What is your preferred daily driver distribution?

bbsm3678@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 104 points –

Considering switching away from Fedora and to another distribution. Does anyone have any suggestions for distributions I should consider?

175

I'm using debian.

I live on the more unstable side, I like Debian Unstable/Sid. I also recommend Siduction as it's based on Debian Unstable.

I've been actually trying Debian Testing for past few weeks.

Debian not recommends testing for everyday using. You definetely have to look at the site. Afaik it is basically a bad version of unstable that gets slow updates and it is only for testing purposes.

Yes, this is correct. The way Testing works, it is very possible (indeed, likely) that you could be stuck with a security vulnerability for weeks. You should use either stable or unstable.

Can unstable be used as a daily driver?

Yes, as long as you pay attention to what packages are being added and removed when you perform an update. Once in a great while, there have been instances of buggy packages mass-removing other packages due to a bug.

That said, Debian-based distros like Ubuntu usually base their stable releases on unstable. Unstable doesn't refer to software stability. Rather, it refers to the idea that the system-level packages could change throughout the development cycle.

Security updates come to unstable through normal package updates, which testing doesn't get until everything makes it through a probationary period with no "serious" bugs filed and no dependency issues. And if any package that the package needing the security patch depends on also has a serious bug filed, the process could take even longer.

Packages from debian unstable trickle down to testing in 8-10 days usually if all the other criteria are met. But I have also heard that important security updates go straight from unstable to stable and then come to testing at a later time. When is that later date I have no idea.

Arch Linux

Reasons:

  • Pacman
  • the AUR
  • community driven
  • bleeding edge
  • pragmatic stance regarding closed source software
  • sane defaults
  • minimalism, build your own without too much compiling
  • the wiki

The wiki is what makes it really hard for me to move out. This masterpiece is where I learned 70% of what I know about linux systems 🤷

My steam deck uses arch btw, and the main reason I didn't choose arch for my laptop was because I haven't had good experience with pacman. But I'll be honest that I haven't given it much of a chance, so I'd like to learn more. What is it that you like about pacman?

What bad experience have you had with pacman? My favourite thing about it is that it is pretty much the only package manager that has never failed me.

Well on the steam deck, updates will always fail until I reboot the device then try to update again. I also really don't like the syntax. It isn't intuitive, and I can't memorize it because of that. For example, I'm not sure why -S means install. I remember install because that's the one I have used the most, but I can't remember what is equivalent to apt update or apt upgrade, and I'm not sure why they can't just use those terms. Why do I need to memorize arbitrary letters with captialization?

I have no expierence with the steam deck, so dunno what's up with that. Never expierenced something like that on my PCs tho.

Yes, the flags can be unintuitive for beginners, S stands for sync, which will sync the package(s) specified thereafter with the remote repositories. If the packages aren"t installed it means installing them, if they are already installed it means updating them to the version that is the latest version in the remote repository. Full system update is done by pacman -Syu, where y tells pacman to synchronize the package lists first and u selects all packages that are older than the ones in these package lists for the S.

You can easily learn all that by using fish (or zsh with a sufficient config) instead of bash. Then, you can enter pacman - and hit TAB to get a list of allowed flags and a brief description. Choose one, hit TAB again and get a list of flags that go with the one you selected before, again with a description right out of the man-page. BTW, that works with a lot of command line programs and is imo almost necessary to get in touch with the shell.

  • Mint, because it works with a minimum of effort.

  • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it's more up to date than Mint, it's a rolling distro, it works, and in the rare event of a problem it's easy to roll back to a snapshot.

Arch.

People think it's really challenging and brittle, but everything seems to always work no matter how often I update (or don't) and the wiki is top notch.

I actually chose arch initially because when you go to forums to troubleshoot problems there is always an ubuntu answer and an arch answer, and the arch answer is almost always shorter.

I only use Arch, it's really stable and easy to fix if something goes wrong thanks to the excellent arch wiki.

But I recommend PopOS for anyone who just wants something good looking and stable and who doesn't need the latest packages all the time.

