yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.
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NixOS because all the other ones differ about as much as Windows 10 from Windows 11. Guix doesn’t count.
Ubuntu, because I’m fine with something that “just works”
How did you deal with snaps.
Fedora. I like the rolling release but with large updates separated into point releases, as well as the ability to perform offline updates. I also like the preinstalled security stuff
I use Ubuntu because it’s the most popular and well-supported.
I’m going to be switching to Mint at some point because it’s basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don’t trust Canonical anymore, but it’s hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I’ve been using Ubuntu since 2017.
I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I’m going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.
Alpine:
- Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
- Extremely lightweight
- Very customizable
- After setting it up I find that it works very well
- Decently sized repo
- OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)
I wonder how hard is it to download apps on Glibc-free systems, On Systemd-free systems ik there is Flatpack and stuff , asking this bcs many apps on Linux only work on Glibc.
I personally haven’t ran into any yet, tbh I have more issues with SystemD dependent apps (Also keep in mind Alpine packages and maintains apps in their repo so they don’t require GLIBs/SystemD)
Ohh, so only open source apps and closed source apps that work on non glibc/systemd then ig
I managed to get Steam working with some work, heroic games launcher worked with no extra effort, and everything in the repo is good (Alpine is independent)
I remember hearing somewhere steam doesnt work on musl,So i assume you used flatpack steam.
Yeah, I just need to add an argument before the command. I set up an alias so its simple to launch.
Knew it
Is that usable for regular Joe or enthusiast grade?
I wouldnt call it enthusiast grade, every day usage is easy but installation can be tough (it gives you a barebones system).
Then that is not for me yet.
Different distros for different uses:
- Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
- Nobara for my main gaming PC.
- Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
- Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.
Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it’s easy.
I use Debian. The current release has pretty up to date software. It’s super easy to install ( I don’t have as much time to fuck around with my OS as I used to). And it’s stable as fuck.
from the comments, there’s a split between
- linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
- linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.
i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it’s not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want
‘Toy’ feels strange to me here. It’s more of a just-works vs power-tool distinction. Sometimes people like tools that require you to RTFM because the deeper understanding has concrete benefits; it’s not just fun. User-friendliness is not all upside, it is still a tradeoff.
You’re absolutely right about hurting new users by not making the destinction, whatever label is used.
Lots of folks use those “toy” distros to accomplish specialized tasks that are cumbersome or impossible on other distros. I’d describe it more as “general purpose” vs “niche”
Both are tools
that could be true, but my comment was the takeaway i had from reading the other comments in this thread (and from previous experience elsewhere on the internet). most people answering “arch” or “gentoo” are saying, themselves, that they like it because it “teaches them how linux works” or that they “like compiling stuff”. clearly the focus is tinkering with the system as an end in of itself, not using the system as a means to another end
That’s a good point, i agree there are also plenty of folks who use niche distros partly as a hobby
Yes! Great way of putting it. It’s hard to explain how just using an OS can be a fun hobby in itself.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed does it all for me. I work and play games on it and stuff, but my laptop is less mission critical, so I run EndeavourOS on it and experiment with fun layouts and everything is all “frutiger-aero-esque”. It feels like how I nostalgicallyremember those WinXP-7 days!
Snapper rollbacks with BTRFS are incredible for letting you play around with an OS you actually use, and still giving you a cushion to fall back on. :D
My little media streamer / guest PC has Mint. Nice, maybe a little boring, predictable, reliable. Ahhh simplicity. :)
Linux Mint, because I don’t like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).
Yk what I LOVE THAT, Why i liked linux mint when i was new.
Well technically Mint has one terrible default nowadays that is hidden unverified Flatpaks.
I do agree cinnamon,mate and xfce us not enough but I found cinnamon the least buggy option.
I avoid flatpaks, so I don’t mind.
Sure but Flatpak is the package format for new users and it’s a very bad decision for a beginner focused distro to restrict it.
