So you chose war?
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Linux
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Okay, let's play this game :D Mint, because it's frickin easy and fulfills all my needs while being stable enough for my work laptop
this sounds reasonable
I just built a laptop and I always choose Mint. I used the XFCE spin and it failed me. Everything worked well except the second monitor screen. I just could not get it to display proper 1080p. I tried forums and changed a bunch of configurations.
I ended up getting Fedora on it and it worked out of the box. Oh well. Fedora it is then.
You're playing Devils Advocate, and you probaly know it xD
Anyway, I prefer NixOS for it's declarativity, reproducibility and immutability.
Example: You want nginx with acme setup? Just tell it to, and NixOS will figure out the steps to reach the desired state.
NixOS is amazing. Literally a perfect distro. I use it on my personal server, and getting things up and running is both faster and more reliable than with Ansible. I have 2 VPS with identical configuration, one for testing, and the modularity of the Nix language makes this extraordinarily easy.
It's funny seeing other distros claiming they invented a solution to problems NixOS solved 20 years ago. Immutability? Atomic upgrades? Containers? Good job, Fedora!
Whats a good begnner nix yt or blog etc. I just got a beelink n100 i want to use as my guinnea pig with nix
Honestly, Nix's documentation is terrible. This is a good start, but eventually you will have to solve your problems with a lot of googling, browsing Nix forums, reading NixOS's source code (99% of which is written in Nix) and reading furry blogs (for some reason, a disproportionate amount of Nix bloggers are furries). I'd recommend installing the OS and trying to configure it however you like before trying more advanced stuff like flakes or packaging new software.
My experience with Nix is that I'm knowledgeable enough to use it somewhat properly and know which concepts to use and when, but it took me months and lots of trial and error to reach this point. At some point, it just clicked, and now I'm comfortable with it just like I am with regular Linux. And I find it MUCH better. On my server, I can add a new service and integrate it with my LDAP in 15 minutes. No way doing it by hand or using Ansible will ever be this fast AND reliable.
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I started using nixos three weeks ago. I use it every day on desktop now, and also switched my homelab serve to it. These videos on Vimjoyer's channel where a great starting point. I recommend trying to go straight to using a flake to update your system instead of channels. Its confusing to get setup, but makes so much sense once you do.
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Debian, because I can just have a computer without needing to fiddle with a million things. I work in tech and don't want to mess with any more code or configurations if I'm on my own computer. It's worked for me for 5 years and has worked for others for 30 years.
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I prefer arch btw
Fedora is the perfect balance of stable and up-to-date, so that's what I'm using on my desktop. I've got Arch on another laptop too because it's so easy to use; it has my favorite package manager and basically every program in existence in the AUR.
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openSUSE Tumbleweed because it's bang up to date and utterly reliable.
Agreed. I want rolling release so I'm up to date and don't have to reinstall when a major version upgrade inevitably breaks something. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed gives me that in a reliable little package. It has its quirks, but I'm trying to learn as I go.
You know what? Ubuntu. There I said it.
I’ve been using it since 2007 - 7.04 was my first foray into Linux ever. At present day it’s been the most “it just works” distro for me. I installed it and… that’s it. Everything just worked.
I don’t care about the “ads” in the terminal. I don’t care that it’s “bloated” (even the most bloated distro is less bloated than Windows).
If a company is porting their software to Linux, chances are they’re focusing on Ubuntu. Not Debian. Not Mint. Ubuntu.
If something isn’t working, chances are there’s a community post about it with a working solution.
It’s cool that distro hopping is a hobby for a lot of people. It isn’t for me. I want no bullshit, just set it up and let it work so I can focus on doing stuff within the OS, not setting up and fine tuning the OS itself day in and day out. And for me that’s Ubuntu.
I don't use Ubuntu on my desktop but in my experience it performs on par with other distributions and it is not a RAM hog either.
I thing "bloat" is a big mythical monster people like to throw around because it's difficult to argue against and scares everybody.
I think snaps were slow to load to begin with but I also read that it was much improved recently, one can also install Flatpak.
So I think Ubuntu is a great distro, performant and stable.
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Fedora, it's bleeding edge, but stable enough for a daily driver. Also, most things work out of the box.
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Arch or EndeavourOS, depending on the machine's purpose and my mood at install time. I prefer rolling release, and pacman + AUR is a lovely combination.
Debiain because it's rock fucking solid.
