If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

Been using Linux for over a decade, and last few years Ubuntu (on desktops/laptops), plus Debian on servers, but been looking to switch to something less “Canonical”-y for a long time (since the Amazon search fiasco, pretty much).

Appreciate recommendations or just an interesting discussion about people’s experiences, there are no wrong answers.

Edit: Thanks for the lots of interesting answers and discussions. I will try a few of the suggestions in a VM.

  • BetterDev@programming.dev
    51·
    10 days ago

    I’ve been fully daily driving Linux for about 15 years now, and for me it’s almost all Arch now.

    I started out distro-hopping between Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Slack, etc, but once I found Arch (and spent two weeks getting it installed, booted, and customized exactly to my liking) I was finally at home.

    I know the meme. I’m not here to claim superiority, or diminish the value of other perfectly good distros. I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.

    What I love about Arch is the lack of bloat. You get precisely what you ask for, no more, no less. You can legitimately run htop and recognize literally every program, and know if something’s wrong immediately.

    Every one of my Arch boxes is a perfect little snowflake, suited to exactly the task(s) I built it for. And if there was anything I had to learn or configure along the way? That’s just the journey, man.

    I have been eyeballing NixOS though…

    • wltr@discuss.tchncs.de
      3·
      9 days ago

      Same, with one exception I don’t really like Debian. Ubuntu, I’m surprised it’s still around. I wonder who uses it, especially on a server.

      I’m eyeballing NixOS. And Gentoo too. And I’m looking for excuse to try FreeBSD.

        • wltr@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          7 days ago

          I’m not old enough to appreciate its obsolescence. It broke on me so many times, basically every single major update on various machines. Arch Linux never broke on me, and I still run my very first installation. Basically on every single machine. Had no need to reinstall anything. I wasn’t deliberately breaking Debian even, never introduced any unusual repositories, used the default flavour of the desktop environment I chose from the installer. Didn’t change defaults too much. Yet every upgrade I did, something was wrong, it simply broke, and the easiest was to simply reinstall than attempting to fix anything. Arch, broke just a few times, most of which was either me doing something, and I knew that was me, or it was on the main page of the distro, in their news, the breaking changes announcement, plus the steps to mitigate them.

          I see no point in using Debian, at least for me personally. I use its flavours, DietPi and Armbian on the SBCs, as there’s no Arch, and I don’t really like Arch ARM. Also, Debian’s website yells unprofessionalism, and it’s a bit difficult to tolerate. And the cherry on top, each time I’m about to download it, I have to hunt that BitTorrent link. I know it’s less than a gigabyte, and I could just download it as is from the website. But it’s a matter of principle, if I can download via BitTorrent protocol, I’d do that. Less pressure on the servers, easier and faster for me. Arch, you don’t have to hunt that link. Debian isn’t simple enough for me, I don’t understand its ideas and approach. Having obsolete everything because of stability … how do you know the updated versions are worse, huh? I don’t know, perhaps Sid is stable too, but my bet it’s less stable than Arch.

          And the names, I personally dislike them. You choose a random Pixar movie and stick to that. Why? Even Ubuntu’s animals are just so much better. To me that’s as weird as naming your software as Gimp, or having fun with these GNU is not UNIX and other recursive abbreviations. It may be fun when you’re a teenager, or a part of some community, but I just don’t like it either.

          I just don’t feel like I’m the part of this community. I’ve been around Debian for like two decades, and never grew liking it. Not my cup of tea.

    • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      9 days ago

      As much of the meme of an arch user will tell you they are using arch.

      NixOS is SO much more accurate to the meme.

    • Tanoh@lemmy.world
      5·
      10 days ago

      Same here. Started around ham/slink and then just kept using it.

      Mostly on servers but for over a year it has been the only booted OS on my desktop (maybe time to recycle the windows m2-drive soon). Sid on desktop is great.

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    10·
    9 days ago

    Debian on everything (well except the router is on OpenWrt).

    First installed Debian more than 25 years ago. Tried some other stuff, Debian is still best for me.

  • Whooping_Seal@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    9 days ago

    I think I started back in the day with Ubuntu Gnome, with some dabbling in Manjaro and then Arch.

    But since then I have used Fedora Workstation, and then Fedora Silverblue / Fedora Kinoite (immutable versions of fedora, with the past several years on Kinoite [kde] over Silverblue [gnome])

    On the server side of things, I am using Debian (with everything running in podman containers).

    If I were to consider migrating, it would be to migrate my laptop to secureblue (likely, rebasing the OS image rather than clean-installing) and migrate my Windows 11 desktop to bazzite. Both of these are still based on Fedora’s immutable base, albeit with changes to the base OS image. At some point in the future, I would also consider migrating my server to an immutable OS, however, which one remains to be seen.

  • Strlcpy@2@programming.dev
    5·
    9 days ago

    Debian mostly. I appreciate the democratic, non corporate governance, the classic Free Software ethos, the stability, and their not going blindly along with upstream defaults (e.g. telemetry).

    My server runs OpenBSD because I find it more tightly designed, and simpler. Laptop Fedora because the hardware wasn’t originally well supported by Debian stable.