cliché question, but hey why not?
I use Pop OS. Used to be big into tinkering and use Arch and all that which I still love but when I was setting up my gaming PC recently I just wanted to install something quick that worked well. It’s been great so far for gaming, browsing and the very occasional bit of coding. I wouldn’t say I’m super attached to it or anything but I like it.
Debian, because stability, but I wonder why each major upgrade, the nvidia drivers break forcing me to reinstall. Welcoming advice in that regard.
Debian, because I know they won’t pull a redhat ever. They do things the right way for things that matter.
Been on Ubuntu since forever but I’m seriously considering debian. What, in your view, would be the biggest advantages (or disadvantages, if any) for debian over ubuntu?
Drivers and kernel modules. Debian with “proprietary drivers enabled” works on about as much stuff as Ubuntu without proprietary drivers enabled. I’ve never got it working without issues on a laptop. You’ll definitely be avoiding drivers that probably have government backdoors if you’re using Debian but it comes at a price.
Arch is ironically easier to deal with in this regard. To give credit where credit is due, Debian is very stable. Once you install it on a sever, it won’t break on its own. It may be harder to get all your hardware working but once you do, if you never upgrade you’ll never have to mess with it again.
Debian Stable. It doesn’t break with updates, it doesn’t break when I try to customize it, it has all the software you could ever want, and it just works. It’s robust, elegant, and free forever.
For most people I’d recommend a derivative like Mint, Q4OS, or SpiralLinux, since those smooth out a sometimes annoying setup process, but for me vanilla Debian is perfect.
Debian on desktop, Debian on server, Debian on my VMs and Debian on my containers.
I used to use Fedora and CentOS, then Fedora and Alma Linux but since RH decided to be evil I decided to go full community distro.
Debian has actually gotten really usable lately. Bookworm is fantastic and whenever I want a newer version of something I use Flatpak knowing that the base below is rock solid.
I rub Debian Sid/Unstable on both my desktop and my work laptop’s WSL2 VM. I use Debian for a lot of reasons, but I think one of the biggest is it’s the “lowest common denominator” for the entire tree base and beyond, and thusly works as much.
Some tool only offers Ubuntu install instructions? It’ll work.
Something needs to be installed from source? Any needed build tools are at most an
apt installaway.“Help I can’t figure out why my
systemdservice isn’t starting in Arch”. Pendingsystemdversion incompatibilities, there’s likely nothing Arch-specific about that problem.Debian has always felt like, I dunno, Latin. So many other languages are based on it, or somehow arrived at the same way to word things despite it, and so once you understand it you can mentally tie all kinds of things together when you run into something in a different language (read: OS).
I recently built a new PC and decided to install Guix on it. I’ve been using arch for years (since around 2005 or so), and wanted to try out declarative system management. I also am a heavy Emacs user and love Lisps, so figured guix was a perfect fit over nix (which I do use on macos).
Fedora KDE. I just really like everything about it.
I’m on OpenSuse Tumbleweed right now.
I got tired of updating version numbers on Mint.
As a side note, just plugged in a years-old random printer/scanner combo my roommate had been trying to find driver’s for, for hours, on his windows machine. It just worked immediately in Linux, didn’t need to download anything. Suck it, printer!
NixOS all day: unimaginably stable, fun to mess around with, shared configs (including dotfiles) on every device, I really like it.
NixOS. I’ve been running Linux since Slackware 1.0, since then have run Debian, LFS, RedHat, CentOS, Gentoo, Arch and Ubuntu. After years of Ubuntu I discovered NixOS and after diving deep into it, have never been happier with a distro. All of my machines and dot files are in a straightforward single language in a git repo. The mutable parts of all my applications are nicely isolated and backed up and I can make changes to my systems fearlessly. It has a very steep learning curve, but it’s amazing.
I’ve been on Ubuntu forever, mostly because when I built my PC, it was popular. Also it’s purple. I’m not on it as much lately and need to check out new distros again.
Ubuntu Budgie for me. I’ve looked at Mint, fedora, Debian and Suse, but so far Ubuntu with Budgie or Mate remains my favourite (that I’m not proud of).
I’m interested in Manjaro and probably too lazy/stupid for Arch.
Mint. I didn’t want to fuss around with my computer too much, I just wanted to come from form work, hit power and go. Like others here, 10 years ago I was down to tinker, but now I just want things to work.
After hopping between the plug-n-play distros, Mint worked the best with my config.EndeavourOS - For when you love running Arch, but can’t be assed to install it all from scratch again (and the Endeavour cinnamon install has been awesome).
Used Fedora because it has some pretty nice out of box CJK support that I don’t have to configure much to use CJK input
