I use Fedora 38, it’s stable, things just work, and the software is up-to-date.
I use Arch because it’s so customizable and there’s so much more freedom. Once I installed Arch I realized I’d never go back to Ubuntu. I’m so used to using the command line all the time now it feels weird and annoying when I have to use something with a GUI desktop environment (I use i3.) People always tell me when they see my system in public (it’s a ThinkPad) it looks clunky, but even the inability to set custom time/date settings in KDE was mildly annoying to me.
I sincerely think CLIs and TUIs are no harder than “user-friendly” GUIs but they’re just too far from the average modern person’s experience for this to be acknowledged. Using nmtui to connect to WiFi is hardly more difficult than what Windows or macOS do.
I also really love pacman, the AUR, and the Arch Wiki.
It has the most accessible package manager of em all. And ofc I’m talking about Arch Linux (bah teh wei.)
It feels great that if something is not present in the upstream repo, I can still usually find it in AUR.
- The package manager.
- New releases make it to the repositories quickly.
- The software is as vanilla as possible; no changes made by the distribution except to get it working.
- The wiki.
- +/- No nagging graphical updater.
- +/- Users can share build scripts for building software from source very easily
- +/- No particular stance on free software licenses.
Debian Bookworm. On my laptop and all my servers.
I’m a seasoned professional Linux sysadmin, so getting a distro installed has never been a problem for me (thanks to my first proper distro being Gentoo).
In the end, it’s the stability and “knowing what to expect”, that always makes me come back to Debian.
I don’t know how you deal with non rolling releases on your machines you actually use for work. By the end of the lifecycle all the tools are ancient
ChojinDSL It depends on your use case. In my case I mostly manage bare metal servers running certain services or docker.
For servers I don’t want rolling releases. That just means stuff is going to break on a regular basis. In my opinion, Arch Linux is the worst offender here. I don’t know if it’s gotten better since last I used it. But with Arch Linux the problem was, that you had to keep up with the updates. If you forgot to update some machine in a while, it could happen that you missed some update that changed some critical things, and everything else already moved on, and the only way to fix it was to hunt down the intermediate package version and try to install that manually, or just wipe and reinstall.
As far as “ancient” tools is concerned, it depends on what those tools are. Bugfix and security patches is what I’m most interested in on a server. Just because there is a newer version of software out there with some new features, doesn’t mean that I need those features, or that they’re relevant.
For the cases where I need something newer, there’s docker, flatpak and backports repos, (if not third party repos for certain tools).
For servers I don’t want rolling releases
Yeah I wasn’t talking about servers.
Rock stability. Everything works. I run debian oldstable, even bookworm is too much for me at the moment. Yes, seriously. I tried to connect to my work office using azure web client and the keyboard layout was wrong. When I went back to debian bullseye, it worked as expected. By the way, this bug also happens with arch and fedora.
I have installed arch as well because sometimes I just want to play with things. I’m very interested in immutable systems, but NixOs is too difficult for me and I’m afraid I will spend too much time on it.
Workstation:
Used to love gentoo, but it kept breaking on me.
Went Ubuntu until they went stupid, then arch for a while but again, breakage.
Debian works, I have to spend 0 energy on it, and I can layer on different vms and lxc for whatever other distros I want.
Server:
Was freebsd because it was perfect and jails were next level shit but people keep putting out software that was obnoxious to install without docker, so debian as hypervisor/zfs and freebsd for most apps, debian for the obnoxious ones. Perfect system.
Easy installation, just works™, and it’s basically a Debian Sid so it’s relatively up to date. Siduction!
Arch: I like the knowledge and understanding that comes with regular usage. I’ve learned a lot about my system that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Also the PKGBUILD system / AUR.
I might as well ask here:
Im running arch on my Desktop. Mostly just to Experiment a bit, nothing to serious, Laptop is ubuntu, and both are dualboot with Windows for Gaming (nvdia gpu in both).
The Main reason to use arch was to play around with Windows Managers like hyprland. However I get the feeling that some stuff is simply missing and or configured wrong on the System.
Is it a better idea to start with something like endeavor with sway and start ricing from there?
both are dualboot with Windows for Gaming (nvdia gpu in both).
If you don’t mind the question, what games do you play? Have you tried gaming on Linux at all? Gaming works really REALLY good nowadays.
Indie games ive tried work well, which is pretty good. A big factor for using windows is Gamepass and my slow internet, where it is more convenient to play the downloaded games under windows.
Other than that its a bit of sim racing in/and VR. Im also doing a bit of CAD Stuff with Fusion 360 and my experience with Free CAD wasnt very good.
Most of this is probably a simple getting used to it process, but so far dualbooting works quite well.