Do you use arch or do you use manjaro or other?

I use Arch default. Stay away from Manjaro... If you want to try arch with a good installer, try https://endeavouros.com/.

Its really just arch with a nice installer and a friendly community where you can ask questions. It's specifically designed for that purpose.

I've used Manjaro a few times and Arch I installed once from their wiki which is a huge pain.

Linux Mint: Debian Edition. After watching a YouTube review I decided to take a break from Arch and give it a try, I'd always like Cinnamon, and I really like this.

Cinnamon, last I tried it, has a bug which causes it to run games with compositing enabled. The setting that's supposed to disable it for games, only works until the next boot.

I recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed without hesitation.

This is the best answer. It’s the most comparable to Fedora with it’s semi-rolling releases.

Tried it for the first time last week. I was hesitant because I'm forced into SLES for work, and I fucking hate it. But thats because all of the default configs for all packages are overly secure. Like, installing apache required a ton of extra steps to allow HTTP traffic. But I needed to test both HTTP and HTTPS for the feature I was working on, so I needed HTTP.

But overall I have been very happy with Tumbleweed. I like that the packages are more up to date than Ubuntu LTS (what I was using previously), and I haven't had as many driver issues either. Oh, and snapshots are amazing. It already saved me once when I accidentally deleted the wrong config file, I just cp'd it from my last snapshot.

Unpopular choice here but Ubuntu LTS with ubuntu-debullshit (vanilla gnome, replace snap with flatpak).

My main factors:

  • stability of the LTS
  • drivers and HW support
  • tons of resources online
  • already use Ubuntu for servers and Raspian on my Pi

I’ve had my fun distro hopping in the past but I just want a low maintenance system nowadays.

Ohhh, I'll have to check this out. I've been gradually moving away from Ubuntu toward Debian (w/ GNOME) for a while because Snap is hot garbage and I don't want to have anything to do with it. Were it not for Snap, I still really like Ubuntu.

Drivers are the weak spot of Ubuntu LTS, even with HWE the kernel and Mesa are outdated compared to Fedora.

How does this differ from Debian+GNOME? I'm not familiar enough with exactly what Canonical adds to Debian to know.

Debian only household here ..

Depends on what you're looking for.

I cannot recommend NixOS enough, it's such a good distribution but on the other hand it's quite tough to learn as it deviates a lot on how distributions do things. It still uses a standard stack (glibc, systemd, GNU tools and all) but the nix tools which include the package manager are totally different from what other distributions offer. It's very solid, yet flexible. It offers a lot of packages by default. I've switched my machines to it because of the advantages.

Arch is great as a rolling release distribution with solid repositories (lots of packages and quite up to date) and it's very close to upstream with a more traditional approach to the distribution tools. In fact there aren't really any apart from the package manager by default. I feel this is one of the most comfortable distributions if you want to learn how a classic Linux system is structured. I ran Arch for about 15 years and didn't really have anything to complain about and I learned more about Linux there than with Ubuntu and Debian.

Please note that neither of these are what one would consider beginner-friendly distributions.

I try so dang hard not to use Linux Mint because I have been using off and on since 2008 but always come crawling back to it when I run into some esoteric issue on another distro. It just hits the sweet spot of what I understand computing to be. I have desperately tried to use various forms of arch. OpenSUSE, fedora, debian, and a whole host of others and eventually get frustrated for some probably solvable reason and go back to my sweet, my love, my wart covered X11 using, 5.15 running, stale boring life mate Mint.

Pop!_OS. Sensible defaults and it's based off of Ubuntu, which is the distro I'm most familiar with.

Pop_os for my laptop and desktop. I use these machines for dev work and gaming. I want to spend as little time as possible doing maintenance. Debian for all servers and containers. Very stable, maintenance doesn't take much effort.

If I was running a pure gaming system I'd probably go with Arch.

Debian + GNOME.

Historically I've been a huge fan of Ubuntu, but I just can't tolerate Snap any more and started moving away from Ubuntu in general.

