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.

Omgboom,

Hannah Montana Linux

samwise_gamgee,

I use EndeavourOS because I like having access to the AUR but didn’t want to risk messing up my Windows installation by trying to manually set up Arch for dual booting (this was before archinstall was made). I like it, and I like using KDE. My only complaint with it would be that pacman kinda shits itself if you go too long without updating.

The first distro I ever used was ZorinOS back in like 2017.

heygooberman,
@heygooberman@lemmy.today avatar

I’m currently on Arch, but my first distro was Linux Mint. Linux Mint eased my transition into the Linux world, as it looked and behaved almost the same as Windows. You can avoid terminal commands completely thanks to the GUI apps that the Mint team includes for updating, installing, and removing packages.

I switched to Arch because one of the benefits of Arch is that it forces you to become familiar with the various different components that make up a Linux distro. When you install Mint, pretty much everything is included out of the box. You may have to install a few proprietary drivers here and there, depending on your HW config, but overall, you get everything you need to start using your computer. You don’t have to concern yourself with a lot of things. Arch is different. Even with the archinstall command that you can use to simplify the installation process, you still have much to do post-install. Audio drivers, package manager, Bluetooth, productivity apps, customization options, WiFi drivers, to name a few. And even after that, when you start daily driving Arch, you still may encounter issues that would require you to do some troubleshooting via reading the Arch Wiki or looking for similar problems on Arch forums. It can be a headache at times, but I personally feel it’s worth it.

ArcticAmphibian,

Try Debian + KDE. It’s a good combo imo - both stability and modernity.

Successful_Try543,

Seconded. I use Debian with KDE btw ;-)

delirious_owl,
@delirious_owl@discuss.online avatar

Qubes

VeganCheesecake,
@VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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

Yeah, let’s keep it to one kind of gambling. I like and use opensuse tumbleweed. Rolling release, never had stability problems.

theorangeninja,

I recently stumbled upon OpenSuse again and want to try it out but can’t decide if I should use Tumbleweed or MicroOS. Did you ever try MicroOS?

Eliteguardians,

Stick to Tumbleweed. MicroOS is the container version.

theorangeninja,

I thought MicroOS is like Fedora Silverblue and an atomic desktop?

Eliteguardians,

They are very similar. It honestly comes down to what you’re comfortable with.

theorangeninja,

Can you elaborate? I think I didn’t understand your point.

poki,

I’m not the one you asked your question, but I think I understood what they meant.

First of all, technically MicroOS is the non-desktop version of openSUSE’s take on an atomic/immutable distro. The desktop variants are referred to as Aeon (for GNOME) and Kalpa (for KDE).

Secondly, while Aeon/Kalpa definitely is to openSUSE what Silverblue/Kinoite is to Fedora, there’s a clear difference in vision and maturity.

Vision

Fedora Atomic is a very ambitious project; everything points toward it being Fedora’s take on NixOS. But, unlike NixOS, it couldn’t start from scratch nor did they intend to. Instead, it’s the process of evolving their existing products into something special. As such, it has been over two years since Fedora has even explicitly stated that they intend for Fedora Atomic to become the default eventually (without saying anything about sunsetting the old). While, AFAIK, openSUSE has yet to make similar statements regarding Aeon/Kalpa.

Maturity

Everything points towards Fedora Atomic being more mature than openSUSE MicroOS; work on the project has started earlier, Fedora Atomic is almost done with their transition (from image-based) to OCI while I don’t recall openSUSE mention anything regarding their transition (from ‘snapshots’) to image-based since they mentioned it briefly last year. Furthermore, Bazzite (based on Fedora Atomic) has become the face of Gaming Linux while openSUSE’ MicroOS fails to deliver on anything but Aeon. Which, to be fair, is absolutely fine. But not everyone is fan of GNOME.

So, use Tumbleweed if:

  • You prefer the traditional model
  • You like YaST
  • You like the rolling release model and not being tied to GNOME

Use Aeon if:

  • You like GNOME and an atomic distro on a rolling release distro
  • You prefer the opinionated, hands off, little to no customization path that openSUSE has currently chosen for its Aeon
  • You like a containerized future

Use Fedora Atomic if:

  • You want an atomic distro, but don’t like any of the decisions made for Aeon; i.e.
    • prefer to use KDE, Budgie or Sway (or any other desktop environment through uBlue)
    • aren’t that big of a fan of container workloads
    • prefer having the choice of installing native packages
  • Prefer atomic on top of a point release distro

Finally, regarding containers specifically; let’s say you want to install package X.

