From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Have been having great luck with the move to Linux, Garuda on my main desktop pc and fedora bazzite on my laptop.
While we are starting fights with our opinions, I absolutely love KDE plasma.
Moving to Linux has made me so happy. I feel like a computer owner / user again. It's not always perfect but nothing has stopped me dead in the water and my issues have resolved in a few minutes of tinkering.
Debian because the swirl looks cool and the installer makes me feel old and sophisticated without having to be old and sophisticated.
Arch because I'm too lazy for a non-rolling distro. I should really set up snapshots and my dotfiles repo on my new laptop though (:
Nobara because I want to game on my PC headache free
I'm a Linux noob so I don't have a distro preference yet but I'm currently using Fedora KDE spin. It's pretty nice.
Debain on servers because it just works.
Arch on desktops because you got basically every software package you'd ever need in the AUR and it's somewhat stable.
openSUSE Tumbleweed or MicroOS. I've since long given up on so called "stable release" distros, because a boon to me is to feel like I'm not using software from the stone age, which is what I feel every time I have to use a RHEL, SLE or Ubuntu system.
I've used Tumbleweed on laptop and desktop for about 6 years. Never has anything crashed, or at least nothing has ever become unbootable. The most damage ever done by an update was a regression in mesa that made 3d accelerated content absurdly slow, but even that was fixed within a few days.
I use MicroOS on almost all my servers and it's rock solid.
zypper is slower than pacman, apt and dnf, but it's extremely usable and easy to work with, even in enterprise scenarios. I'd say it's basically on par with dnf, usability wise.
openSUSE in general feels extremely stable, and I just love that they went btrfs by default a few years back and just seem to have this future proofing aspect.
OpenSuse Slowroll (rolling release with constant updates plus an update burst every two months)
Nobara bc my first year of using Linux had some rough patches, and I just wanna turn my brain off and game for a while with minimal troubleshooting.
I'll start distro hopping again soon tho
Void Linux
The name is really cool
Arch. It has pretty great documentation and I like having the safety of knowing what's on my computer. Other than those two things, I just like arch I guess. There isn't anything wrong with other distros.
Use whatever distro you feel comfortable with. That being said, there are definitely good ones and bad ones. I use Arch btw. That's the beauty of Linux tho. You can try a distro and if you dont like it you can literally install a new distro over the old one by blowing away everything but the /home partition. Did I mention yet I use Arch? I use Arch btw. The package managers are such a great tool to get a system up and running in a short time, but you can always compile everything from scratch if you want. You can config your programs with the default settings and let the OS do it for you, or you can micromanage every single config option and take a little more time to personalize your machine. I've told you I use Arch? I use Arch btw.
Yeah, Linux is great! And in case you were wondering I use a distro called Arch Linux.
I started with LinuxFT from a magazine coverdisk. I also installed it on an old 486 at the office. It became the "internet box". The company director at the time believed Bill Gates that the internet would be a fad and wasn't worth investing in and would not put any money into the company internet connection. So, it was an old 486, running LinuxFT, with a modem calling out on demand, squid proxy, email boxes etc. But it worked.
After that I moved to Redhat (before it was paid for). I remember for sure installing RH5. It was definitely a smoother experience.
Server wise, I went through various distros. Once I got to debian, for servers I never really left the "apt" world. Management wise, it's just too easy to work with. Hopping between Ubuntu and Debian even now.
For firewalls I've been through ipfwadm (Kernel 2.0.x), ipchains (Kernel 2.2.x) and iptables (Kernel 2.4.x). Now, there is some newer stuff now. Nftables, but there hasn't been a "you must change" situation like the other two and as such, I've generally stuck with iptables, mainly because when I did try nftables I had a real problem getting it to play nice with qos. Probably all fixed now, but I'm too lazy to change.