I've been a long time Debian user. Debian 12 has been almost a perfect release so far. Highly recommended.

So were Woody and Potato (memories...).

Woody was my first Linux distro ever! My family only had one PC with dialup at the time, and you could buy the entire repo on CD-ROM. I actually keep the CD images around in case I want to play with a VM and feel nostalgic.

I know the FSF wouldn't approve, but I am glad that they include the firmware on the regular network install image now. I need it to connect to wi-fi.

I know they always offered one with the firmware, but you had to do some digging on cdimage.debian.org to find it.

My journey roughly went like:

  1. Mint + Cinnamon
  2. Mint + i3
  3. MX Linux + i3
  4. Debian + i3

Right now I'm using Debian + i3. It's pretty lit

My main reason is that Debian is a very stable, very popular distro, that isn't a fork of another distro. The fact that it's stable means issues are more rare; the fact that it's popular means when issues do pop up, there are much higher odds that I'll find others who ran into them before; and the fact that it isn't a fork means that I can just prefix "debian" to any search, rather than say having to contend with it being potentially a "debian" issue, or an "ubuntu" issue, or a "mint" issue. In fact, debian is popular enough that most of the time I could just prefix "linux" to a search, rather than "debian".

While there are distros that market themselves on other merits, it seems to me that the main goal of an operating system is to be a stable foundation. I wanted to pick something that would let me have a good time with i3; Debian seems one of the most straightforward choices. I considered arch, but in the end Debian seems like the lower-effort option.

agree. you mention debian and arch. I have also tried both of them. the problem with arch (rolling distribution) is that you are forever updating and you never know what exactly has changed in the system and you have to look. You can still have so much experience and solve problems, but they always cost time. all this from a daily user perspective is crap.

from a security point of view, new software can contain security loopholes just like old software. i'd rather have a stable base where i can easily keep an eye on changes than daily updates.

I have been running OpenSUSE Leap on my home server for 3 years, and I moved from Fedora after many years to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on both my work and home (gaming) PC. I am super happy!

I was going to say Arch but I typically install EndeveavourOS these days ( lazy man’s Arch ).

What are your feelings about EndeveaourOS vs Arch vs Manjaro vs Garuda?

Sorry I did not see this sooner. EndeavourOS is my favourite by far. I loved Manjaro when I used it and thought detractors were exaggerating its problems. Then I had a string of problems all clearly linked to poor management and now I strongly recommend that nobody use Manjaro ever. Once I started to use EndeavourOS, I realized that Manjaro incompatibility with the AUR was causing me constant problems without me realizing it. I was attracted to Garuda and did use it for about a week. It was not for me in the end but that could just be preference.

The thing about EndeavourOS is that, once installed, it is essentially just Arch. There only only just over a dozen EndeavourOS packages on top of the 80,000 or so vanilla Arch ones. So, EndeavourOS is basically just easy to install with decent defaults. Manjaro has its own repos and they are incompatible with the AUR ( trust me ). Garuda departs from Arch a lot more. That could be good or bad depending on your preferences.

One thing that drives me away from Endeavour is that it bills itself as terminal centric and I am trying to go away from terminal hell that most Linux installs get to. Just in OpenSuse, I was having to dive in and debug xone when I just wanted to start playing rocket league. I used Linux as a daily driver from 2008 to 2012 and eventually bounced back to Windows due to wanting to play games. Every year I check back in with distros people recommend and I just don't have the care to maintain a Linux install. I don't need to maintain a Windows install, windows literally does it for me and very successfully in my experience.

They do bill themselves as terminal centric but honestly I do not get that.

The whole point of the distro relative to Arch is the graphical installer. It sets you up into a nicely configured desktop by default. There are graphical tools for configuring most things.

I think the main reason they say that is that there is no graphical package manager by default. So, even to install one, you need to use the command line at least once. They pre-install yay though so yay -S pamac-gtk or yay -S octopi will solve that problem ( I do not like pamac myself though ).

It is basically just Arch once installed though so I guess it has fewer tools built in than many distros.

