Is weird that I like and use both Fedora and Debian?
I never thought about it before but I use upstream and downstream without much though. For my personal devices and containers I use Fedora but when it comes to servers and VMs I use Debian for its stable nature.
I also run Linux mint in my homelab with pcie pass though so it functions like a normal desktop.
I think it’s pretty normal. For me, I switch back and forth between NixOS and Arch because neither of them provides me with exactly what I’m looking for i.e a distro that has all the packages I use within its repos (I hate compiling) and is static release (I often forget to update), but is not immutable (sometimes I need special programs for university that can only be obtained via compiling from source on a non-immutable distro). Arch and NixOS both have all the packages I need (only ones that do afaik), and one of them pffers static release but is immutable, while the other is rolling release but is not immutable. Currently I’m on Arch, but when (if) it breaks, I’ll just switch to NixOS instead of fixing it, and use distrobox or something similar for any packages that need to be compiled.
I'll go against the grain a little bit and say it's a little weird. There's nothing wrong with liking multiple distros, but a lot of people either stick with RPM-based (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Rocky, OpenSUSE, Mageia) or Debian-based (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, Elementary). Then you have weirdos that like Gentoo, where nearly every package you install has to be compiled on the system. Or Arch, where the "installer" throws you in a terminal, and damn near everything has to be done manually to get your system up and running. And updates are "rolling release", and if you try to update just one package without updating the rest of your system things can easily break.
I am mostly a fan of Debian-based distros myself. But I'll use CentOS on a VM if I'm trying to self-host anything that recommends it.
I think that is completely normal. I run Arch on my main desktop, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop and Debian on any and all servers I host. And I think they all work wonderfully. Even outside of these distros, I can still see the use case for many other distros. I think many popular distros each have a specific goal in mind and they execute it well.
I use Debian on my servers, Arch on my laptop and desktop. Different tools for different jobs. I tried Debian on my laptop a few years ago but it wasn’t a good fit for me - my hardware was too new for the stable kernel, and the Wayland/wlroots stuff was too far behind. As a server though, especially since I’m mostly running Podman containers, stable and slow-updating is great! I use unattended-upgrades and haven’t had a problem yet.
I haven’t spent much time with Fedora but I’d probably like it as a desktop OS - fairly fast updates, and sticks pretty close to upstream without a ton of custom theming for example. I would miss the AUR, but Flatpak covers a lot of what I need, and Distrobox could handle anything else.
I’m an arch Linux user and I like most of the distros, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, RockyOS… I try different distros too, my problem is that I will always return to Arch Linux and a simple i3wm environment… but I like GNOME, KDE and the awesome Wayland. It’s just I like what I am used to and goes faster, and I can use the same tools as always. xdotool for example, the alternative for Wayland is ydotool which is a daemon running as root to emulate a device and I dislike the idea of doing that, root? systemctl daemon? Hmm…
But I could be totally good with fedora, at the end I just want the i3wm environment and the wonderful bash or zsh terminal (like alacritty) to interact with Linux. Best OS than Apple and Windows. Funny how Apple interface sucks so much, they lack from smart UI, Windows 11 forces you to log in, their UI is messed up, good thing is their desktop is smart enough to grid windows, and their terminals sucks, PowerShell has good things, but it’s not the same… c:an\'tfindPaths/ and I don’t really see the good on Object-oriented on terminal and stuff like apple being able to render high quality image on your terminal so you can see on a normal prompt a 8k image on the same terminal app… wtf, and they are even closed and people/companies pays for it.
Yup. I was a Debian guy back in the day, and eventually gravitated to Arch in it’s early days. Then I didn’t have time, so I used Fedora for pretty much a decade. Now I’m back to Arch, but have a project to spin up simple routing and NAT’ing VMs in lab environments, that can be used to demonstrate a variety of configuration issues on our platform. Would it be easier for me to do in Arch? Absolutely, both due to familiarity, and the fact that Arch doesn’t get in my way nearly as much as Debian does. But Debian is far more stable, configuration-wise, so I’m going that route so I don’t have to debug and tweak scripts every few months, or even weeks.
I’m using Fedora GNOME for my pcie passthrough desktop vm and Debian Bookworm for my hypervisor and virtual servers.
When Bookworm ages I’m sure I’ll mix in other distros for vm servers to try out stuff that isn’t available in Debian Stable yet.
I’m also curious to set up a virtual NixOS and a virtual Fedora Silverblue/Atomic just to check them out.
I use arch for all of that I’m running vms and host ssh servers also run containers & it never broken for me and to be honest your situation is weird 3 distro for one job.
Use whatever you want for personal. But I would suggest trying to use containers for hosting if you haven’t already. It really blows the idea of needing a stable OS out of the water since you can just declare everything you want in a config file and tear down and spin up with the app you need ready in less than a minute.
You can use Ubuntu still of course in a container. But things get really interesting when you use smaller attack surface distros like Alpine, BusyBox, or even a distroless container.
Unless you want to run everything in the cloud you still need something bare metal. In my case I run Debian VMs on my proxmox cluster with docker and podman containers.
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