  • On Tumbleweed, you just do sudo zypper install X and you’re done with it.
  • On Aeon, if it’s available as a Flatpak, you do flatpak install X. If there’s no Flatpak of it, you install it within a container that you access through Distrobox. Within the container, use the package manager corresponding to the container. Technically, while inside the container, the environment is very similar to Tumbleweed. So, say you got a Tumbleweed container, then you can continue using sudo zypper install X.
  • On Fedora Atomic, you can layer onto the system through rpm-ostree install X; this is very close to how installing packages work on Tumbleweed. And, you can continue using both Flatpak and Distrobox; like how it’s done on Aeon. Note that Tumbleweed also allows access to Flatpak and Distrobox. So, Aeon is most restricted as it can’t install packages onto the base system. Btw, Fedora Atomic accomplishes this through layers that can also be peeled off later on (through uninstalling for example). With this, the base system actually isn’t affected, but the end user doesn’t notice it.
xonigo,

I’ve tried a couple different KDE distros and settled on Fedora 40 KDE spin. It seems to be the most complete KDE experience without all of the Canonical/snap bloat. It works great on my Thinkpad. Also runs decent on my gaming desktop using the latest Nvidia beta driver - I used to get stutters and artifacts in games/steam/plex and now with the beta driver those apps run fine

darkphotonstudio,

If you like or need the latest software, use a rolling distro. I use Manjaro (boo, hiss) and really like it. But if you don’t want the Arch users to beat you up and pants you, I hear Endeavour OS is pretty good.

termus,
@termus@beehaw.org avatar

Nobara

doubtingtammy,

Debian stable on Thinkpad 1 and Debian testing on Thinkpad 2. Testing is nice because Gnome is a slightly better version. Stable is nice because it doesn’t bother me about updates.

What don’t you like about gnome?

DreamyRin,
@DreamyRin@beehaw.org avatar

I didn’t particularly like the layout styling in Pop!_OS and being so new to linux, I didn’t know how much I could change aesthetics wise. KDE looks more appealing to me, I don’t know if it’s because it looks like windows, but that might be a factor? it’s the default on the distro I wanna give a try (Bazzite) which also has nudged me in that direction.

I wasn’t expecting so many people to have used Debian for things other than servers. I have it on a server myself, but I decided I needed something more set up for gaming already on my desktop. what led you to Debian specifically? the stability?

doubtingtammy,

Pretty much. I used mint for a while, then Ubuntu, upgrading every October and April. Then I tried Debian on a laptop I didn’t want to update often, and realized it’s not really missing anything that Ubuntu has.

Although I think the main thing that lead me to Debian was some issue with snap that I was having

smiletolerantly,

NixOS on my Laptop, Desktop, Gaming Machine, and around 10 servers.

Still have two servers on Arch, waiting to be migrated, and I’m really itching to but NixOS on the Steam Deck as well.

RecluseRamble,

Debian, Mint, Arch (by the way).

Had Ubuntu as my main driver for about 2 years but didn’t like Gnome and had more trouble with an Nvidia card than on Mint or Arch.

Fedora is top of my to-try-list but I’m not a distro-hopper, so who knows when I’ll have a use case.

TheBigMike,

My first distrobution was the good old Ubuntu for a laptop that I used for school. I stuck with that for 2-3 years. During that time I really, really wanted to try out new distros, but I didn’t want to lose my files and such, so I just stuck with it. During this time I also changed my desktop’s os to Ubuntu, but I am not sure when I did it.

After I got a Laptop due to the previous being old and broken, I tried out Arch Linux and grew to love it more than Ubuntu, so I changed out my desktop’s os to that as well when I got a new ssd and was migrating to it. I used Arch for another year or two, before my laptop had a disk failure and I had to reinstall. I installed Debian onto it, since I was feeling lazy and didn’t want to go through the mess of installing Arch again. And then later I also installed Windows on it with dualboot for games that didn’t want to work with Proton.

So basically I now use Arch on the desktop and Debian/Windows on laptop.

hellfire103,

I have a few machines, which run:

  • Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it’s fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it’s 2004.
  • openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
  • Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
  • FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I’d give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
  • Gentoo (WIP) - I’m just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
  • crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.

Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.

Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.

The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.

BlueEther,
@BlueEther@no.lastname.nz avatar

I’m currently on Neon on the desktop (and macOS on the mac). On the servers it nearly all debian and a couple of BSDs

Over the last almost 25 years i’ve almost exclusively ran KDE when not being stuck with windows (for various reasons). Ive heard good things about Arch, but I’m getting far too old to be bothered with a semi-complex install (yes I have run Gentoo for several years, so I think it is an age thing).

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