Anyway, I don’t own EndeavourOS stock. No big deal if you prefer something else.

No worries, thanks for your input. I'll certainly put Endeavour on the list to check out.

Void. I like xbps, and I prefer distros that make as few assumptions as possible.

EndeavourOS, it just works really well and never breaks. The only time I had an issue was when I was using the Zen kernel and it locked up installing league of legends and watching a YouTube video at the same time. Using the mainline kernel though gives me no issues.

Everyone immediately want you to use their distribution of choice. However no-one can really answer this unless you include more information about yourself and your Linux experience, objectives, what kind of tinkering you're comfortable with, what you expectations are, etc.

The best answer IMO is always Linux Mint when people ask these kind of questions.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for now, with Garuda for gaming. Still working up the courage to combine all the best features of both into my first Arch install.

I'm the wrong one to ask because every time I try something else, I end up returning to Fedora.

But what you switch to depends on why you want to switch:

  • Want to learn more about how Linux works? Install Arch the Arch Way, or try out Void.
  • Want a different DE? Well, you've got Fedora Spins if that's your main goal, but KDE Neon lets you try out the latest stable KDE stuff, which is fun!
  • Looking for a rolling distro but don't want the extra complexity of Arch's minimalist philosophy? OpenSuse Tumbleweed is fantastic.
  • Do you really want to dig deep and have total control of your system? Look into Gentoo or Linux From Scratch.

I've done most of these and more, and I'm happy to recommend something more specific, but I can't without knowing what you're looking for.

If you don't know what you're looking for, and just want to do something different, then do what I do when the distrohopping bug strikes: check out several distros' websites, pick a couple that appeal to you, then research those a little deeper, maybe rum them on a virtual machine for a bit. If you find one you like, back up your critical data and go for it!

I'm the same, tried lots of distros but always end up back with Fedora. Running it now on my 3 desktops and 2 Laptops.

I'm currently trying out Garuda on my gaming Desktop, and a already kind of want to ho back to my safe space after two weeks. Don't get me wrong, I totally see why folks like it, but it's not for me.

Guix. I like Nix and Scheme so it just makes sense.

I wanted to like Guix very much, but eventually found it extremely inflexible. You will miss a lot of packages that are not trivial to create in Scheme yourself. Also a lot of packages have issues that no one wants to fix, or it takes half a year (e.g. being able to use NetworkManager for an eduroam/university wifi connection).

It's also not possible to just compile a package yourself because the directory structure is totally different.

I don't think Guix will ever become more flexible, I've given up on it

I'm considering to switch from Fedora to Debian stable with Flatpaks for the available apps (more up-to-date and more isolated).

But I'm also considering NixOS atm

EndeavourOS is good, I was frequently using arch wiki on other distros so it's handy to have it actually apply accurately to my distro. AUR is super handy as well.

I could use regular Arch, but I appreciate the simplified installation.

Also easy to install with auto btrfs snapshots so that updates can never really break anything.

I use btrfs actually as well, but mainly just for compression/deduplication. I've been meaning to get snapshots set up but haven't gotten around to it yet.

You really should. It can save your butt, and it's only a few shell commands.

I'm using Debian 12 stable and I do everything on it, even gaming. I use flatpaks to keep certain apps that benefit from being up to date, and I install backported kernel and mesa when they release for more performance (amd gpu).

I've been on and off with vanilla Debian for years while distrohopping, but I tried out Debian 11 testing and everything just worked for me, am still using that same install but I'm sticking to stable branch now.

Also, proprietary drivers are now officially supported by Debian as of Debian 12, and are available to install out of the box without needing to search for them or add the non-free repositories now, which was a pretty big roadblock for a lot of people.

btwOS.

I can't tell you if it's *your* cup of coffee. You should decide it by yourself.

- Pacman(!)

- Minimalistic approach

- ArchWiki

- AUR

- Rolling-release model

- Bleeding-edge softwares

- Community that would call me out if I didn't read the wiki (yes, IMO it's a positive)

Been using PopOS for the last 2 years (ish) with zero issues. It's been a delight!

