Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Recently I bought cheap Surface-like x86 tablet on a rather recent hardware, and running Debian and its cousins required more tinkering than I was willing to do, so I decided to go with a more modern rolling release. Tried Arch for a few months, bricked it from mixing stable and testing branches, tried Fedora, and finally settled in Tumbleweed. I like it for being on the bleeding edge and exceptionally stable at the same time, perhaps thanks to robust OpenSUSE Build Service automated testing. And it is from a European company, that can’t hurt.
I recently moved to Fedora KDE Plasma after years on W10, simply because I don’t want to use W11 and its AI bullshit. So far, it’s been a great time, and I haven’t noticed any major performance issues, so I’m happy with it. Having to update everything every few days is pretty novel though, and ‘sudo dnf update -y’ makes me feel like Hackerman, king of all Hackers. I think I like the customization options most though. I get way more control over what happens on my PC than W10 ever gave me, and it’s all wrapped in a very user-friendly GUI. Overall 8.5-9/10.
Linux Mint is a nice and easy distro that is quite good :D
I have been using Tuxedo OS for the past few months.
I just wanted to use something that was Ubuntu based with KDE.
KDE Neon sounded a bit too bleeding edge to be used safely as a daily driver. And Kubuntu is maybe a bit too conservative for me.
Tuxedo OS seems nicely balanced between that and so far it’s been great.
Arch. Why?
- Arch Wiki
- Pacman
- Community (therefore AUR)
Slackware: because I’m old and arch is too trendy.
👍🏻 Slackware was my 1st distro. It was before kernel 2.0. Now I use windowslike girly distros…
Geez, I haven’t heard of someone running Slackware in at least 15 years. I mean, I know it’s still around, I just haven’t heard anyone say they were running it.
It’s much more… manual than others, I’ll admit. For me anymore it’s a labor of love.
Yeah. I remember, lol
CachyOS! I was on Mint before this and had a bunch of issues running games. I think this was in part from going from NVIDIA to AMD (9070 XT).
Decided I had enough and instead of doing a simple Mint reinstall, I gave Cachy a go. I’ve had a little issue here and there but the experience has been beautifully smooth compared to Mint. It’s now set up better than I had it before and I’m over the moon with it haha.
Cachyos, since I like archlinux and the things it comes with I would install on arch. There’s even a few things that would have to be compiled from aur that’s in their repository pre-compiled.
I installed Manjaro about six months ago because I’d never tried it. I like it so far and it has yet to get in my way enough to make me want to change.
Nobara: Has all the gaming features I want on my gaming pc (like gamescope) and is htpc capable. Also, it’s based on Fedora, which I’m familiar with.
Fedora: I like gnome and it’s always fairly up to date and rock solid. Great on my laptop.
Have considered switching to openSUSE though. It’s German (as am I), it’s the first Linux distro I ever used (on my granddad’s PC, more than a decade ago) and I’ve heard a lot of good about tumbleweed.
Steam OS on Steam Deck. Fedora on Framework13 cause reliability. Garuda Mokka on Framework16 cause pretty and it just works.
May move from Garuda back to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed or CachyOS at some point.
Pop OS. Don’t use much of its custom features since I have installed sway on top of it and did some custom edits, was thinking of switching to another distro but they announced COSMIC, which looks very cool. Why not stick with the distro that could have the best experience with it?
EndeavourOS because of the AUR
I favour Arch because I prefer everything I want to install to be in the package repo and for it to be a version actually new enough to use.
But I actually use EndeavourOS because it is 99% Arch but installs easily with full hardware support on everything I own (including a T2 Macbook). It never fails me.
And now I have realized that I can use Distrobox to get the Arch repos and the AUR on any dostro I wish.
So, I now have Chimera Linux on 4 machines because it is the best engineered distro in my view. The system supervisor, system compiler, and C library matter to me (not to everyone). All these machines have the AUR on them (via distrobox). Best of all worlds.
Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I’ve ever had to type out.
How long have you used it and how is it?
I’m pretty curious about those kinds of distros, and don’t really like how nixos is completely hosted on github (and all the drama that constantly comes from the community, and the bad documentation for many things, …).
However, guix seems such a niche project that I feel like it can’t really be used.
About a year and a half.
To be honest it’s not “easy” to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.
To use it like any other distro you’re going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.
Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.
There’s also The toybox
Some additional nice things about guix:
Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.
Shepherd is hands down the best init program I’ve ever used. It’s just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.
The OS documentation is built into the distro, with “info guix” you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.
