Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.
Fedora because it has (IMO) the best vanilla GNOME experience. Every application is in the same theme and looks similar.
Fedora Gnome. I like it and it just works for my daily office use. I don’t have the time nor the mental strength to fiddle with different distro’s on a regular basis.
Debian for everything since it’s one of the few distros that has always been there. It’s one of the second distros to come after after SLS. Distros come and go, but Debian marches on.
Most big distros are old enough to drink though. Ubuntu is 20yo, Fedora 21yo, openSUSE 18yo, Arch 23yo, Gentoo 23yo. (I got curious and a bit carried away…)
But sure, Debian does have them beat by roughly 10 years (31yo).
Yepp. Started using Debian around the Ham/Slink releases, haven’t found any reason to change yet.
Oh wow yeah I started around the same time. 1998 was a magical time. I stated with a boxed copy of OG Suse but switched to Debian like 6 months later then never switched again. I learned a lot from the thick manual that came with Suse but once I tried Debian everything just clicked. It’s like you learn the Debian rules and philosophy and any package you work with makes sense.
I run SteamOS on desktop hardware because I hate windows and it solves almost every Linux gaming problem out of the box…
How?
Steam deck SteamOS iso installer! It’s actually surprisingly stable for basic tasks but it is pretty locked down so you can’t really break it unless you really try. And it seems to run better if your pairing it with amd cpu/gpu hardware
Is there an official build for general release, or are you running a steam image built for a handheld?
Yep! It’s the SteamOS 3 beta… It’s got some bugs and some weirdness to it, but it’s not terrible at all
Debian Stable.
I’ve used plenty of distros but Debian continues to give me a stable, predictable OS that allows me to get done what I need to get done with no real surprises. I have used it for many years and know how it works very well at this point.
Its my computing equivalent of a comfy and sturdy pair of well worn boots.
Yeah I daily drive debian stable.
With flatpaks and docker I never run into problems with my applications being too old or whatever.
EndeavourOS because someone said it was Arch for lazy people, and I’m a lazy people.
I did use vanilla Arch before for a while, but just ended up being more work for the same setup with more issues from stuff like missing dependencies I didn’t have to worry about with Endeavour.
Only other distro I’ve used was Pop!_OS when I first tried out Linux.
Same here: too lazy to fiddle around with stuff. It works, is Arch based, and satisfies my needs
NixOS, because:
- I can have my entire system be declaratively configured, and not as a yaml soup bolted onto a random distro.
- I can trivially separate the OS, and the data (thanks, impermanence)
- it has a buttload of packages and integration modules
- it is mostly reproducible
All of these combined means my backups are simple (just snapshot
/persist, with a few dirs excluded, and restic them to N places) and reliable. The systems all have that newly installed feel, because there is zero cruft accumulating.And with the declarative config being tangled out from a literate Org Roam garden, I have tremendous, and up to date documentation too. Declarative config + literate programmung work really well together, amg give me immense power.
Do you know about guix? Seems right up your alley.
I do, yes. I’d love to use it, because I like Scheme a whole lot more than Nix (I hate Nix, the language), but Guix suffers from a few shortcomings that make it unsuitable for my needs:
- There’s no systemd. This is a deal breaker, because I built plenty of stuff on top of systemd, and have no desire to switch to anything else, unless it supports all the things I use systemd for (Shepherd does not).
- There’s a lot less packages, and what they have, are usually more out of date than on nixpkgs.
- Being a GNU project, using non-free software is a tad awkward (I can live with this, there isn’t much non-free software I use, and the few I do, I can take care of myself).
- Last time I checked, they used an e-mail based patch workflow, and that’s not something I’m willing to deal with. Not a big deal, because I don’t need to be able to contribute - but it would be nice if I could, if I wanted to. (I don’t contribute to nixpkgs either, but due to political reasons, not technical ones - Guix would be the opposite). If they move to Codeberg, or their own forge, this will be a solved issue, though.
Before I switched from Debian to NixOS, I experimented with Guix for a good few months, and ultimately decided to go with NixOS instead, despite not liking Nix. Guix’s shortcomings were just too severe for my use cases.
I’ve been distro hopping for 15+ years but have settled with Mint for the last few, because I just want something that works. I’m too busy nowadays to bother with maintaining a distro, so I just want something that works out of the box and is easy to maintain. The laptop I use it on is connected to the TV as I use it to watch movies.
Fedora because it’s boring in the best ways. Curious about NixOS though.
Bazzite because I get an immutable install that won’t let me accidentally fuck it up. It just works. All necessary drivers for my dock and peripherals are already installed and configured. It’s the very first time in my decades long Linux excursion that I have a user experience that is similar to windows in that sense, but without the enshittifcation of windows.
I genuinely enjoy video editing, gaming, and surfing the web on my laptop when it’s running Bazzite.
I haven’t tried Bazzite yet, but I feel the same about the other ublue flavours.
I’m the most productive I’ve ever been. Tweaking everything was fun for a few years, but now I just need a distro I can trust, that comes with the tools to do anything.
I see rebases to Bazzite DX are available now. I might give that a go today.