Linux Mint Cinnamon. Seriously, it's the best. Fast, light, Ubuntu based, stable, good looking, full featured. All the power of Ubuntu without the downsides (snaps, heavy, slow etc)

Fedora Silverblue. I want a Linux system that just works.

Nobara on my desktop, Pop_os! on my laptop. As soon as the new COSMIC DE is ready I will switch to Pop on my desktop as well.

Still Arch on main desktop, but slowly moving towards NixOS everywhere.

The biggest selling point for Fedora IMO is the way it handles UEFI and Secure Boot. I haven't found anything comparable. Securing the proprietary garbage running on your main board is critical regardless of your OS.

Can you elaborate or point me to some resources? I'd like to hear more about this because I've wondered for a while what to do about Secure Boot on my machine.

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Debian support it too. The kernel is secure boot ready and it's very easy to sign nvidia kernel module with the default shipped key via mok.

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I'm currently using Debian Unstable. I used Fedora for a long time, but it got noticeably worse when IBM bought Red Hat. I also like Arch, btw. I have tried a bunch of other distros too, but they all have some quirk that annoys me (*buntu has Snap, Pop!_OS and Mint don't support KDE officially, OpenSUSE is based around YaST, Elementary is weird about software installation, Manjaro fails at basic security 101 and keeps DDoSing the AUR due to bugs, etc.)

I have not tried NixOS yet, but I keep seeing it recommended, so I'll have to try it.

Isnt pop primarily an extension for gnome? Beyond that and some drivers do they add anything else to ubuntu?

They add a lot of stuff on top of GNOME and ship a few extra packages to help with gaming. Not sure how they handle snaps these days because I haven't checked in a while. It looks nice if you like GNOME, but it just isn't my cup of tea.

I'm currently running Debian Unstable with KDE on my System76, but I've also used Fedora and Arch on it just fine. I don't have nvidia.

Pop doesnt have snap installed in my recent install.

I don't like gnome in particular but I am too lazy to setup a proper WM on my work laptop for fear of braeking and losing work.

Have tried fedora gnome with their pop-shell it worked fine otker than a few differences. Some odd behaviors like move next workspace would move it to first or last.

Nvidia is a pita. It prevents my machine from waking from sleep and I can't even close the lid because I cant turn off sleep on lid close.

Pop doesnt have snap installed in my recent install.

That's good.

I don’t like gnome in particular but I am too lazy to setup a proper WM on my work laptop for fear of braeking and losing work. Have tried fedora gnome with their pop-shell it worked fine otker than a few differences. Some odd behaviors like move next workspace would move it to first or last.

I used Fedora for a long time because they've officially supported KDE, XFCE, and MATE for a long time despite being known as a GNOME distro. Unfortunately, the enshittification that came with IBM buying RedHat was too much for me.

Nvidia is a pita. It prevents my machine from waking from sleep and I can’t even close the lid because I cant turn off sleep on lid close.

I've owned two computers (secondhand) that had nvidia and it was a constant thorn in my side... when it worked, it was still glitchy because nvidia likes to use their own libs for GPU rendering, which may or may not be compatible with the rest of the system. And of course the sleep issues and the driver not working half the time. I have no fucking idea why System76 is still selling laptops with that garbage built in. Mine just has the integrated Intel graphics, and while the performance isn't always that great, the video actually works 100% of the time.

I too prefer to have just iGPU which the recent ones are more than sufficient for most of my needs. But wanting to try some ML and that most configs with 16+ RAM offerings are mostly gaming laptops with nvidia.

Although I've had some display issues without nvidia too. Previous laptop had issues connecting external monitor. Only some distros had that issue so possibly a misconfiguration or incorrect library was used.

I've been switching between Arch and Debian for the past 5ish years. I don't really notice much of a difference, other than Arch has updates much more often than Debian Testing usually does. I like how meta-packages in Arch are more minimal than the ones in Debian, but that's a very minor thing.