Fedora cause I can't be bothered to deal with anything distro specific. It stays as close to upstream as it can and I like that
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SteamOS because it comes bundled with the SteamDeck...
If it wasn't for updates deleting everything I install with Package Manager I'd have no complaints.
Daily Driver, use it for work and school, only gotten better with time
Debian GNU/Linux because of its emphasis on free software. also, it's an operating system that doesn't make me feel its presence. couple it with a stable desktop environment like xfce and it becomes a good combo. I've installed it on all of my machines. be it server or home devices. it's my universal operating system.
though in office I'm provided an ubuntu machine, with which I'm also content since at the end of day, it's GNU/Linux. it's all that matters to me.
Arch because https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_is_the_best
Enough said.
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Shit, here we go again 🤦.
Linux Mint Debian Edition. I mention it a lot on here, but it really is my favorite distro. I have been using Linux a long time, and I'm old. I don't care to spend a lot of time and effort tweaking and configuring. LMDE gives me everything I need and is usable out of the box, while not standing in my way when I need to get shit done.
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Fedora Silverblue and Silverblue specifically. I used to run Arch and did all the cool things from DE customization to custom kernels and other cool shit with scripts and so on. Now I just want a system that I know will boot and just do it’s thing
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Fedora, because the packages are up to date enough for me, and I've never experienced any breakage.
Arch, because the packman animation when installing packages is very nice.
Fite me.
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I use Arch (btw). It's not that I prefer ir over others for anything in particular, i'm just used to it by now.
(that's my personal laptop, the computers in my offices are either Debian or Ubuntu)
It's funny, I switched off Arch.. probably 8 or 9 years ago now, and went to Fedora. At that point I just kind of became a Linux user, instead of a Linux enthusiast. I moved to the Apple ecosystem about two years ago, getting sick of Google's shit and deciding to go all in.
Now I'm coming back to the fold, and getting back to AOSP since I still don't want to deal with Google's bullshit. As I get deeper into ROMs, I'm realizing just how uncomfortable I am in Fedora. It's easy, it works, but there's a certain lack of control that really makes me uneasy. As I start messing around with Arch again in a VM getting ready to install on my Thinkpad, and in WSL on my work laptop, it's like I never left. Sure, I have to learn a bunch of new stuff because a lot has changed in almost a decade. But it's less about Arch, and more about changes in the Linux landscape. I feel so much more comfortable, like coming home after a long time away.
Fedora.
They have solid community and financial backings, they do tremendous work pushing the Linux desktop forward, it's close to vanilla and the sweet spot between stable and bleeding edge (aka "leading edge") for me personally.
Arch, I love the AUR
Fedora over Ubuntu. Ubuntu nowdays seems lost it's soul...
Fedora and Gnome workstation is the best ootb Distro I ever hold.
Also Fedora Xfce spins ovrr Linuxmint or Xubuntu. They are first class, stable, and bleeding edge.
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Nix-Darwin , DayWalker of Distros, all of the strengths, none of the weaknesses
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Nixos
EndeavorOS. It’s based on arch which has great nvidia driver packages if that's your thing and the arch wiki is amazing.
A nice package manager wrapper is bundled. Do yay to search for any package and install it; do yay (nothing else) to upgrade everything, and yay -Rcns to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAUR which is also easy to setup. What is the AUR, you ask? A repository for user-created ways to install TONS of stuff, think homebrew (including cask, unseparated) but on Linux
For the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer
Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default
Fedora for my Laptop: It just works out of the Box and everything is close to vanilla
Void Linux +1
It's organized beautifully. The tools are lightweight and easy to use. The package manager is a joy to use, fast and lean. Partial updates won't break your system. It's rolling but not bleeding edge which provides robustness of the system. Runit, the init system, is also a joy to use. Super easy to use and minimal.
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KDE Neon, because it runs Linux in the background.
I use Guix. It's fully free, it's basically the de-facto GNU system, and I like the features of the Guix package manager.
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Short answer: Custom Fedora Silverblue image through uBlue's template, because it offers a relatively mature and easy to use distro with unique features in terms of stability and security that's (almost) unmatched within the Linux space.
Long answer:
spoiler
which distro and why do you prefer it over others?
Personally, I'm very fond of atomic^[1]^ distros. What they bring onto the table in terms of stability and "It just works."^[2]^ can't be understated^[3]^. I've been running Fedora Silverblue^[4]^ for the last one and a half years and it has been excellent barring some smaller issues^[5]^. While on the other hand, the distros^[6]^ I've experienced in the mean time through dual-booting happened to be a mess and I eventually couldn't continue to use them as they accumulated issues all over the place.
