I use Fedora 38, it’s stable, things just work, and the software is up-to-date.

  • Agin@forum.basedcount.com
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    1 year ago

    I use Arch because it’s so customizable and there’s so much more freedom. Once I installed Arch I realized I’d never go back to Ubuntu. I’m so used to using the command line all the time now it feels weird and annoying when I have to use something with a GUI desktop environment (I use i3.) People always tell me when they see my system in public (it’s a ThinkPad) it looks clunky, but even the inability to set custom time/date settings in KDE was mildly annoying to me.

    I sincerely think CLIs and TUIs are no harder than “user-friendly” GUIs but they’re just too far from the average modern person’s experience for this to be acknowledged. Using nmtui to connect to WiFi is hardly more difficult than what Windows or macOS do.

    I also really love pacman, the AUR, and the Arch Wiki.

  • GustavoM@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It has the most accessible package manager of em all. And ofc I’m talking about Arch Linux (bah teh wei.)

  • Sanndy@lemmy.perthchat.org
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    1 year ago

    Running Endeavor OS. Painless installation, everything works outta the box, good community, no release/lts bullshit. If it breaks, just rollback.

  • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space
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    1 year ago
    • The package manager.
    • New releases make it to the repositories quickly.
    • The software is as vanilla as possible; no changes made by the distribution except to get it working.
    • The wiki.
    • +/- No nagging graphical updater.
    • +/- Users can share build scripts for building software from source very easily
    • +/- No particular stance on free software licenses.
  • Björn Tantau@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I like it for being a rolling release with quality control. On the one hand I don’t like its restrictive defaults but on the other hand I know enough to work with them and that’s given me a leaner system.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s also what I run.

      I want a boring up to date system with a good KDE desktop that just works (even with an nVidia GPU). Tumbleweed is fine. I don’t want to mess with my computer, I want to use it. I messed with it ages ago when I had to enter xmodelines by hand to make the damn thing work, I’m glad we’re past that.

    • Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Same here. Very good KDE Plasma and KDE apps integration, rolling and up to date apps, and very stable at that and if something would go wrong I can easily at boot switch back to a state before the update. Pure gold.

  • ChojinDSL@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Debian Bookworm. On my laptop and all my servers.

    I’m a seasoned professional Linux sysadmin, so getting a distro installed has never been a problem for me (thanks to my first proper distro being Gentoo).

    In the end, it’s the stability and “knowing what to expect”, that always makes me come back to Debian.

    • Fal@yiffit.net
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      1 year ago

      I don’t know how you deal with non rolling releases on your machines you actually use for work. By the end of the lifecycle all the tools are ancient

      • ChojinDSL@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        ChojinDSL It depends on your use case. In my case I mostly manage bare metal servers running certain services or docker.

        For servers I don’t want rolling releases. That just means stuff is going to break on a regular basis. In my opinion, Arch Linux is the worst offender here. I don’t know if it’s gotten better since last I used it. But with Arch Linux the problem was, that you had to keep up with the updates. If you forgot to update some machine in a while, it could happen that you missed some update that changed some critical things, and everything else already moved on, and the only way to fix it was to hunt down the intermediate package version and try to install that manually, or just wipe and reinstall.

        As far as “ancient” tools is concerned, it depends on what those tools are. Bugfix and security patches is what I’m most interested in on a server. Just because there is a newer version of software out there with some new features, doesn’t mean that I need those features, or that they’re relevant.

        For the cases where I need something newer, there’s docker, flatpak and backports repos, (if not third party repos for certain tools).

        • Fal@yiffit.net
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          1 year ago

          For servers I don’t want rolling releases

          Yeah I wasn’t talking about servers.

  • tangled_cable@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Rock stability. Everything works. I run debian oldstable, even bookworm is too much for me at the moment. Yes, seriously. I tried to connect to my work office using azure web client and the keyboard layout was wrong. When I went back to debian bullseye, it worked as expected. By the way, this bug also happens with arch and fedora.

    I have installed arch as well because sometimes I just want to play with things. I’m very interested in immutable systems, but NixOs is too difficult for me and I’m afraid I will spend too much time on it.

  • Anolutheos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I use Mint. As a beginner the Windows-like feel is convenient for me but once I get the hang of it I could see myself trying something else

    • megane-kun@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      This is what I recommend for Linux newbs. And they can stay with it if they’re happy with it. It’s also a decently competent Linux distribution which is a hell of a bonus.

    • Maurice Milligan@mastodon.ie
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      1 year ago

      @Anolutheos @Lolors17 I use Mint Debian edition. I got fed up opening my laptop and having to update when MS said so, so switched to Ubuntu, then Mint, the LMDE and have stayed for 4 years. It’s not exciting, cutting edge, etc but neither am I! It just works all the time. Updates are easy and everything is boringly reliable - I love it!