Arch updates much more often and to vastly newer versions. Not saying which is better but those two distros differ quite a lot in this respect.

i like fedora a lot, but its updates got a little too far ahead for me. So i recently switched to debian 12, and with flatpaks and their more-current mesa components, everything is working on my desktop as well as it was before, especially games on steam (flatpak) and in bottles.

I need to settle on one for a bit. I like Fedora for it’s edge stability and embracing newer secure technology. But, I will be shifting to Debian 12 or Ubuntu LTS because I need to get real work done. I like Pop and Mint, but they don’t have secure boot which I desire.

I’ll probably enjoy arch when I get the time to play with it more.

What do you mean you need to do real work done that cannot be done on Fedora?

You can have secureboot on mint. On mobile but I'll search up a link when at desk. It's not terribly hard given Mint is derived from Ubuntu. Should come up in a search if you're impatient

Trisquel GNU / Linux. The kernel is 100% libre so you can do your computing in freedom.

Unless you really buy specific hardware... I don't see myself buying 2008 thinkpads like Stallman because the CPU has proprietary microcode lol

I respect my freedom more than anything and I never use CPU newer than core2duo since it has ME

Zorin OS. No muss, no fuss. I've been wanting to hop to Endeavor or Pop! just to do something different.

I mainly play games and watch movies.

Fedora Workstation. It's fast and stable.

Everything I use is available either as a Flatpak or a RPM.

I used Feren OS for a long time, but now i prefer Cachy OS and Vanilla Arch on my laptop, both with KDE Plasma

Do you mean vanilla Arch or Vanilla ( with Arch )?

Just Arch linux as in I got it from the official Arch website

Arch for the last 8ish years. I'm interested in switching to something immutable and with a declarative package manager, but every time I try something else I end up back on arch. It works and has all the packages I use ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Here's an incomplete list of my daily drivers since...well, I'm old.

  • QNX Neutrino
  • Mandrake 7.2
  • RedHat 7.1
  • Went back to Windoze for quite a while
  • Gentoo
  • Ubuntu (quite a leap there)
  • OS X
  • Linux Mint
  • Debian
  • LMDE
  • Fedora
  • KDE Neon
  • macOS
  • Fedora Asahi

I'm sure I've missed the odd one or two (and I regularly jumped back and forth with Debian/Ubuntu/Mint for years and years).

I used to distro hop a lot, so if I only used it for less than a month, I haven't bothered to list it.

  • Speak & Spell
  • 150 things in 1 from Radio Shack
  • Simon
  • CP/M
  • DOS 2.1 - 6.22 ?? (DoubleDOS)
  • Dos + Desqview X (I spell that right?)
  • Slackware (Linux 0.99pl13) (home)
  • Windows 95 & Linux
  • DEC OSF-1
  • OS/2 Warp (work) / Slackware Linux (home)
  • Windows 98, 98se & Mandrake Linux
  • Domain Aegis (Apollo workstations) (w) & Mandrake and maybe Redhat Linux (h)
  • HP-UX (w) & Mandrake Linux (h)
  • SunOS & Solaris & HP-UX & Aegis & AIX & os/390 (zSeries) & IRIX (w) & Redhat or Mandrake Linux (w & h)
  • PClinuxOS
  • Gentoo
  • Linux mint / Ubuntu

Love that list. I am also old. I used SLS, Slackware, and stuff with the .99.x release numbers I switched to Red Hat around 4.1 I think and went to Mandrake from there. And then…

You never used Arch? Not even for Asahi?

I built Arch (twice I think) but only ever in a VM to have a look around, never made it my daily driver. Used Manjaro for a couple of weeks, but I wouldn't say it was a daily driver either.

For now, it's Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. But I'm really interested in Immutable Systems. I like OpenSuse Kapla, but the KDE Integration is still in alpha. There are still a few shortcomings with the only flatpak approach, like the fact that the Steam Flatpak can't provide smooth wireless controller support because of lacking permissions.

