I’m very curious of which distro users loves the most that they have it on their daily hardware?
I personally use Alpine on my Thinkpad
Hell yeah, Alpine on older Thinkpads rules. What DE / WM are you using ?
Sway :3
Neat! I used it as well but I would rather use dwm or xfce recently.
I wanted a Wayland WM but also something lightweight
I default to xubuntu
Debian for my daily workstation. Minimal terminal-only install, and then I piece together my environment.
For smaller, headless applications I like Alpine. Containerized projects, VPS, etc.
Okay. What are your thoughts of KISS linux? It’s pretty minimalistic and have a very tiny package manager which is written entirely in Bash script.
Sounds like a remake of Slackware.
KISS
Debian is KISS. Grab it and use, no need to overcomplicate things.
KISS-ish. Default init is systemd. Debian also provides customized configuration of services.
Building a deb package isn’t that straightforward as Arch’s PKGBUILD.
I’m unfamiliar with KISS. I don’t really distro hop, since what I use has satisfied all my needs to date.
Vanilla Arch.
Debian and Fedora. I use Debian on servers and Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
Nobody has mentioned immutables yet?!
I finally dipped my toes into trying a new distro over the summer and have been really impressed with Project Bluefin. All the familiarity of Gnome for existing Ubuntu or Debian users but with a completely hands off rolling update experience.
The main drawbacks are the slight complexity of how the fuck to install stuff on an immutable system. In theory you use Homebrew for CLI apps and flatpak for GUI apps but I’m really not a fan of installing from sources other than the original dev.
Bazzite is immutable, it worked generally okay for me but I swapped back to mint because I had to use a smart card reader and getting it to work on an immutable was a royal pain
Gentoo, because no other distro offers as much choice.
I really love NixOS and use it on all my devices. Its not as difficult as people say and it really makes the linux experience a piece of cake once you get it down.
The single config file to control almost everything is just what I was looking for in linux and the fact that it solved any kind of dependency hell I have experienced in the past is huge. If I had to list a top 3 it would be NixOS, Fedora, and Arch.
Debian Stable. Predictable, low-maintenance, and well-supported. From time to time, I think about switching over to Alpine or even BSD, but the software selection and abundance of Q&A posts for Debian and its derivatives keeps me coming back. Having been a holdout on older Windows versions in the past, I’m quite used to waiting for new features and still amazed at how much easier life is with a proper package manager.
I got arch cus its light af basically, id just install what i want/need myself
I use Arch for personal and gaming, Debian for self hosting and hacking, Alpine for containerized cloud deployments.
I use Arch for personal and gaming, Debian for self hosting and hacking, Alpine for containerized cloud deployments.
Pretty much the same for me: bleeding-edge Arch for my workstation, rock-stable Debian for my server.
I just installed Bazzite about a month ago and love it! Used Ubuntu in the past and it was ok, but eventually went back to Windows. I definitely don’t feel that way about Bazzite though, I think I might stick with it as my primary OS!
Over the course of the last 20 years, I’ve gone from Arch -> Void -> Pop!_OS -> Ubuntu, and that is what I use on all my machines (laptops, desktops, servers).
Manjaro for my laptop, Mint for my HTPC, and Debian for my servers.
I’m sorry but I can’t resist mentioning it. Manjaro implemented quite sus telemetry recently so you should keep it in mind when choosing and using it.
Good to know! I was considering switching back to Debian or Mint, maybe LMDE. I’ll look further into it. Thanks for the tip!
LMDE is fucking fantastic
Try endeavoros and use flatpaks. That’s basically manjaro with the following differences:
- current with the aur
- doesn’t have a built in gui software installer
- no modifications-it’s basically just arch with the things you would have probably installed
I was thinking of switching away from Arch and back to something Debian-based. I’ve never been a big fan of flatpaks (I have a background of not having fast internet or much storage space, it’s just stuck with me) and I never used the AUR anyways.
I mainly tried Manjaro to try the bleeding-edge life, and while I do enjoy having more up-to-date packages, I do miss being able to install DEB packages. I think I might try Debian testing and see how that goes.
I’ve effectively gone that route of moving away from Arch to Debian and although it hasn’t been without some minor inconveniences from not having the most up to date software, I’ve been really happy with the change. I try to avoid flatpaks and for the most part have been successful, with like 2 or 3 exceptions so even if you’re not much of a fan, I’d wager you’d be fine for the most part without them.
Yeah, that’s my plan. I usually end up with a couple of flatpaks (or AppImages) for the things that I need up to date, but otherwise just go with most things from the repository.
I can’t define one favorite distro. I change my daily driver sometimes but it’s always something Arch based, even though I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is the ultimately best distro/base.
