yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.
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Tuxedo OS. Same idea as smth like mint or PopOs but (imo) done much better. It also has rolling release for some stuff (like the DE) and non-rolling for other stuff (not even sure what bc I don’t really look in detail). It also uses KDE plasma my favorite (and imo the best) DE. It’s got pretty good app availability in terms of official packages because it is based on Ubuntu LTS (now 24.04). There are a couple things that are vestigial on most computers bc it was made for tuxedo computers but these have no negative effect on other devices in my experience.
NixOS because all the other ones differ about as much as Windows 10 from Windows 11. Guix doesn’t count.
Different distros for different uses:
- Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
- Nobara for my main gaming PC.
- Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
- Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.
Ubuntu, because I’m fine with something that “just works”
How did you deal with snaps.
Alpine:
- Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
- Extremely lightweight
- Very customizable
- After setting it up I find that it works very well
- Decently sized repo
- OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)
I wonder how hard is it to download apps on Glibc-free systems, On Systemd-free systems ik there is Flatpack and stuff , asking this bcs many apps on Linux only work on Glibc.
I personally haven’t ran into any yet, tbh I have more issues with SystemD dependent apps (Also keep in mind Alpine packages and maintains apps in their repo so they don’t require GLIBs/SystemD)
Ohh, so only open source apps and closed source apps that work on non glibc/systemd then ig
I managed to get Steam working with some work, heroic games launcher worked with no extra effort, and everything in the repo is good (Alpine is independent)
I remember hearing somewhere steam doesnt work on musl,So i assume you used flatpack steam.
Yeah, I just need to add an argument before the command. I set up an alias so its simple to launch.
Knew it
Is that usable for regular Joe or enthusiast grade?
I wouldnt call it enthusiast grade, every day usage is easy but installation can be tough (it gives you a barebones system).
Then that is not for me yet.
Fedora. I like the rolling release but with large updates separated into point releases, as well as the ability to perform offline updates. I also like the preinstalled security stuff
I use Ubuntu because it’s the most popular and well-supported.
I’m going to be switching to Mint at some point because it’s basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don’t trust Canonical anymore, but it’s hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I’ve been using Ubuntu since 2017.
I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I’m going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.
Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it’s easy.
I use Debian. The current release has pretty up to date software. It’s super easy to install ( I don’t have as much time to fuck around with my OS as I used to). And it’s stable as fuck.
from the comments, there’s a split between
- linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
- linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.
i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it’s not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want
‘Toy’ feels strange to me here. It’s more of a just-works vs power-tool distinction. Sometimes people like tools that require you to RTFM because the deeper understanding has concrete benefits; it’s not just fun. User-friendliness is not all upside, it is still a tradeoff.
You’re absolutely right about hurting new users by not making the destinction, whatever label is used.
Lots of folks use those “toy” distros to accomplish specialized tasks that are cumbersome or impossible on other distros. I’d describe it more as “general purpose” vs “niche”
Both are tools
that could be true, but my comment was the takeaway i had from reading the other comments in this thread (and from previous experience elsewhere on the internet). most people answering “arch” or “gentoo” are saying, themselves, that they like it because it “teaches them how linux works” or that they “like compiling stuff”. clearly the focus is tinkering with the system as an end in of itself, not using the system as a means to another end
That’s a good point, i agree there are also plenty of folks who use niche distros partly as a hobby
Yes! Great way of putting it. It’s hard to explain how just using an OS can be a fun hobby in itself.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed does it all for me. I work and play games on it and stuff, but my laptop is less mission critical, so I run EndeavourOS on it and experiment with fun layouts and everything is all “frutiger-aero-esque”. It feels like how I nostalgicallyremember those WinXP-7 days!
Snapper rollbacks with BTRFS are incredible for letting you play around with an OS you actually use, and still giving you a cushion to fall back on. :D
My little media streamer / guest PC has Mint. Nice, maybe a little boring, predictable, reliable. Ahhh simplicity. :)
Linux Mint, because I don’t like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).
Yk what I LOVE THAT, Why i liked linux mint when i was new.
Well technically Mint has one terrible default nowadays that is hidden unverified Flatpaks.
I do agree cinnamon,mate and xfce us not enough but I found cinnamon the least buggy option.