Ubuntu usually provides you with system working out of the box. Same goes for Fedora and its spins. Arch is DIY distribution, which means that the “missing” stuff you usually have to install/configure yourself.
archinstallgives you just a basic start.If you don’t know your way around bare window managers, then yeah, it would be a good idea to try with things preconfigured: EndeavourOS should give you that, Fedora Sway spin also.
Or you could bite the bullet and try to provide the missing things yourself and learn in the process. What are you missing?
I use Mint. As a beginner the Windows-like feel is convenient for me but once I get the hang of it I could see myself trying something else
This is what I recommend for Linux newbs. And they can stay with it if they’re happy with it. It’s also a decently competent Linux distribution which is a hell of a bonus.
@Anolutheos @Lolors17 I use Mint Debian edition. I got fed up opening my laptop and having to update when MS said so, so switched to Ubuntu, then Mint, the LMDE and have stayed for 4 years. It’s not exciting, cutting edge, etc but neither am I! It just works all the time. Updates are easy and everything is boringly reliable - I love it!
Hopefully LMDE6 is a game changer for the most popular first Linux distro. If the CosmicOS by System76 doesn’t win that title.
My grandparents were 1,5 years with Mint but LMDE5 has now been for 10 months and it is awesome. Literally 0 issues since day 0 whereas Win7 and Win10 caused constant headaches for me over the phone.
@Nuuskis Are you using a System76 machine? If so, how do you find it? And importantly how would you rate the keyboard against a ThinkPad / Lenovo?
Unfortunately I’m not. I’m running numerous Thinkpads until System76 releases their in-house produced Virgo laptop with hot-swappable mechanical keys and open source bios (Coreboot). It’ll also have the trackpoint from Thinkpads.
I use Fedora 38, it’s stable, things just work, and the software is up-to-date.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I like it for being a rolling release with quality control. On the one hand I don’t like its restrictive defaults but on the other hand I know enough to work with them and that’s given me a leaner system.
I like Tumbleweed because it’s utterly boring and predictable while being rolling.
That’s also what I run.
I want a boring up to date system with a good KDE desktop that just works (even with an nVidia GPU). Tumbleweed is fine. I don’t want to mess with my computer, I want to use it. I messed with it ages ago when I had to enter xmodelines by hand to make the damn thing work, I’m glad we’re past that.
I like it because I can appreciate a good lizard.
Same here. Very good KDE Plasma and KDE apps integration, rolling and up to date apps, and very stable at that and if something would go wrong I can easily at boot switch back to a state before the update. Pure gold.
i use arch, it’s amazing, everything i wanna do works other then games since i have some old cheap nvidia gpu which is hardware fault itself, i wanna do developer tasks just works, wanna do tweaks just works and it’s fun to use. i tried using other Distros i just can’t use debian based or arch based just bare bone arch with gnome or xfce depending on my mood. if i switch fedora is always my 2nd choice but not sure after some news released on red hat I didn’t stick to fedora because of lack of package or something like that just package management things kept me in arch.
I use Ubuntu LTS. It’s stable, things just work, and it’s got 10 years of free support. That’s a very long time to not worry about my machines.
I don’t get it. You end up with ancient packages and have to install ppas to get modern tools, or write code that can’t take advantage of modern tools and have to do workarounds
This is a similar reason as to why I use Debian as my base operating system and for just about every service I run on my host, the processes are containerized using Docker. It gives me the flexibility to choose the best “operating system” that supports the software I want to run at the release cadence that suits how I want to consume it for a given piece of software, and the base host OS is just that and nothing more. Upgrades to new Debian releases are non-events and I get no surprises with my apps in containers.
I can upgrade the underlying container base operating systems as I need which I choose Alpine, Debian, and Ubuntu based on which fits my needs. Alpine gets updates quickly, Debian is good for core services that I would normally run natively on my host, and Ubuntu hits well for wide support of almost every other service I need. So I get a stable base with the option to go as quickly as I need if I have a need for a newer package. It’s not always about having the newest software, it’s about stability where it counts.
Exactly. I haven’t used PPAs, pinning or backporting for many years now. Docker, Flatpak and Snap take care of nearly all use cases.
No PPAs, no workarounds. Just Docker, Snap and Flatpak. OS upgrades become trivial. Nothing breaks.
$ sudo docker ps -q | wc -l 17Currently running 17 containers.
E: If you haven’t looked into VS Code’s “dev container” feature for software development, you should check it out.
It’s easier to install when using DualBoot.
EndeavourOS is just what I needed when I started to DualBoot with windows, besides being just easier to install, some games I play still require Windows, like most dx12 games since they’re currently broken due to some driver error in the latest Nvidia drivers.
I love Arch and can’t see myself using anything but it, but I don’t have the patience to do a manual install every other week or so because I got bored or am to lazy to actually fix my system, especially while dualbooting.
