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.

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.
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.

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.

ulkesh,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

Garuda Dragonized

SturgiesYrFase,
@SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

Ditto. Super easy setup, most stuff just works right off the bat. Super active community on the forum and high participation from the devs.

Stowaway,

I wanted this, but it wouldnt boot for me. :( my hardware was pretty new at the time though, so maybe works now?I’ll have to try it again some time.

ulkesh,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

Hmm, yeah my PC is about 2-3 years old now and it booted just fine. If normal Arch can boot (EFI ideally), then Garuda should be good.

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!

sin_free_for_00_days,

I started with PowerPPC back in the '90s (it did not even ship with a working X system). Then went to Debian a few years later, and it was great. I played around with Gentoo for a little while when it first came out, then ended up back on Debian after a couple months. Then I played around with Arch for a little when it showed up, then went back to Debian. After that I just said fuck it, and have stuck with Debian. I run testing/unstable unless it’s some side server I have, in that case I just run stable. I hear good things about OpenSUSE and Fedora, but at this point I’m old and don’t feel like trying something when I have no issues. Tiling WM and Vim. That’s about all I seem to need.

hazelnoot,
@hazelnoot@beehaw.org avatar

I’ve been using Xubuntu for half a decade, zero regrets.

lengau,

Kubuntu

Andromxda,
@Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Gentoo on my PC, Fedora Asahi on my MacBook

Cilnios,

Arch + riverwm on my desktop. I know barless tiling window managers look daunting, but simplicity is liberation.

I can’t imagine doing that on my laptop though, so I’ve got arch + KDE Plasma and I love how it just works.

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.

Omgboom,

Hannah Montana Linux

yessikg,
@yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Q4OS, it’s Debian based with KDE, it’s beginner friendly. It even has a Windows installer for easy dual boot

Aatube,

endeavourOS

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

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