1y ago

What is your go-to Linux distro and why?

I'd like to settle on a distro, but none of them seem to click for me. I want stability more than anything, but I also value having the latest updates (I know, kind of incompatible).

I have tested Pop!_Os, Arch Linux, Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu. Arch and Pop being the two that I enjoyed the most and seemed the most stable all along... I am somewhat interested in testing NixOS although the learning curve seems a bit steep and it's holding me back a bit.

What are you using as your daily drive? Would you recommend it to another user? Why? Why not?

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It used to be Fedora, and I still want it to be Fedora. It was solid, stable, cutting edge, and easy to work with both on the command line and in the super-up-to-date Gnome desktop. DNF is great once you make a few tweaks, I don't care about systemd, and it supports all of my hardware with basically no tweaking right out of the box. And the Anaconda Installer isn't all that bad once you get used to its idiosyncrasies. I've been a distrohopper for like 15 years now, but I always end up hopping back to Fedora. Or I did, anyway, but with IBM-RedHat's shenanigans as of late, I'm looking for a new home. Current thoughts:
I used to run Arch (btw), and could go back to it, but I'd prefer something more brainless to maintain (Arch isn't hard to maintain - check updates before you install, be careful with the AUR, it's golden - but I just don't have the spoons anymore). It's actually what I'm running on the laptop I'm using to post this.
I'm not going to use Ubuntu or anything else involving Snap because I hate dealing with Snap (YMMV - I know it has its fans, but I don't like the way Canonical is handling it's stuff there, and I only have room in my depression-addled brain for one universal package format).
I love the new Debian, but the Gnome desktop is already out of date, and it's just going to get farther behind. I have to decide if I want to give up cutting edge Gnome in favor of holy-Mary-Mother-of-God stability.
Some up and coming immutables look very interesting; blendOS and Vanilla OS in particular, but also OpenSuse Aeon. Just not sure I'm ready to go immutable, old grognard that I am.
But seriously, RHEL - just re-open the source code, thanks, you asshats.
Edit: I really need to learn how to proofread before I post.
- As a Fedora user, I don't understand why you care this much about RHEL? I agree the decision is very bad, but Fedora is downstream from RHEL and
  Is not owned by Redhat (although they are it's sponsor)
  Will never go closed source, as it is community run and this would infinitely degrade the quality of RHEL.
  If you really prefer using Fedora, I think the paywalling of RHEL's sourcr code has little to no affect on you.
  
  You make good points. My jumping off the Fedora ship was a knee-jerk reaction to the RHEL doofusry, and not one based completely on rational thought, sadly. And now I've been hopping around spending more time researching stuff and trying things out than getting things done lol.
  So yeah. I might just go back to Fedora...
  
  Yeah, I almost distrohopped for the same reason!
  Even if you do go back to Fedora, you're a more experienced user than you were before.
- Maybe you can help me. I have a computer hooked to my TV. The usage is 99% displaying YouTube and 1% displaying other internet content. It is running Mint. Getting YouTube to come up takes an eternity. I'm wondering if a different distro would fix this. If so, which one would be best? I need it to run Firefox well because I want to use the ad blocker. Ideas?
  
  I would not expect another distro to fix this, unless the computer's hardware is very old or very slow. If that is the case, I would try to combine an extremely lightweight window manager with an extremely lightweight distro.
  
  Well yeah, the hardware was thrown together from stuff I already had. It plays fine, it just takes forever to start. I suppose I could update the mobo/cpu.

227 comments