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.

termus,
@termus@beehaw.org avatar

Nobara

Marighost,
@Marighost@lemm.ee avatar

Bazzite Linux running KDE Plasma 6. It’s a wonderful distro based on Fedora 40 (I think, still kinda new) and it’s made for gaming.

rickyrigatoni,

Debian testing on my desktop

Endeavour on my laptop

Gonna switch desky to endeavour soon. Debian stable is great but testing is not a good experience but I need the more recent packages.

Eliteguardians,

Give Debian Sid an opportunity.

blindfisch,

Manjaro

Easy to use and you can still legally say “I use Arch btw”

darkphotonstudio,

Bonus points for making Arch users seeth because you call Manjaro, Arch.

Templa,

EndeavourOS on my desktop, Arch Linux on my laptop.

joewilliams007,
@joewilliams007@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Linux Mint. Yes, it's not that interesting, but as many others point out, it just works. Both on my laptop and desktop pc. No issues for over two years.

melroy,
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Agreed. I'm using Linux Mint XFCE edition. Works great. Mint is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 (Ubuntu Jammy), which is the only down side for me as a developer. Since all packages are very outdated in general.

average650,

Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Open Media Vault (based on Debian)

I’m thinking of just using Debian on most of my machines in the future, just have to go through the effort to switch.

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

5714,

Arch KDE and SteamOS.

Cwilliams,

Kinoite has my heart forever

zolax,

Gentoo

linko,

Slackware

ArcaneSlime,

Hey I want to try out slackware real bad (for my own, religious reasons. Praise “Bob”).

So anyway I was wondering, I’ve heard it’s more difficult than your average distro, mainly in the sense that dependencies are not managed by a package manager like the dnf I’m used to, but then I’ve also heard they have tools for that now. Before I try it out I’d like to ask a few people like yourself how they manage dependencies, and if there are any other tips you’d like to share.

wer2,

Slackware was my first real distro (many moons ago), glad to see people still enjoy it.

Onihikage,
@Onihikage@beehaw.org avatar

Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.

DreamyRin,
@DreamyRin@beehaw.org avatar

this is actually what I’m going to be giving a go! I have very little experience (I have servers that run Debian and DietPi, but I get help with those) with linux but I’m really excited to give the KDE version a try. and I’ve been trying to learn, too, because also my partner is going to be moving to a dual boot setup as well. been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot too, especially while my desktop is out of commission.

do you find that anything is missing in Bazzite for you?

Onihikage,
@Onihikage@beehaw.org avatar

The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.

The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.

chunkystyles,

I really like KDE. As a long time Windows user, it feels so much more natural than Gnome.

chunkystyles,

I just installed Bazzite over the weekend on my main computer. It’s definitely not the smooth experience that Windows is, but I’m hoping I can get used to it and keep using it.

Onihikage,
@Onihikage@beehaw.org avatar

It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!

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.

charliegrahamm,

Debian on servers, EndeavourOS on general PC (mainly because the aur is so good)

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