Enough packages show up.
PCLinuxOS.
Stable and rolling for regular people OS.
Haven’t used it in a few years, but if it is still like it was, I highly recommend it for regular users. Solid, good choice of packages (for regular people). Don’t remember ever having any problems with PCLinuxOS.
(I switched away only because I’m not a “regular” user.)
Heard that distro while looking into wikipedia.
Debian. Because it’s the best about “Just Works” (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.
BUT I’m also not a “numbers go up” geek. I don’t give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that’s just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).
If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.
(/soapbox)
My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don’t play the latest games anyway, I’m a PatientGamer, and I don’t do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.
It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don’t have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).
It all works fine, but one day I’ll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs
Bazzite for personal stuff because it looked neat and just worked after installation with a small learning curve. Due to interia I went with bluefin on the work computer for the same reasons
I’m currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.
I’m really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:
- There actually aren’t that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won’t hesitate to say “BTW I use arch” were as others don’t really bother.
- There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say “BTW I use arch”
- (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it’s because it’s actually a good distro that people like.
(This is mostly a joke jsyk I’m sure arch is a great distro)
In my experience, the only quirk of arch is its installation.
pacmanand the AUR are great and I really did not have any issues with stability. First time I tried arch I used a tiling window manager, custom menu bars and all that “hackerman” stuff, which was not stable at all and forced me to reconfigure and tweak my machine all day every day. Now I am using a full blown Gnome desktop environment and it is rock stable. My only wish is to have an/etcdirectory just like Intel Clear Linux.
Fedora Silverblue
- I like Gnome
- I like that Fedora adopts new technology quickly
- I like how it makes updates more reliable
- I like flatpak
Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.
Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.
I was using Debian and Docker for my servers, but I’m switching to uCore and Podman. It was a decent learning curve, but I think I’m going to like it better.
I hated postman so much I switched back to Docker. Why compose was better at handling dependent containers then quadlets. Yes I could use postman compose but heard it’s no longer supported and if I’m using it might as well use a supported docker compose.
I never used Docker compose. If I had two containers that needed to communicate, I’d just setup networking for them.
I use the Bluefin flavor of Silverblue. I like not having to tinker with my laptop to keep it working, everything happens in the background.
I like flatpak
i am kinda the opposite of you, i find flatpacks meh its alright.
I love flatpak. No more dependency hell!
Agree
While true… RIP disk space.
That’s false
I see being facetious is lost. Yes I know they don’t use a lot of space, however, they do package all their own dependencies. That means you do end up with duplicates.
Appimages do. Flatpaks have runtimes. There may be multiple runtimes but space is cheap. You can even spare the amount of space on a phone.
I once thought I should compress my images because they had 10mb each. I was wrong. I just had to put them on my server with immich and I don’t care about the space anymore. One 4k video is so big, all space related problems with apps or images are a real waste of time.
It depends on whether those dependencies are shared with other programs.
SSDs have become incredibly cheap, and flatpak doesn’t even use that much storage space.
What do people use for command line utilities? The selection on flatpak is a bit sparse
- Flatpak, create a shell script to call the flatpak command and pass arguments
- If the app doesn’t work well as a flatpak or isn’t packaged, I would use distrobox
- If the app doesn’t work well in distrobox, I’d rpm-ostree install it
- If I’m feeling fancy, I might look into installing homebrew. But you need to do some workarounds with PATH and homebrew otherwise it can break things; Universal Blue includes these workarounds out of the box
Options include:
- Installing them through
brew; this is setup, enabled and configured correctly by default on uBlue projects like Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin. - Installing them within a container; be it though Toolbx or Distrobox. This is what Fedora Atomic initially intended (and probably still does).
- Some users got a lot of mileage from utilizing
nixto this effect. - If all else fails (or if you outright prefer it this way), you can always layer it through
rpm-ostree.
- Installing them through
