Linux

Nixos because... I feel like were already loud enough of a crowd everyone should know its benefits lol

I'm relatively new to Linux, so I'm testing a few distros via VMs right now. My main desktop runs OpenSUSE Leap with KDE Plasma and I love it so far. I'm also trying Fedora 42 with GNOME, but I'm realizing I don't like GNOME. I'm running Linux Mint Cinnamon on a 2016 MacBook Pro, which is pretty nice too. I also ran Debian stable for a bit. OpenSUSE is my favorite of the ones I've tried.

On my main desktop I'm using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.

Linux Mint Cinnamon didn't run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who's implementation of KDE?

I've spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I'd rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I'm not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I've been around long enough to go "Remember PeppermintOS? You don't, okay." So I'm looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.

I've never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I've tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don't know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.

That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.

I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.

For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

Bazzite, Aurora, Proxmox and Ubuntu Server.

Fedora because it just works and I don't have to mess with it.

@aleq

I'm using #endeavouros with Gnome on my Desktop at the moment, just because I wanted to try Arch with all the priorly mentioned arguments, rolling release, Wiki and so on.

I started with Slackware in the early 90s, SuSE and Red Hat (Fedora today) just for fun and self-education, even though Slackware wasn't fun at all. This distro brought me nights without sleep and full of tears. 😂🫣

I tried a couple of times to switch to Linux on the desktop but never got it to work satisfyingly like Windows with all my private and business applications and games.
So Linux and I had an on and off relationship over decades. I wanted to love Linux so badly, but it was never reasonable to run it on the desktop.
Let's see how we're going to end, Arch/Endeavour and me.

On a server I would not switch from a Debian-based distro, just because I'm used to it and I would also prefer stable instead of rolling releases.

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.

Void linux. Both on wayland + labwc desktop and radpberrypi 4 server with multiple dockers, and a bootable usb for my work laptop. Why? Its lightweight, rolling, rock stable, and easily extendable. I love runit for its simplicity. Love xbps package manager for its speed, and love the good and clear documentation.

Fedora Gnome. I like it and it just works for my daily office use. I don't have the time nor the mental strength to fiddle with different distro's on a regular basis.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, because it has been the most stable and flexible experience I've had that worked out of the box. I have tried a lot of distros over the years, and openSUSE has really held up.

Additionally, I use Nobara for a multi-purpose machine that I also occasionally use for gaming (that's why Nobara instead of openSUSE: it gets me slightly higher %1 lows and is less effort to set up for gaming) and a Void Linux machine for programming. Nobara is pretty good, by far the best gaming oriented distro I've tried, but I do regret that it's Fedora based. Void is really fantastic, but for some reason it only boots on my System76 laptop, so that's the only device I use it on 🤷.

Void is an arch-killer for me; it's faster, has huge repos, and offers a similar experience. I honestly prefer it, and would probably use it on most of my machines if it weren't for the booting issue (it's been a few months since I last tried, so things might have changed though). OpenSUSE is king for low-effort stability and flexibility though.

Well, those are my two cents. Good day y'all!

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.

Ubuntu. It was reccomended to me by a few of my mor knowledgeable friends, and I haven't had any major issues with it. The operating system is doing what I need it to and I just can't find any motivation to want to change.

EndeavourOS because someone said it was Arch for lazy people, and I'm a lazy people.

I did use vanilla Arch before for a while, but just ended up being more work for the same setup with more issues from stuff like missing dependencies I didn't have to worry about with Endeavour.

Only other distro I've used was Pop!_OS when I first tried out Linux.

Because despite all the people telling me I'm wrong, Kubuntu is still by far the best distro I've ever used. Rock solid, super fast, and continues to improve.

Fedora because it has (IMO) the best vanilla GNOME experience. Every application is in the same theme and looks similar.

I was running only arch on my surface pro 7 and my amd desktop, then last week after an update it seemed gnome and Linux surface kernel weren't playing nice and had bricked the install. I have switch the laptop to Debian but I tend to stick with arch, like op as I am used to it, I now run Debian as it is known to be stable.

I would love to find a new distro but for me its the sunk cost fallacy, I have put so much time into learning arch and to repeat all that - this new distro would need to offer something wildly different.

Arch. Started using it in high school. Never had a reason to switch. Now I'm just regularly frustrated by other distros trying to make things easier by abstracting simple configurations behind layers of custom scripts.

Wanted to try out wayland and fedora was recommended as the best experience for that during those years. Discovered the most polished, stable and smooth Linux experience I'd had to date. Mostly used ubuntu distros and arch before. Never looked back. Upgraded to Silverblue to try out the future of linux. Haven't changed anything since. Been about 3 years now on Silverblue.

Arch, moved here from Ubuntu when I realized I have a good idea of what I want installed and have no need for a bunch of things to get bundled into the OS

Fedora (workstation) is the first distro I actually managed to daily drive. Its modern, stable, and I didnt have to spend to much time in getting everything to work how I want it. Tried some distros in the past but they never stuck (Ubuntu, mint, popOS).

Curious about arch but I think I will stick Fedora for now.

Debian on my servers as a very stable base, Fedora Kionoite on the laptop to try out the concept of atomic distros.

Mint cuz I'm a newbie and it was recommended.

I tried KDE Neon Plasma a while too and it was doing a weird stuttery jitter thing with the mouse that I didn't like so I switched back.

Mint just hasn't had any huge frustrating problems or anything wrong with it that I couldn't fix in the settings menu. Just how I like it.

Fedora. I've been using it since Fedora Core 1 and was mostly RedHat before that. I don't have time to muck around with my desktop and Fedora almost always just works. I've had too many problems with Ubuntu and Suse and friends. And while I like Arch and Debian and others, I just want my desktop to be point and click. My days off tinkering on my desktop are long gone. Kids, house, work, wife, grandkids, other hobbies keep me busy. I save tinkering for my selfhosting adventures.

Mine may be the funniest

I used to always recommend people use Linux Mint as their first distro, but then it hit me, how can I recommend something I only installed for five minutes? So I got myself Linux Mint, it was 21.3 Virginia at that time, now I have more important things to do in my system and it has stayed.

I used Arch in my old laptop for 2 and half years, learned alot of things from Arch, also got to know some people in the Arch unofficial Matrix Room. But I have a new laptop and this is the story.

I switched to Arch Linux for the memes, but now am unable to leave it. I've tried a few dozen distros, but none of them are as good as arch for me, I always come back to it. It's like arch is my perfect distro.

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.

I’ve been distro hopping for 15+ years but have settled with Mint for the last few, because I just want something that works. I’m too busy nowadays to bother with maintaining a distro, so I just want something that works out of the box and is easy to maintain. The laptop I use it on is connected to the TV as I use it to watch movies.

It's Debian. It's well-supported by software and super stable and open.

Fedora strikes a good balance for me. I come from arch and opensuse. I like the stability of fedora, but I like that it also gets updates faster than Debian. Most software I have found has Fedora considerations.

However, I have been using Ubuntu LTS for my self hosted media server.

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.

I use Debian on machines I don't want to fuck with or have change much.

I use Endeavour because it was recommended to me for the bleeding edge hardware I had just bought for gaming.

Mint. Just because it works with zero issues on the desktop. Everything else is either Rocky, RH or Debian.