      • Nuuskis@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Hopefully LMDE6 is a game changer for the most popular first Linux distro. If the CosmicOS by System76 doesn’t win that title.

        My grandparents were 1,5 years with Mint but LMDE5 has now been for 10 months and it is awesome. Literally 0 issues since day 0 whereas Win7 and Win10 caused constant headaches for me over the phone.

          • Nuuskis@sopuli.xyz
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            1 year ago

            Unfortunately I’m not. I’m running numerous Thinkpads until System76 releases their in-house produced Virgo laptop with hot-swappable mechanical keys and open source bios (Coreboot). It’ll also have the trackpoint from Thinkpads.

  • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Workstation:

    Used to love gentoo, but it kept breaking on me.

    Went Ubuntu until they went stupid, then arch for a while but again, breakage.

    Debian works, I have to spend 0 energy on it, and I can layer on different vms and lxc for whatever other distros I want.

    Server:

    Was freebsd because it was perfect and jails were next level shit but people keep putting out software that was obnoxious to install without docker, so debian as hypervisor/zfs and freebsd for most apps, debian for the obnoxious ones. Perfect system.

  • SMSPARTAN@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s easier to install when using DualBoot.

    EndeavourOS is just what I needed when I started to DualBoot with windows, besides being just easier to install, some games I play still require Windows, like most dx12 games since they’re currently broken due to some driver error in the latest Nvidia drivers.

    I love Arch and can’t see myself using anything but it, but I don’t have the patience to do a manual install every other week or so because I got bored or am to lazy to actually fix my system, especially while dualbooting.

  • Kogasa@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Arch: I like the knowledge and understanding that comes with regular usage. I’ve learned a lot about my system that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Also the PKGBUILD system / AUR.

  • IAmHeroForFun@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    i use arch, it’s amazing, everything i wanna do works other then games since i have some old cheap nvidia gpu which is hardware fault itself, i wanna do developer tasks just works, wanna do tweaks just works and it’s fun to use. i tried using other Distros i just can’t use debian based or arch based just bare bone arch with gnome or xfce depending on my mood. if i switch fedora is always my 2nd choice but not sure after some news released on red hat I didn’t stick to fedora because of lack of package or something like that just package management things kept me in arch.

  • obot@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Easy installation, just works™, and it’s basically a Debian Sid so it’s relatively up to date. Siduction!

  • lloram239@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I like that the NixOS packaging system feels like it’s build for Free Software, making source code and Git repositories a first class citizen. You can simply drop a flake.nix into your repository and turn it into a Nix package within a couple of minutes, that’s quite a bit different than the utter headache it is to package something for Debian. Nix packages being free of naming conflicts also makes it very easy to mix and match whatever versions you need, something that’s basically impossible on most other distros unless you resort to containers or virtual machines. NixOS having the largest package collection of any distro is a plus too.

    • Entropy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Can I use a file in the same place as the nix config to set the configs for i3 for example? Or anything else that would go in ~/.config? It would be amazing to have all the configuration files in one single folder to easily move to new hardware.

      • lloram239@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Yes, that’s what home-manager is for, your configuration goes into ~/.config/home-manager/ and from that you can generate all the other configuration files that go into your $HOME (either by just copying a read-only version of the raw file or by generating it on the fly from the nix configuration file when a home-manager module is provided)

    • 347_is_p69@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      How different (if at all) does Nixos feel as a daily driver, if at all? Is it only about getting used to the system, or does it require to do everything the Nixos way?

      Also how does user-level configuration work? Does the upgrade system just ignore your $HOME in terms of version control?

      • 🦊 OneRedFox 🦊@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago
        • Largest repos of any distro, so package availability is good (also supports Flatpak).
        • All package installation and configuration is handled via config files, so it’s easy to keep track of what’s installed. Also makes re-installation convenient and easy (this is also great if you’re fond of unixporn-style setups).
        • Because it uses config files to manage this, you can also take advantage of VCS.
        • Instead of having to work with several shitty DSLs to configure your system, now you only have to use one!
        • Being able to install multiple versions of the same library is nice. With Nix you can just install whatever the fuck you want, really. Want to use DisplayCAL, but can’t because it was dropped from the current release’s repository for still depending on python 2? No problem, just have your flake pull it from a previous release when it was still in the repos; it’ll just work because builds are done in isolation.
        • The generation system makes updates fearless, since if something breaks you just rollback.
        • Development is both better and more annoying. There’s no FHS, so you have to set up a dev environment with a flake every time you want to do a project. This is nice because you don’t miss dependencies as everything has to be explicitly laid out in the flake and other Nix/NixOS users can share your flake and get the same exact dev environment (kiss “it works on my machine” excuses goodbye). Annoying both because you’re required to put in more forward planning with your dev environment and also because it breaks language-specific package managers, so you’re limited to supported languages.
        • You can’t just git clone/make/install stuff from GitHub, as there needs to be a flake first. If the software already has one included, great! If it doesn’t, you’ll be making it. If you need a dependency that currently isn’t packaged for Nix, you’ll be making more than one. If the software is difficult to package, god help you.
        • Nix documentation can be really lackluster and also assumes you’re Linux-savvy.

