So we can clearly see the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them, please follow this format:
- Write the name of the Linux distro as a first-level comment.
- Reply to that comment with each reason you like the distro as a separate answer.
For example:
- Distro (first-level comment)
- Reason (one answer)
- Other reason (a different answer)
Please avoid duplicating options. This will help us better understand the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them.
Fedora
I want to preface this by saying that Red Hat absolutely deserve your ire in light of the recent news.
I appreciate that Fedora has relatively recent packages for a fixed release distribution. I really appreciate how they’ve pioneered in desktop-oriented technologies to help make Linux a more palatable experience for regular users, and I’m glad to see these gradually be adopted by others over time.
I’m happy to hear that the Fedora project still mostly operates Independently under redhat / IBM, but I’d be lying if I said the IBM acquisition didn’t worry me to the point of looking into alternatives.
Agreed. I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue for about a year. I love the immutable OS paradigm but IBM/Red Hat’s recent actions have left me feeling uneasy and I want to find an alternative.
I’ve also been using silverblue for about a year, it works well. Didn’t know about IBM acquiring Rad Hat, sad news.
For a similar experience there is Vanilla OS that I tried briefly and that seams to have similar immutability features and hastle free setup with a vanilla gnome desktop. It’s based on Ubuntu.
There is also NixOS which takes the immutability to another level. The entire system with all packages are configured in a config file. Which is nice if you want to have an identical setup on multiple machines but makes it a bit less user friendly imo.
Silverblue is cool. I’ve been playing around with it on a portable NVMe drive. Planning on making the switch soon (whether that’s Silverblue itself or another immutable option).
It’s a really intriguing concept. One interesting point I saw someone make the other day is that you don’t necessarily need an explicitly immutable distro to achieve the affect. It’s more about your user habits and workflows. If I can’t find an alternative to Silverblue that I like, I’ll probably just go to Debian or Arch and make it “immutable” by not touching the base system at all and running apps with Flatpaks or distrobox containers.
Huh, never thought about it like that. Please let us know how you get on if you decide to move away from SB.