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'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 do the same. Fedora on my laptop because I want a balance of stability and having the newest features. Servers run Debian, because I don't have time to fix and update things.
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 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 just stick with one because I’m boring. I’ve used it for a long time, it works, I haven’t really changed anything in years. I think it’s pretty cool to talk with people who are polydistroamorous though.
Only reason why that is weird to me, is just how much better Linux is. I’m too old to give a shit about a fanboy mentality. Linux used to be something you suffered through in order to get a tradeoff only available to power users. Now, my 90 year old grandmother has an easier time with Linux. It’s more consistent, and doesn’t break stuff nearly as often.
A more controversial take, is that I feel the same about MacOS. It was a lot of work in order to reduce how often it is annoying.
I keep going back and forth between Xubuntu Minimal and Fedora. Im just tooling around on a $38 Lenovo Chromebook, which has only 16GB of flash storage (soldered of course). Fedora has the smaller footprint, and runs pretty smooth. Xubuntu Minimal is, well, minimal so it is pretty snappy. Xfce is where it’s at for me.
Sometimes having so much choice can feel like a hindrance when it comes to trying to find a district that checks all of our boxes.
This is an aberration. You must choose one and never deviate.
Seriously though I think it’s pretty normal. When I install Linux i usually pick whatever distro at the time and end up using a couple of different ones. I have arch on my desktop and Pop OS on my laptop at the moment.
Add comment