        Also how does user-level configuration work?

        You use a 3rd party tool called home-manager for this. It provides about the same experience as the system config and has more configuration options for software, so should be preferred when it makes sense.


        Overall, it’s great if you’re Linux-savvy and is one of the few distros that is legitimately innovative. Said innovation can also be a pain in the ass on occasion though, but still worth it.

      • lloram239@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        All OS configuration (i.e. your installed packages, services, /etc content) happens in NixOS via a single configuration file in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. When you do nixos-rebuild switch that file gets read and the OS gets rebuild, which in practice means some downloading and changing some symlinks, so it’s reasonably fast, kind of like GNU stow. The partition table isn’t touched here, that has to be setup manually on the first install like on every other distribution. NixOS will also not rollback the file system if you decide to boot into an older version, everything is done by symlinks and environment variables, so you don’t have to worry about your $HOME disappearing or anything like that.

        For daily use that means that you basically never edit anything manually in /etc ever again, except for that one NixOS config file. You also can’t since everything will be symlinks into a read-only /nix/store. For permanent package installation you also need to edit the file and rebuild, you can’t do imperative stuff like apt install .... However with NixOS you don’t need to permanently install anything if you just want to try it, you can just do nix run nixpkgs#emacs or nix shell ...and it will run it without installing it (everything goes to the /nix/store/ cache and is garbage collected when no longer needed).

        This can become a problem when you are dealing with third party packages that come as self extracting installer files that want to install themselves in /usr or depend on programs being available as /usr/bin/python or whatever, since on NixOS that whole hierachy is empty ( except for /usr/bin/env and /bin/sh). NixOS has buildFHSUserEnv to work around that and provide apps with a normal looking Linux filesystem, but that requires a bit more effort than the usual curl http://.../install.sh | sh hack.

        By default $HOME isn’t touched at all and will behave largely like on any other distribution. You can however install packages as user via nix profile install (which behave much the same as apt would, but is local to your $HOME). The other popular alternative is home-manager, this provides basically the same what /etc/nixos/configuration.nix does, but for your $HOME, so you can start systemd services, generate your bash profile with it or install apps locally in your $HOME. Home-manager has to be enabled manually and is probably best ignored until you are familiar with the rest of the system. Home-manager is also less all-or-nothing than NixOS itself, so you can freely chose which dotfiles you want to manage manually and which you want to generate via home-manager.

        As for nitpicks when it comes to daily use: Due to everything in NixOS being fully reproducible, NixOS makes little to no use of binary compatibility, meaning if libfoo changes, everything that depends on it has to change too. This requires a bit more downloading than other distributions. After an upgrade, NixOS will also keep two copies of everything around until you garbage collect them. This allows you to just go back to an older version via the boot manager. But it also means that you might need two or three times as much storage as on other distributions, at least until you garbage collect. But generally that’s a worthy trade-off unless you are on an extremely resource constrained system (anything >=32GB storage should be fine).

        Finally, if in doubt, install the Nix package manager on whatever distribution you are using right now. You don’t have to go the full NixOS at once, you can install Nix packages on any Linux distribution and play around with it, similar to flatpak.

  • cuacamole@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    I might as well ask here:

    Im running arch on my Desktop. Mostly just to Experiment a bit, nothing to serious, Laptop is ubuntu, and both are dualboot with Windows for Gaming (nvdia gpu in both).

    The Main reason to use arch was to play around with Windows Managers like hyprland. However I get the feeling that some stuff is simply missing and or configured wrong on the System.

    Is it a better idea to start with something like endeavor with sway and start ricing from there?

    • sanguinet@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      both are dualboot with Windows for Gaming (nvdia gpu in both).

      If you don’t mind the question, what games do you play? Have you tried gaming on Linux at all? Gaming works really REALLY good nowadays.

      • cuacamole@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Indie games ive tried work well, which is pretty good. A big factor for using windows is Gamepass and my slow internet, where it is more convenient to play the downloaded games under windows.

        Other than that its a bit of sim racing in/and VR. Im also doing a bit of CAD Stuff with Fusion 360 and my experience with Free CAD wasnt very good.

        Most of this is probably a simple getting used to it process, but so far dualbooting works quite well.

    • alternateved@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Ubuntu usually provides you with system working out of the box. Same goes for Fedora and its spins. Arch is DIY distribution, which means that the “missing” stuff you usually have to install/configure yourself. archinstall gives you just a basic start.

      If you don’t know your way around bare window managers, then yeah, it would be a good idea to try with things preconfigured: EndeavourOS should give you that, Fedora Sway spin also.

      Or you could bite the bullet and try to provide the missing things yourself and learn in the process. What are you missing?