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.
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
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
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. :)
Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur
Also pacman and the aur
Another reason why am using cachyos
NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.
Ubuntu because I’m old, uncool, and tired
Hilarious to have to look this low for it, but who want to stand up and declare themselves mainstream.
Polished, reliable, and solid, and snaps are not a big deal or an insidious evil, and neither is Canonical. They make missteps for sure. But with containers etc stability is more important than immediate updates and it’s excellent about kernel updates for new hardware. It’s slick Debian, and if the fuckery ever gets real switching to Debian is easy.
Me too. Rock solid, with KDE. So easy to learn, make it mine.
Debian on most my machines. Can’t trust commercially backed distros any more. I’m tired of chacing cutting edge stuff. Like things to just work.
I can agree, my goal now is to find a distro that keeps some stuff updated not everything like kernel etc.
And there is ever decreasing need for cutting edge with containers and sandboxing. And hardware improvement is no longer so rapid so buying the hotness of 2+ years ago is cheap and effective and well supported.
- Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it’s snappy, reliable, and I don’t need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
- Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it’s still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop… I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.
edit: typos
I wonder what you will think of lmde its linux mint with a debian base instead of ubuntu (It keeps some stuff for eg the desktop updated).
LMDE is snappy as hell and stable as a rock
Never tried lmde but love to try it if cachyos started breaking down.
I’ve seen lmde mentioned on Mint website but if I recall correctly they also presented it like a somewhat experimental version?
I remember there was only lmde 6 with download to 32bit and 64bit
After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn’t want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it’s based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that’s a two-edged sword.
Right now I’m content with Tumbleweed, but I’m keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.
I wish it was not hard getting nvidia drivers on opensuse.
Wdym? Installing Nvidia drivers on openSUSE is just one simple command:
sudo zypper in nvidia-driver-G06-kmp-defaultThat’s all, no additional configuration required, even the kernel arguments will be handled by the Nvidia driver.
I would try to install everything called nvidia nvidia driver I didn’t end up getting it working.
Have you tried recently?
You used to either have to install them manually, or enable the nVidia repo.
But I reinstalled Tumbleweed a few months ago and it auto-detected and added the repo for me and everything. I didn’t even have to disable nouveau first or anything like that, if I recall correctly.
no
i see people saying that, but the process was almost automatic to me. what issues are you having?
When I try to install the Nonfree nvidia drivers, it just doesn’t work and wont show nvidia gtx 1650 it would say my gpu is llvmpipe that’s it.
EndeavourOS. It’s just easy to install and I basically use it like Arch
Debian and Linux Mint.
Debian for mission critical stuff like servers or things I don’t want to futz with, like HTPCs, work machines, etc.
Mint for my gaming desktop because it’s a bit newer on kernels and such.
Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.
I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it’s what I’m comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to “just work” most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.
Ubuntu server is primarily because it’s incredibly easy to get support when you need it.
yeah i love linux mint just works
For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.
For my gaming PC, I’ve got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I’d either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I’d just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I’m doing on there
Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.
I use NixOS, Gentoo, and Debian:
- NixOS because I like declarative configuration files.
- Gentoo because I enjoy compiling from source.
- Debian because the other two are more difficult to use.
Technically NixOS is all compiled from source too (if you disable the binary caches). It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head. Debian still holds a special place in my heart too, for its simplicity and stability!
It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head.
I wouldn’t say so. We currently don’t hold a candle to USE-flags. Many packages are already configurable but there’s no standard on anything w.r.t. that.
There’s no technical reason we couldn’t have such a standard but it hasn’t happened yet.
I do this with my kernel & a couple of applications that either compile super fast anyhow or at runtime benefit from further compiler optimizations.
