to install locale emulators, tinker with character encoding, patch the exe multiple times, etc.).
Will I stick with Cachy forever? I don't know, but it's been such a rock solid experience that I don't feel the need to switch at all right now.
Overall, I feel much more free since switching to Linux. I'm so glad I didn't get to experience the Windows 11 downfall.
I keep things fairly vanilla and simply run Ubuntu on my home PC and then Debian on my home server. For the server, I simply picked Debian as the internet recommended it to me and it's given me no trouble. Given my previous personal experience running Ubuntu, I felt comfortable digging into Debian for my server.
For my home PC, I actually spent the better part of 18 months hopping from distro to distro. I got caught up in internet hype for various distros and wasted a lot of time trying them out, running into issues, debugging them, trying to fix them and eventually give up and move onto the next one. Since I've gotten myself lodged in the Apple ecosystem (vendor lock-in!) over the last few years for my other devices, one thing I've come to appreciate is how little I've really had to fuss with macOS to get it to do what I want. know some people feel strongly about Apple's products and software but anecdotally, they've given me the least trouble and fuss. I realized I want the same from my tower so I eventually went back to Ubuntu. With some minor tweaks and extensions to GNOME, I feel pretty comfortable with it now.
Ubuntu works best for me since the majority of mainstream software is only really tested to work on Ubuntu and as such, I have the least trouble with it. Things auto-update nicely without me having to intervene. My Nvidia 3070 has no troubles with the auto-installed/managed/updated drivers on Ubuntu and I have no trouble with gaming on Ubuntu. Ubuntu's updates have also given me the least grief. With some of the other distros I tried, even the gaming focused ones, there'd be a point where an update would eventually break something bigly and I'd have to patiently wait for an update to be able to use my computer.
My primary machine has been running the same Gentoo image since 2008. Every component has been replaced multiple times but I consider it the same machine because the OS image and /home has been rolling forward continuously. It was reinstalled in 2008 because that's when I switched to a 64 bit userspace. There hasn't been a reason to reinstall since then.
On one of my laptops I use Arch because it's not powerful enough to keep up with Gentoo builds.
all of my servers are on either Ubuntu server or Debian. My super shitty Chromebook (Toshiba CB35) runs like a dream with Endeavour (arch flav) with i3 normally, but still performs well with other wms.
Yeah, way better. In the old days I was hesitant to update or even reboot for fear of the unknown… which was typically already known in a bunch of posts from a decade earlier. :)
So me not updating or restarting my SF01 for three years was leet opsec — got it! :)
the only Linux computer i actually have these days is my VPS, which runs Debian Trixie. i'm liking it -- i might use testing if/when i go back. was always an arch user for the past ~8 years
I was about to say I use Debian for everything except my main computer that runs Arch (only because the tinkering is part of the fun I look for when using my PC), but then I realised that that is as far from the truth as possible:
() I'd really like to find a graphical web browser that can also run on that laptop, but so far no such luck. If anyone has any ideas, shoot!
I can think of three potentially useful GUI browsers on such an ancient machine:
I do not believe these three have any Javascript support.
I usually use Pop! OS and Debian and NetBSD(I know, not Linux), but from time to time I've used Raspbian, Parrotsec, Alpine and Kali for various dedicated purposes.
SteamOS, because it comes pre-installed on the Steam Deck :P
In actuality though, I do use it as my daily driver, for games obviously but also everything else using a dock and desktop mode. I did dual boot Linux (Ubuntu I think) several years back when I was flirting with being a programmer, but this is my first real experience with Linux full-time. It's been great, I do love the Discover store as a convenient way to install most things. The decks immutable OS makes installing non-Discover apps a pain sometimes, but nothing too bad. Overall very happy, runs well, and glad to not have to worry about what crappy thing Microsoft will do next
Let's see, uh...
Mint is my go-to for new installs, because it Just Works so well. Two computers in the house are on it right now. One of them is the living room gaming/media PC, which ran Pop!_OS for a little while but I found the experience to be pretty flaky.
My laptop used to also run Mint, but I switched to Kubuntu at some point. I forget why I did, but Plasma's so nice I've kept it anyway. That one's also got a Kali VM because everything I use ends up with one of those eventually.
The kids' laptop (the one that isn't running ChromeOS) runs... I forget what I put on there actually, something lightweight that a decommissioned Chromebook could live with. I should look into that.
The Pis all run Raspberry Pi OS.
My wife's all Apple products. She'll see the light someday.
At this point, the only computer in my house still on Windows is my work laptop, and that's only because it isn't mine.
I've been using Solus quite happily for the last couple years. It ships with the Budgie desktop and has great defaults for someone migrating from Windows. It has been very stable even though it's a rolling distro.
In the past, I've also tried OpenSuse Tumbleweed which was fine if you are happy with Gnome or KDE.