Desktop wise. I dual boot windows/linux. Linux is Manjaro, and I like Manjaro, for the fact that gaming generally just worked. However, I feel like every major upgrade I am chasing broken dependencies for far too long. But, when it works, Manjaro is great. However, I have had several failed desktop experiments. I ran Gentoo way way way back, I think I had an AMD Athlon at the time. I thought it was great, I mean building stuff for my specific setup, nice idea and all. But upgrades were so damn slow compiling everything! I tried Ubuntu, but I never found the desktop to be any good. I did also have Redhat way back in the late 90s. But the desktop was just poor back then.
I still have yet to see someone mention Hanna Montana Linux.
I just distro hopped to nixos. I was unaware of it until I came to the fediverse. The declarative system, once you get over the small learning curve, I feel is very easy to understand and configure. Creating and being able to roll back system configurations is a great feature too.
Previously I was using void. I quite enjoy it too and am sure I'll revisit it. It's a light (no systemd) rolling release distro with an emphasis on stable packages.
Debian Unstable. Because I know my way around Debian more than any other distro, but I need the newest Gnome for proper support of tablet mode on my convertible and that's something you can't install via flatpak or backports.
Downside is that it pushes package updates that weren't tested for compatibility with each other, so you need to know if what apt suggests makes sense before you hit "Y".
I've tried Arch and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed in the past, but both rely too much on packages built by users without proper integration with the main repo.
NixOS. There are lots of great things about it (like atomic upgrades, easy rollbacks, no dependency hell, safely mixing stable and unstable packages, and more) but it's killer feature is that (almost) everything about the system is specified in a single config file
Debian for me and Linux Mint Debian Edition for anyone I help with computers, because I don't want to configure a system more than once and to investigate why some stuff doesn't work.
Arch because the packages are recent. Arch has no shiny innovation and even the performance is not that fast, but I always find a way to make everything working. It is the only distro like that for me.
Fine, let's have it your way.
🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 , obviously 😀 It's flexible to no end, enables trimming off the most cruft and, because of that, can be the most secure. That last bit depends on how trigger happy you are to installing packages from outside 🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 repos.
Would highly recommend giving 🇬 🇪 🇳 🇹 🇴 🇴 a try ;)
This has been beaten to the ground.
Gentoo because it's what I know, and I know enough to make it do what I want.
I like Void because it makes me quirky.
Just kidding.
I like Void because it makes me quirky, doesn't require me to learn how systemD works, AND it is lightweight! Plus it has literally never broken on me.
Linux Mint Debian Edition for reliability with some user-friendly additions, dual boot with Garuda’s gaming edition because it pretty much sets up everything on its own for that purpose and has the latest updates.
Artix. I went Void -> Arch -> Artix. I can't help but feel that Artix is what Arch should be. Perfect blend between the Arch and Void experience.
Fedora Kinoite because it doesnt suck and doesnt break. Actually switched to ublue kinoite main, very close to upstream with minimal changes that always stay the same (its always the same difference, not weirdly diverging more and more from upstream).
But I dont know if it is the best model, as Fedoras BTRFS snapshots + ostree without the image based thing would sound better ? But this is not existing.
Btw Nix, Flatpak, Distrobox/Toolbox, Distrobox/Toolbox with root, Podman, Docker, layering, removal, are all things that work on Fedora Atomic. Maybe even snap if someone is brave enough to try
Ubuntu because it requires the least amount of hack fixes to get working.
And snap has vastly simplified software installation.
That is a bold opinion my friend.
Manjaro, because it's rolling release and it's built on Arch, only the necessary stuff is installed (including a desktop environment), you can set it up with just a few clicks, and it works out of the box, and even proprietary GPU drivers are easily installable with mhwd. Stable and reliable.
In case anything breaks, there's quick help on their forum, which (when it happened to me once) outperformed customer support of proprietary software.
It's been my daily driver for almost 8 years without any major issue.
So in short, robustness, rolling release, simplicity, community.
Edit: I have to add, my use case is for a desktop PC for software design/development + a little gaming.