Not exactly a product from ublue but something in the same line:
Secureblue because of the reasons aforementioned for the ublue images where things are really darn rock solid out of the box AND because Linux is fundamentally behind in security and this project is trying to mitigate some of the big flaws.
I’m asking this because I haven’t tried secureblue: in what ways is Linux behind in security, and what does secureblue do to mitigate that?
And do any of those mitigations negatively impact usability?
Some answers to your first question you can find here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html
For the second question about in what ways Secureblue do mitigate that you can find more here: https://secureblue.dev/features
The last question about usability, is very usable. If you use Bazzite you may have a similar experience. It is not like QubesOS that isolate all processes making it even not able to use a GPU.
Thanks! That first link is an excellent resource for a security tool I’m working on. Specifically, gVisor, which I hadn’t heard of, but looks like an excellent way to harden containers.
I may rebase to secureblue from Bluefin at some point to give it a try.
I’m loving bluefin and I really want to go all in on the immutable stuff, but I’m having a hard time being productive on it. The devcontainers experience has been miserable (probably because I refuse to use VSCode and every other editor having poor or no support for it); I also had SElinux fuck me up when trying to build some complex dockerfile from a project at work (something that was supposed to just work took me two whole days of debugging - and I even managed to break bluefin’s boot process when I tried to mess with the SElinux configuration. This one was mostly due to my own inexperience with SElinux, combined with there being a lot less content on the internet about fixing stuff on immutable distros compared to traditional ones).
Honestly, even with VSCode, devcontainers are kind of just ok, at best.
They are very fiddly. The containers keep running when you close VSCode (which makes sense, and sure the resource usage is minimal, but it’s damned annoying) and you have to stop them manually. Meanwhile the commands in VSCode to work with/activate the containers are not super clear in terms of what they actually do.
Oh, what’s that? Need a shell inside the container you’re working in for testing things out, installing dependencies, etc.? Well, I hope you pick the right one of VSCode’s crappy built in terminals! Because if you want to use a real terminal, you are stuck with the crappy devcontainer CLI to exec into the container. A CLI that is NOT up to date with, or even includes, all the commands for devcontainers in the editor (which is what makes working with them in other IDE/editors such a pain in the butt…).
And this gets me…. What? A container I can share with other developers, sure, but it’s very likely NOT the container we are actually going to deploy in. So…
Yeah, I’ve also had a lot of frustrations with devcontainers in Bluefin. I really like what the Bluefin project is doing. The reasoning behind it makes a lot of sense to me. But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.
They do have Homebrew and Distrobox though, which helps a lot. I have ended up doing most of my development work on Bluefin on the host system with tools installed via brew, which is kept separate enough from the rest of the file system to still keep things tidy.
Overall, I think Bluefin is great and it, or something like it, may very well be the future of Linux… but the future isn’t here just yet and there are some growing pains, for sure.
But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.
Both podman and docker are on the image, you could just use containers normally without using devcontainers if you want.
Yes! This what I usually do. I will develop on the host using tools installed via Homebrew, then package/build/test via docker.
And to be clear, I really love the ideas behind Bluefin and use it every day. I’ve just kind of given up on devcontainers, specifically.
NixOS. My primary reason for switching was wanting a single list of programs that I had installed. After using ubuntu for 5 years I just lost track of all the tools and versions of software that I had installed…and that didnt even count my laptop. Now all my machines have a single list of applications, and they are all in sync.
I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn’t like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I’m hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it’s a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.
Everything-in-my-life-as-code FTW
Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.
Also, if you run
nixops, it’s much easier to work with if your dev system is also running NixOS.What do you use nixops for?
It’s for deployments and managing many environments/machines from a single CLI interface. You can do all sorts of things like push configs based on labels/groups, gather real-time data/logs, scale up/down. It’s great when you have a lot of VPS/VDS/VMs to manage and you’re not using a platform’s specific management tools.
I mainly use NixOS as a barebones backend, keep it as minimal and hardened as I can, then most of the projects/apps that run are done through something like Docker or k8s. So for me, it’s all about managing the underlying servers that provide the tools needed for a project to operate.
The tool itself is undergoing a pretty big redesign at the moment, but you can get the gist of it from the overview in the manual of the commands.
https://hydra.nixos.org/build/115931128/download/1/manual/manual.html#chap-overview
That’s fair enough, I also host some applications on a k8s cluster, but for the underlying OS I picked talos instead.
I use NixOS and Home Manager to keep my configuration as code and shared between my PC and laptop.
The only VM I have running NixOS isn’t actually doing all that much, and I don’t mind ssh-ing into it to apply new configs from time to time.
Yeah, i’m realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.
I use Fedora. No real reason in particular (I do like yum/dnf a lot), I just think it’s neat.
I’ve used Arch in the past as well.
Fedora strikes a good balance for me. I come from arch and opensuse. I like the stability of fedora, but I like that it also gets updates faster than Debian. Most software I have found has Fedora considerations.
However, I have been using Ubuntu LTS for my self hosted media server.
Arch. Purely because of the Arch Wiki. I honestly think it’s the easiest OS to troubleshoot as long as you are willing and able to read every now and again.
