what's your current linux distro?

wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned, so I’m keeping windows for it specifically.) this’ll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn’t love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.

and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you’ve tried but didn’t like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I’ve seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.

mozz,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Debian is mine and has been for decades + I’m a little bit happy to see it’s still well represented / well thought of in the community. Everything works, and you can choose new + exciting with headaches sometimes, or old + stable with no headaches but old.

Only real issue is the package management hasn’t kept pace with node / python / go / everything else wanting to do its own little mini package management, and so very occasionally that side is a little bit of a mess

NixOS I would like to try at some point as the core philosophy seems a little more suited to the modern (Docker / pip / etc) era, but I never messed with it

robber,

I recently switched to Debian and use nix to install / provide the likes of node / python / go for development.

mozz,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Wait, how does that work? Can you do Nix package management on a Debian system or something?

robber,

Yes, you can just go ahead and install nix in your distro to use e.g. nix-shell to create a development environment.

doubtingtammy,

Conda makes python soooo much easier. I never use apt for python things. If you use it a lot, you’ll eventually have to learn how to work with different environments. But I promise it’s easier than trying to solve dependency hell with some combination of apt and pip.

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Qubes

Max_P,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

What distro I’m using isn’t that helpful of a question because it’s largely a matter of taste and technical needs. I use Arch in large part because I do some rather exotic things that would be harder to set up on most mainstream distros whereas Arch just gives me a completely blank slate to work with and configure my system the exact way I want it to work. My desktop also has some server duties, it runs VMs, it has multiple GPUs and also drives my TV room independently of my main workstation area.

I usually recommend whichever distro gets you the closest to having everything the way you like out of the box as a starting point just because it’s less frustrating when most things works out of the box. The Arch experience is nothing works out of the box because it doesn’t even come with a box. Arch isn’t necessarily a bad choice even for beginners, but the learning curve is much steeper as a result and some people do like to just learn everything whereas some others prefer to start with the shallow part of the pool rather than diving it headfirst. It’s not like you have to commit to any distribution forever, you can start with something simple to use, learn your way around Linux and then you can upgrade to another distribution as your needs and wants evolves.

DARbarian,
@DARbarian@kbin.run avatar

Currently running Garuda for gaming and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for everything else. Very much look forward to combining them in my own Arch/Void install when I get my new laptop.

Xirup,
@Xirup@yiffit.net avatar

Dumb question, why don’t you use Garuda for everything?

DARbarian,
@DARbarian@kbin.run avatar

As somebody who rarely PC games at the moment, I feel it's pretty bloated for what it is. But my Nvidia GPU worked out of the box so

silkroadtraveler,

Mint 21.3 as my main Desktop OS - almost zero complaints after over a year. Everything just works.

Ubuntu using Linux-Surface on my old Surface Pro. Breathed new life into a device I had abandoned (after all 8gb of ram isn’t enough for Windows malware these days). Gnome works really nice on a touchscreen two-in-one. Kudos to the Linux-Surface folks. They took one of the few positive developments from Microsoft (Surface hardware) and made it possible to remove the worst part (windows). Not that I’ll ever buy a Surface again. It also allowed me to retire my iPad.

Fedora Linux on a cheap Dell laptop as my media client. Fedora is nice and runs well, haven’t done too much with it other than Firefox and Calibre. Nice to see a different ‘branch’ in action.

I’m pretty basic and generally lazy so I don’t delve into some of the smaller distros or distro hop. Maybe later I’ll do it with VMs, but eh not sure it’s my kind of hobby. Too many other things to do.

