Share Your Favorite Linux Distros and Why You Love Them

InternetPirate@lemmy.fmhy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 104 points –

So we can clearly see the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them, please follow this format:

  • Write the name of the Linux distro as a first-level comment.
  • Reply to that comment with each reason you like the distro as a separate answer.

For example:

  • Distro (first-level comment)
    • Reason (one answer)
    • Other reason (a different answer)

Please avoid duplicating options. This will help us better understand the most popular distros and the reasons why people use them.

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NixOS, I have a fetish for configuration files

I'm currently doing my second pass of Nix after diving deep into it last time and coming out unsatisfied. The same problems that I had before with it are problems I'm seeing again:

  • disjointed configs pulled from random source or build repos on the internet
  • unintuitive grammars with parameters that require you to download an autocompletion spec
  • flakes that aren't immediately easy to grok

Contrast that with my last Guix experience:

  • Lisp form, super easy to understand grammar
  • Recipes are so trivial that I've written three on my first day
  • Source tree is included and you are expected to add branches to it

The only problem with Guix that I can see is that it's not as popular

Flakes are extremely simple (my whole system is a flake: https://github.com/cmargiotta/dotfiles ), but they are basically not documented.

The grammar is really really bad, I prefere a lot the Guix one too! I am using NixOS only because the last time I tried Guix I didn't find a lot of packages for their extremist GNU policy (I agree, but I need some packages), is it still like that?