I avoid flatpaks, so I don’t mind.
Sure but Flatpak is the package format for new users and it’s a very bad decision for a beginner focused distro to restrict it.
Enough packages show up.
Fedora Silverblue
- I like Gnome
- I like that Fedora adopts new technology quickly
- I like how it makes updates more reliable
- I like flatpak
Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.
Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.
I was using Debian and Docker for my servers, but I’m switching to uCore and Podman. It was a decent learning curve, but I think I’m going to like it better.
I hated postman so much I switched back to Docker. Why compose was better at handling dependent containers then quadlets. Yes I could use postman compose but heard it’s no longer supported and if I’m using it might as well use a supported docker compose.
I never used Docker compose. If I had two containers that needed to communicate, I’d just setup networking for them.
I use the Bluefin flavor of Silverblue. I like not having to tinker with my laptop to keep it working, everything happens in the background.
I like flatpak
i am kinda the opposite of you, i find flatpacks meh its alright.
I love flatpak. No more dependency hell!
Agree
While true… RIP disk space.
That’s false
I see being facetious is lost. Yes I know they don’t use a lot of space, however, they do package all their own dependencies. That means you do end up with duplicates.
Appimages do. Flatpaks have runtimes. There may be multiple runtimes but space is cheap. You can even spare the amount of space on a phone.
I once thought I should compress my images because they had 10mb each. I was wrong. I just had to put them on my server with immich and I don’t care about the space anymore. One 4k video is so big, all space related problems with apps or images are a real waste of time.
It depends on whether those dependencies are shared with other programs.
SSDs have become incredibly cheap, and flatpak doesn’t even use that much storage space.
What do people use for command line utilities? The selection on flatpak is a bit sparse
Options include:
- Installing them through
brew; this is setup, enabled and configured correctly by default on uBlue projects like Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin. - Installing them within a container; be it though Toolbx or Distrobox. This is what Fedora Atomic initially intended (and probably still does).
- Some users got a lot of mileage from utilizing
nixto this effect. - If all else fails (or if you outright prefer it this way), you can always layer it through
rpm-ostree.
- Installing them through
- Flatpak, create a shell script to call the flatpak command and pass arguments
- If the app doesn’t work well as a flatpak or isn’t packaged, I would use distrobox
- If the app doesn’t work well in distrobox, I’d rpm-ostree install it
- If I’m feeling fancy, I might look into installing homebrew. But you need to do some workarounds with PATH and homebrew otherwise it can break things; Universal Blue includes these workarounds out of the box
Debian. Because it’s the best about “Just Works” (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.
BUT I’m also not a “numbers go up” geek. I don’t give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that’s just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).
If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.
(/soapbox)
My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don’t play the latest games anyway, I’m a PatientGamer, and I don’t do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.
It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don’t have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).
It all works fine, but one day I’ll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs
EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.
Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
Prob the reason why i hated garauda (Idk if is it because i picked the dragonized gaming ver)
Probably. I’m definitely not a fan of Garuda Linux (never used it to be honest). The styling and the bloat are not my taste. But the most important thing to me is, if I can trust those developers and maintainers? And I don’t trust most non common distros. Looking at their webpage, they also have a KDE lite version with less bloat and bare minimum packages to get started. This is actually awesome!
Sadly its kde only.
What do you mean by personal package manager?
I didn’t say “personal package manager”. Do you refer to the part “basically my own AUR package”?
pacman, the package manager of Archlinux that is also used in EndeavourOS, allows for installing custom packages. There is another tool part of Archlinux that let you build custom packages. These custom packages can be installed on your system, which is then seen like a normal package and handled this way with all the defined dependencies and information about the package. You can install the package from a local location, it does not need to be online repository.Then you can upload it to the AUR, which is exactly that: Arch User Repository. But you don’t have to upload it. Either way such a custom build package is what I referred to my own AUR package. For more information see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository
What they said.
Fedora.
I’ve tried them all but found it’s the most reliable. It’s upgrades are even more reliable than Macos and Windows.
Packages are very up to date but also well tested. Sometimes even newer than Arch for short periods.
The community is awesome.
I love Gnome, I’ve found it’s more consistent than even MacOs in its design. And it has perfect keyboard shortcuts.