I've been using Linux Mint for a couple years now. My computer overheated one day, and the hard drive was the last thing I had to get working again. That got me looking into ways to use the computer even if the hard drive completely died, and that led me to Linux on USB. I read a lot of opinions saying that Mint is the closest thing to a drop-in replacement for Windows, so I tried that and was satisfied. Eventually I decided to install it permanently and dual boot, but now I haven't booted into Windows in ages.
On that note, could someone please recommend a guide for distro-hopping-for-noobs? I was a moron and installed Mint onto a partition of a spinning-disk external hard drive, and I've noticed it getting slower as time goes on. I'd like to port my existing installation to an SSD and try out some other distros in the meantime, but I'm terrified that I'll brick my computer trying.
Oh man it's a mess. I'm responsible for my own systems and the folks who work with me since we run some non standard systems. I'll give my non Linux systems first, since I'm in way too many environments.
Windows: XP (legacy scientific equipment), Vista (retro gaming), 7 (legacy scientific equipment), 10 (less legacy scientific equipment), 11 (regrettable but necessary for gaming for a few things I run).
Mac: 2011-2020 Intel silicon iMacs (second hand free/cheap work computers for my team), 2017 iMac Pro with stupid ram (work computer for me), and M1 Pro MacBook Pro (daily driver laptop, coding test bench).
Linux (other than Android):
Ubuntu: very old laptop I dual booted to learn Linux on when I started research at a place with a headless server. Not in active use.
Linux Mint:
slightly newer laptop that Win 10 slowed way down. Has some legacy hardware so I keep it around.
Several VMs I made on my iMac Pro when I needed some Linux software, various versions.
Programming test bench computers for part of my team that does a lot of coding and need dedicated Linux computers. These are "spyware computers" that had broken Windows installs on them from Amazon, but they came with i9s for $300, so we wiped them and installed Mint, upgraded RAM and SSDs, and boom mini compute...thermal throttling sucks though, working on it.
Debian:
Old (Buster) and New (latest, I don't remember) Data Acquisition computers for work. Old started slowing to tar, so we upgraded - custom build for $300, very proud.
Home Server (latest), for backing everything up and streaming my media to devices. Similarly, my to-be-remote backup solution is a 2014 Mac Mini that I wiped and put a duplicate Debian install on with some huge USB HDDs.
Various work VMs (buster mostly?). When the old Daq computer got me into Debian, some software didn't run right fast for Mint, so I added some here. Now, my main coding environment at work.
Pop_OS!: 24.04 test environment/sandbox computer. I asked some questions about it a while ago. Had to reformat (out of computer!?) the install SSD to then install a new version of it. Nuts. But it's working well with my RTX 5070, which is why I tried it. Not sure if it's a forever option, but I'm pretty pleased for now.
I...have too many fractured computer environments between work and home, but I can tell you exactly what each one is for, so that's probably a sign I have the right amount sadly.
I've been running Linux Mint for a bit over a year now, picked it as something seemingly straight forward to migrate to from Win 10, or at the very least try and experiment with.
Beyond installing as a dual boot setup, I think I've only booted back into Win 10 two or three times since. should probably look at reclaiming that drive space at this point, and tidy up drive formats for Linux in general.
Debian, with their KDE task through the netinstaller.
It's stable, both as a project and an operating system. Open, democratic, and works very well with minimal fuss. I don't need to add third-party repos to enable wifi or multimedia generally (especially more recently), and is generally supported by most software vendors.
Distrobox and flatpak correct the issue of outdated software as I can update the parts I want on this solid base.
I wanted to use Gentoo on the laptop back when I first got it, but I needed to fiddle a bit too much with it for my liking to get it working with the laptop hardware. Pop OS seemed like a decent thing to look into. The initial plan was to switch to Archlinux afterwards, but Pop turned out to be acceptable in many ways (and annoying in a bunch of others).
I'm using Mint Cinnamon on my main PC and have done so since leaving Windows 3 years ago. I still consider myself a Linux newbie though. I've still not really committed anything about using terminal to memory... unlike most here, I'm not a programmer, though I like to tinker and was a Windows power user (or pretty near to it) after being the fix-it person for my family computer growing up. I haven't had the time to invest into anything esoteric since switching, and Mint has been user-friendly enough that I've just stayed with it.
I've played around with 4 or 5 other distros but haven't really done any distro-hopping yet. I recently got 2 used laptops that I was supposed to be testing before giving to friends but that may or may not still happen, and I have Kubuntu and Debian on those. When I build my next PC (if RAM prices ever come back down) I'm surely going to use something with KDE Plasma.
I'm on Void linux. I don't remember why I picked it, but it's what I'm comfortable with so it's what I use on all of my devices. I tried Arch and I put fedora on my wife's pc and my dad's pc, but Void is home. I like how services work. I like how lean it is. I like how stable it is.