So far, it should be pretty clear why I prefer atomic distros over traditional ones. However, why do I favor Fedora Silverblue over the other atomic distros? Well, I try to be very security-conscious. And, unsurprisingly, this has influence on my choice. In this case; Fedora is the only one (together with openSUSE) that properly supports SELinux. While AppArmor is also excellent, it's not ideal for the container workflow atomic distros are known for; which is probs one of the reasons why openSUSE has only recently started supporting SELinux while they've been supporting AppArmor for a long time. Furthermore, while both Fedora's and openSUSE^[7]^'s offerings are excellent. Fedora has been working on theirs considerably longer and therefore their atomic distros are more mature. Thus, I ended up with Fedora. Silverblue, however, wasn't actually initially preferred over Kinoite. I started on Kinoite, which I was attracted to for how KDE Plasma was relatively similar to Windows^[8]^ and for how it allowed easy configuration out of the box. At the time, Kinoite wasn't that polished yet. So I had to rebase^[9]^ to Silverblue and the rest has been history.
There are actually atomic distros that don't heavily rely on the container workflow to do their bidding and thus don't necessitate the use of SELinux over AppArmor. Those distros would be NixOS and Guix. These are on my radar and I might even switch to either one of them eventually^[10]^. Heck, I've even installed the Nix package manager on Fedora Silverblue through Determinate Systems' Nix installer. But, to be honest, I'm most interested in Spectrum OS. Which I would define as the love child of NixOS and Qubes OS^[11]^.
- Perhaps more commonly referred to as 'immutable'.
- Built-in rollback capability. No system corruption due to power outage or anything. Automatic background upgrades.
- Obviously, there's a lot more I like about them. I won't do a complete rundown, but the following is worth mentioning: (Some degree of) declarative system configuration. Reproducibility. Improved security.
- To be more precise; at first just the stock image, but I've since rebased to uBlue's Silverblue image and more recently to my custom image using uBlue's 'template'.
- As much as I like Fedora, their repos could be a lot better; both in terms of available packages and how up-to-date the packages are. Furthermore, though more GNOME's issue than Fedora's, extensions add IMO excellent functionality to the table. However, they sometimes behave very unpredictable in an otherwise very predictable environment. For example, enabling the blur my shell extension somehow forces me to log out right after I try to unlock my screen; probably caused by the gnome-shell crashing for some random reason.
- Which would be EndeavourOS and Nobara.
- Which would be openSUSE Aeon and openSUSE Kalpa.
- Fedora Kinoite was indeed my first experience on Linux 😅.
- Which actually felt like a magical experience for how easy and effective it is.
- After their infamously steep learning curves have been conquered.
- Best desktop OS in terms of security and privacy.
Mint (MATE). It's preconfigured closest to what I want, with just a couple tweeks I can do whatever I need with utilities and a GUI I'm familiar with.
If Its a headless machine Ubuntu or Debian. Again familiar with both can do whatever on both without having to relearn low to build a wheel.
Primarily a windows user but I do use Linux for some applications.
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KDE Neon: the stability of an Ubuntu LTS base without the snaps and other Ubuntu nonsense you may end up having to deal with in Kubuntu, with all the latest versions of KDE software directly from KDE themselves. They say it's not a distro, but it pretty much is.
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Nixos.
The ability to have my whole system in a git repo is what i have been looking for when i did not know it.
Steep freaking curve though and the documentation kinda blows. But its the distro ive spent the longest on apart from Arch, and i feel quote at home even though most stuff is done differently.
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Tumbleweed. I've used Linux since the nineties so I know my way around but I appreciate a sane default desktop install so I don't have to waste time fiddling too much.
People always talk about lean/fast/customizing, in reality most distros are performant and fairly lean/bloat free, it's just how Linux is. TW is no exception and like all the others it's easy to customize. I don't use YAST.
I can get comfortable almost any distro, though I prefer those with systemD+Wayland and Nvidia drivers in a repo so they update with the rest. I like rolling release, also considering the pace of Wayland and KDE development.
For new users I always recommend Mint.
I have Arch (KDE) installed on my desktop at home. I have been using it for 6 years and I love it, especially the AUR! This month I have been mostly using my laptop and I am using MX Linux 23 KDE which is great! I really find it's tools very useful when I need them (which is not often, but I am glad they are there).
Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.
I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.
I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don't want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.
I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)
I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.
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