I've found success installing Steam and other stuff using distrobox on openSUSE Kalpa. The initial setup isn't as easy as installing a flatpak, but after a quick distrobox-export it's totally seamless.

For me it's tumbleweed at the moment it's defaults like btrfs and snapper are how I used to setup fedora. Then there's the tools like OBS and yast that are super useful it's rolling but well tested before it gets to you

I'll only mention it because I haven't seen it yet, I just installed endeavor os and it's been pretty Great

Manjaro with KDE. I've only been running Linux for a month, and found Arch a bit intimidating, so to me Manjaro was the closest I dare fly to the sun. Really liking it so far.

I used to love Manjaro. It seems great when you use it. Word of warning though, it will break on you at some point. When it does, instead of abandoning Arch distros completely, consider giving EndeavourOS a shot.

Thanks for the tips, and the heads up. EndeavourOS was on my list when I tried to figure out what to go for, so I'll definitely try that when Manjaro breaks.

Vanilla ass Ubuntu. I spent 25 years finding the right distro, this is good enough. My first love was Mandrake.

Trisquel GNU+Linux on my Librebooted ThinkPad X200

Every time I try something different I always come back to arch + swaywm

Void linux became my second nature. It's design is great, runit and xbps are just awesome. Can't recomend more. P.S. I also switched to Void from Fedora

Linux Mint. Seriously, seriously good. Very fast, very light, looks amazing, has full access to all Ubuntu apps, runs Flatpak, is stable and solid. Sane defaults across the system.

Highly recommend it.

Bad for performance and gaming right?

LOL. old man.

mint mate is good for performance..

what do you use for gaming?

POP!_OS is amazing. It started out as a way for System76 to create an Ubuntu operating system image that had all the latest packages that they would need for their hardware but then grew into something much bigger. They have a plan for Wayland with cosmic-epoch and they ship the latest kernel (6.4.6 as of writing) and latest Mesa. It's solely responsible for killing my distro hopping (as well as having GNU Guix and Flatpak).

Watch this snippet on where POP!_OS came from (invidious link)

Piped link

Arch on my main pc, and Ubuntu on my server, only reason it's Ubuntu is I needed 6.2 kernel for my Intel arc encoding card and debian based for the arrs

Arch on everything with a screen. NixOS on everything without.

Whats a good way to start with nixos? Are there default configs to start from?

Everytime I go to the site to try I postpone for some reason, but mainly apprehension of deviating too mudh from debian base which has been my most used distros.

And how recommended is it to have nix package manager in popos or any debian based?

You could run a VM and plan to setup one service on it as an exercise. NixOS wiki is pretty ok in general, but it is a useful skill to read the code of the modules you use. Flakes are poorly documented and also controversial. So I wouldn't hop on that yet.

Switched from Ubuntu to fedora recently.. I'm pretty happy with it and it's package manager

blendOS because it gives you access to all the good stuff, including the AUR and even Android apps.

Oooh, neat! I hadn't heard of that. Thank you so much for sharing this! I look forward to trying it out. Exciting!!

I have been meaning to give a BlendOS a try. VanillaOS as well ( though I kind of want to wait until they rebase on Debian ).

I wanna move to nix but my monkey brain can't understand it. Might just take the plunge anyways

Documentation is not enough good for me to care and I hate when there are multiple ways to do things, I still did not understand how I should install programs on NixOS

Tried it, did not understand it (and had no use for immutable packages). Went back to Arch, never looked back.

Honestly, I just can't get past the absolutely horrible logo. Right up there with TempleOS IMO...

For all the praise I give Debian, I still just run Kubuntu and call it a day.

It's not that Debian's particularly hard to install or set up (pretty quick and easy after you've done it enough times, though there is also the Live CD with Calamares for an easier install), and it's honestly better than (*)Ubuntu in terms of official repos (at least Sid is), but I sometimes just find it simpler to install Kubuntu, unsnap it, remove apport, and get on with everything else.

Maybe I'll go MX or something at some point and just enable systemd because I use it and out of the "anti-systemd" distros, it's the most "hey, if you want to use systemd, no prob".

