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Linux @lemmy.ml
Mwas alt (prob) @thelemmy.club

What distro do you use and why?

yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.

246 comments

  • EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.

    Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.

  • Debian. Because it's the best about "Just Works" (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.

    BUT I'm also not a "numbers go up" geek. I don't give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that's just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).

    If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.

    (/soapbox)

    My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don't play the latest games anyway, I'm a PatientGamer, and I don't do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.

    It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don't have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).

    It all works fine, but one day I'll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs

  • Different distros for different uses:

    • Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
    • Nobara for my main gaming PC.
    • Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
    • Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

  • Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.

    I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it's what I'm comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to "just work" most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.

    Ubuntu server is primarily because it's incredibly easy to get support when you need it.

  • Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it's easy.

  • Debian Testing. It isn't "recommended" but it works fine.

    Obviously if you want AUR you need an Arch variant, in which case just pick Arch.

    Edit: I needed the why, it's up to date enough for me and I know apt well.

  • I used to use Arch btw.

    Now I am on Nix, I just love shell.nix files. I haven't spent much time on my configs yet, but once I finish them, they'll be super easy to set up again, thats cool.

  • Mint on my ancient MacBook because I didn’t really know any better and it’s working just nice for me, and Asahi/Fedora on my M1 mini, because it’s the only option.

  • NixOS because it's the only usable stab at sustainable system configuration.

    • All that follows is my personal opinion, but for ease of writing, I'm gonna present it as facts.

      Once you have grasped the advantage that Nix offers, all the fundamentally different solutions just seem s o inferior. When I first tried NixOS on a decommissioned notebook, the concept immediately made sense. Granted, I didn't understand the language features very well – I mostly used it for static configuration with most stuff just written verbatim in configuration.nix, though I did use flakes very early on because of Lanzaboote. But just the fact that you had a central configuration in a single language that was able to cross-reference itself across different parts of the system absolutely blew me out of the water. I was a very happy and content Arch user, even proficient enough to run my own online repository that built from a clean chroot for AUR packages (if you use Arch with AUR packages on multiple systems, check out the awesome aurutils!), but after seeing the power of NixOS in action, I switched over all my machines as soon as I could - desktop, virtual servers (thanks nixos-anywhere!), main notebook and NAS.

      People often praise the BSDs for their integrated approach – NixOS manages to bring that approach to Linux. Apart from GUIX System that I never tried because Secure Boot was a requirement when I last looked at other distributions, none of them have tackled the problem that NixOS solves, and it's not even certain if they actually understand it. Conceptually, it plays on a whole different level. No more unrecoverable systems, even with broken kernels – just boot the previous configuration. Want to try changes without any commitment? nixos-rebuild test got you. Need an app quick? nix shell nixpkgs#app it is.

      Plus the ecosystem is just fantastic. The aforementioned nixos-anywhere really helps with remote provisioning, using disko to declaratively setup filesystems and mounts, you have devenv which is a really good solution for development environments, both regarding reproducibility and features, and many more that I can't mention here. There is nothing comparable, and the possibilities are unlike in any other ecosystem.

      It's not perfect for sure though, and documentation is sparse. The language concepts which allow one to "unlock" the most powerful features are different from what most people know.

      I was lucky enough to have some downtime at work to get into the system a bit deeper (this was still for work though, just not my core skillset) by implementing a "framework" for our needs which forced me to not just copy and paste stuff, though I definitely did get inspired from other solutions, but to actually better understand the module system (I think?), thinking in attribute sets, writing your own actual modules, function library and so on. But in the end, it was definitely worth it, and I'm unaware of any other system that would allow what Nix and NixOS allowed me to build.

    • this but since Nix is licensed with MIT and deals with weapon manufacturers, i had to go

      GUIX!!!, it is everything

  • I use Fedora simply because I got a Framework and the fingerprint reader didn’t work in (K)Ubuntu so I tried Fedora as a little test. It worked, so I just stuck with it - everything else worked as I wanted, and it gave me the opportunity to try a completely new distribution.

  • NixOS for most things, Debian on some servers as a docker host

    • Interesting. I’ve using NixOS many years on servers but recently also started using it as a base for docker hosts. Before that I used Ubuntu or Debian for docker hosts, but I figured out I still like the declarative approach even for simple servers like docker hosts. There’s your basic security config, ssh keys and monitoring setup that I used to do imperatively, but I much rather have declaratively now, no matter how small. And enabling docker on NixOS is just a virtualisation.docker.enable = true; anyway.

      • Oh I know it's better, problem is I host some stuff my friend group relies on so I don't want downtime while I figure things out. Also, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to get NixOS set up on a VPS without native support (I'm on Hetzner and I know it's possible, it's just a bit of a hassle). It's one of those projects that I'll get to eventually, when I got time. Or so I tell myself

    • I recently started using compose2nix, and I'm enjoying it.

      https://github.com/aksiksi/compose2nix

  • Bazzite for personal stuff because it looked neat and just worked after installation with a small learning curve. Due to interia I went with bluefin on the work computer for the same reasons

  • I use NixOS for my desktop because I hate myself you can configure everything without needing to edit a bunch of different config files that use different configuration languages.

    I use Arch btw for my Minecraft server because I am crazy.

246 comments