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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Tuxedo OS. Same idea as smth like mint or PopOs but (imo) done much better. It also has rolling release for some stuff (like the DE) and non-rolling for other stuff (not even sure what bc I don’t really look in detail). It also uses KDE plasma my favorite (and imo the best) DE. It’s got pretty good app availability in terms of official packages because it is based on Ubuntu LTS (now 24.04). There are a couple things that are vestigial on most computers bc it was made for tuxedo computers but these have no negative effect on other devices in my experience.
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
Lubuntu
My first foray into unix-likes was oprnbsd with fluxbox. I eventually moved to openbox. Lubuntu with lxqt gives a nice simple openbox experience with a menu and stuff. I customize it to have openbox present the mouse menu instead of the whole pcmanfm desktop thing.
Arch, cause I set it up to my liking once out of curiosity when I was procrastinating, wrote a script that automates https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance and now am too lazy to switch to something else.
Especially since maintenance involves typing Update.sh once a week or so, and nothing else.Kubuntu, because it’s the most solid distro I’ve used that meets my needs.
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.
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
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
- 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
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. :)
EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.
Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
Prob the reason why i hated garauda (Idk if is it because i picked the dragonized gaming ver)
Probably. I’m definitely not a fan of Garuda Linux (never used it to be honest). The styling and the bloat are not my taste. But the most important thing to me is, if I can trust those developers and maintainers? And I don’t trust most non common distros. Looking at their webpage, they also have a KDE lite version with less bloat and bare minimum packages to get started. This is actually awesome!
Sadly its kde only.
What do you mean by personal package manager?
I didn’t say “personal package manager”. Do you refer to the part “basically my own AUR package”?
pacman, the package manager of Archlinux that is also used in EndeavourOS, allows for installing custom packages. There is another tool part of Archlinux that let you build custom packages. These custom packages can be installed on your system, which is then seen like a normal package and handled this way with all the defined dependencies and information about the package. You can install the package from a local location, it does not need to be online repository.Then you can upload it to the AUR, which is exactly that: Arch User Repository. But you don’t have to upload it. Either way such a custom build package is what I referred to my own AUR package. For more information see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository
What they said.
Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur
Also pacman and the aur
Another reason why am using cachyos
NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.
Debian on most my machines. Can’t trust commercially backed distros any more. I’m tired of chacing cutting edge stuff. Like things to just work.
I can agree, my goal now is to find a distro that keeps some stuff updated not everything like kernel etc.
And there is ever decreasing need for cutting edge with containers and sandboxing. And hardware improvement is no longer so rapid so buying the hotness of 2+ years ago is cheap and effective and well supported.
Ubuntu because I’m old, uncool, and tired
Hilarious to have to look this low for it, but who want to stand up and declare themselves mainstream.
Polished, reliable, and solid, and snaps are not a big deal or an insidious evil, and neither is Canonical. They make missteps for sure. But with containers etc stability is more important than immediate updates and it’s excellent about kernel updates for new hardware. It’s slick Debian, and if the fuckery ever gets real switching to Debian is easy.
Me too. Rock solid, with KDE. So easy to learn, make it mine.