Actually, for Debian, another good option is Spiral Linux. It's basically just Debian, but with btrfs, snapshots, and zRAM all set up (from the same dude who does GeckoLinux, so very familiar with btrfs). Maybe once the new Bookworm-based ISO is up, I'll switch over.

I have used Gecko in the past. I really liked it. I'll be checking out spiral linux now. Thanks

Kde neon, latest Plasma on a stable ubuntu.

That's the best combination ever known to humanity

If you are a KDE user or are interested in it, I've been running KDE Neon for a few months and don't plan on changing any time soon. Stable release, Ubuntu LTS based without the forced snaps (though snaps are in the repos if you want them), comes with the standard Ubuntu LTS repos and flatpak installed out of the box, with the one difference there being that it will update to the latest stable version of KDE software as it's released. Basically a de-snapped Kubuntu LTS with all the latest KDE stuff. Works great for me.

Nixos. Can't even fathom going back to anything after getting to grips with it

I'm pretty happy on Ultramarine. Its like Fedora but with more repos by default, media drivers, more DE options, and a bunch of more reasonable defaults for daily all-purpose use.

I use Manjaro but I might switch when CosmicDE launches on Pop!, especially if they get graphics switching working nicely on Wayland.

I use Debian with kde and its been great. Went from debian 11 to debian 12 without reinstall and then use void and devuan on my other computers and arch mobile on pinephone.

Used Arch for over 5 years. I don't know if having a child changed me but I realised I'd lost a lot of time I had that I spent just fiddling with configs to get stufftpo my liking so went from Arch xmonad to PopOs and Gnome.

It has been stable and doesn't have the snap bullshit that comes with Ubuntu.

You wouldn't need too much config for arch and gnome.

Fedora (with Plasma) and I don't plan on moving to another distro until something tangible happens. Switching my distro based on hypothetical situations would keep me from ever staying on any distro for very long.

That being said if I had to use another distro, I feel like I'd try out Debian stable, while using Flatpaks and Distrobox to get up-to-date software. That feels like it would be a good approximation of the excellent middleground that Fedora has.

EndeavourOS with KDE

Same systems as vanilla arch for packaging such as pacman and AUR

Archwiki instruction work without modification

Great forum community without the incessant RTFM

I'm old too :-/

  • CP/M
  • DOS
  • Windows3, 95, 98
  • BeOS
  • some Debian and Mandrake
  • Windows XP
  • Ubuntu (a long time)
  • Mint/Cinnamon (I hated it, it was quick, maybe a year)
  • MX/Xfce (since ~2016)

I may try Arch on a old laptop just to play with it.----

I hated it, it was quick, maybe a year.

I think we have a very different definition of quick, my friend. I've been on Linux for about a year and a half, most of which on Arch and recently on NixOS.

CP/M. Ya got me there. I guess I can say EOS though ( Coleco ADAM ) and Tandy DOS 2.1.

If you don’t want to jump straight into Arch, give EndeavourOS a go. It is only 20 packages on top of the 90,000 you get in Arch ( so, it is Arch ) but it is a breeze to install and is sensibly configured out of the box. Once installed, it is Arch ( don’t let the elitists tell you it isn’t ). It uses the real Arch repos and runs the real Arch kernels. Of course, if you have the time, vanilla Arch may be even more fun.

Elementary It’s just like Mint but I had way less issues than with any other distros.

Neon right now i will try pop os when the new cosmic desktop drops

Has a release date been announced for cosmic?

Nah, it's more of a "when it's ready" type thing. You can see updates on their blog but by the looks, it'll be another 6 months or so before a real release candidate is ready.

Endeavour os with kde! Used to run manjaro and I think it's a good stepping stone, so you know what you like and not, what to keep... For example, I didn't know about oh my zhs and p10k, and if it wasn't for manjaro I wouldn't have know about that and owils be running the default bash console.

I'm also on Fedora and love it, but I'm thinking of switching to OpenMandriva ROME. OpenSUSE's Tumbleweed is another option.