Best of luck and let us know how it goes.

st3ph3n,

Seconding this experience with Mint 21.3, although on a laptop here. I just wanted something that works without much fucking about, and it delivers.

silkroadtraveler,

Yes! Linux Mint is such a great project - it made me excited to get on my desktop again.

viking,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

I have a Surface Notebook 2 and for the life of me can’t get Ubuntu (or Xubuntu in my case) to work with it. No matter which installation style I use, either it crashes during the installation or never boots into the bootloader. Eventually I installed some custom Arch, but I hate it.

silkroadtraveler,

If it’s any comfort, it took me a few tries to get it to work. It was over a year ago so the details are a bit rusty. I started out trying to install Debian, and it also crashed during installation, so I went back and tried some of the bug fixes. (One was something to do with the MOK). Debian didn’t work after that but Ubuntu did. It was a strange experience, and there’s nothing that would motivate me to switch after I finally got it to work.

Perhaps you can give it another shot sometime and it’ll work. If you hate the custom arch that’s on it, and you don’t use it, you might as well try.

viking,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

Yeah I’ll try eventually, but I got another Laptop running Xubuntu just fine, so I just don’t really use the Surface at all. It’s more of a last resort for the time being, and for that, any OS will do.

mox,

I’m on Debian Stable (with a few backported packages) for both work and gaming. It’s not the most beginner-friendly distro, but I’m no beginner, and I love how low-maintenance it is. It just keeps on working.

I would like to try Qubes OS eventually. I don’t think it will be ready for gaming any time soon, but for privacy and security-minded isolation of components, I expect it’s tough to beat.

Cube6392,
@Cube6392@beehaw.org avatar

Antix! It has a couple of rough patches but overall I really like it. Mainly I like having my RAM back

v8bmx3,
@v8bmx3@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m on MX Linux

RiikkaTheIcePrincess,
@RiikkaTheIcePrincess@pawb.social avatar

Finally, my chance to say…

I use Arch, by the way :D

…Also, I tried Ubuntu and Mint and Fedora and some others (ages ago). Didn’t like feeling like everything I wanted to do was stepping on the toes of some software that was trying to manage it for me, but not how I wanted or I just didn’t want it managed for me.

I tend to alternate between Arch and Gentoo every few years. Sometimes Arch feels like it’s making assumptions and doing things its way more than I want, but then Gentoo takes ages to install or update anything, is a bit more fiddly. I’ll probably go back or maybe try out Funtoo again but for now I don’t have a CPU that won’t melt if I try to compile things (laptop-only booooo v.v!!) sooo Arch for now. :3 🤷

ssm,
@ssm@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

SteamOS on steam deck, PostmarketOS on pinephone. On desktop I use OpenBSD, but if I used a Linux it’d be either Alpine, Void, or Devuan.

rorschah,
@rorschah@lemdro.id avatar

I used to be on pure Arch for 2.5 years, but currently uses cachyOS. And its so much removes the pain points of arch, as well as giving super fast performance.

collapse_already,

I am using CentOS 9 in WSL. I don’t particularly care what distribution I use because I mostly using a bash shell as a software development environment. I prefer apt to flat packs and use ubuntu 20 on an embedded system that I write code for at work. I keep wanting to get more experience with KDE and gnome, but I haven’t been good about using my free time to mess with OS. As long as I have vim and a prompt that uses vi input, I am pretty content. (Does this make me sound old? The kids at work have trouble following what I am doing when we pair program.)

ipacialsection,
@ipacialsection@startrek.website avatar

Debian! It’s stable, elegant, and doesn’t impede customization. I distro-hopped a lot over the years - some that I ended up disliking included KaOS (severely limited software repository), Clear Linux (only way to get ffmpeg was to compile it from source) and Fedora (very slow); most I liked, and just decided to move on at some point. But I kept coming back to Debian, and eventually got to a point where instead of trying a different distro when Debian broke, I would just reinstall Debian.

I’d be interested to try VanillaOS or another “immutable” distro at some point in the future. See if they’ve matured enough for my day-to-day use.

Vodulas,

I’m on Pop_OS and really like it. I chose it because i have a 2080, so the nvidia specific package is great for me. No WiFi issues, but I almost always have it hard wired, so not much chance to have it go wrong

truxnell,

My current distro is NixOS - mainly as I’ve built my NAS/homelab. Definitely not recommended for a new player to Linux!

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