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  • Fedora is the perfect balance of stable and up-to-date, so that's what I'm using on my desktop. I've got Arch on another laptop too because it's so easy to use; it has my favorite package manager and basically every program in existence in the AUR.

    • You can have both! Just install Distrobox and set up an arch container.
      I do that on Silverblue and it works great :)

  • openSUSE Tumbleweed because it's bang up to date and utterly reliable.

    • Agreed. I want rolling release so I'm up to date and don't have to reinstall when a major version upgrade inevitably breaks something. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed gives me that in a reliable little package. It has its quirks, but I'm trying to learn as I go.

  • Fedora, it's bleeding edge, but stable enough for a daily driver. Also, most things work out of the box.

    • It's not bleeding edge, it has a release cycle of 6 months.
      It's more leading edge, since it uses the most modern technologies like Wayland by default, btrfs, and so on.

  • Fedora.

    They have solid community and financial backings, they do tremendous work pushing the Linux desktop forward, it's close to vanilla and the sweet spot between stable and bleeding edge (aka "leading edge") for me personally.

  • I have Arch (KDE) installed on my desktop at home. I have been using it for 6 years and I love it, especially the AUR! This month I have been mostly using my laptop and I am using MX Linux 23 KDE which is great! I really find it's tools very useful when I need them (which is not often, but I am glad they are there).

  • Void Linux +1

    It's organized beautifully. The tools are lightweight and easy to use. The package manager is a joy to use, fast and lean. Partial updates won't break your system. It's rolling but not bleeding edge which provides robustness of the system. Runit, the init system, is also a joy to use. Super easy to use and minimal.

    • xbps is absolutely lovely. It may not have concurrent downloads, but it manages to be quick anyway!

  • EndeavorOS. It’s based on arch which has great nvidia driver packages if that's your thing and the arch wiki is amazing.

    A nice package manager wrapper is bundled. Do yay to search for any package and install it; do yay (nothing else) to upgrade everything, and yay -Rcns to remove stuff and all their unused dependencies. I also recommend chaoticAUR which is also easy to setup. What is the AUR, you ask? A repository for user-created ways to install TONS of stuff, think homebrew (including cask, unseparated) but on Linux

    For the DE I recommend MATE but you can select any of the major ones in the installer
    Get synapse for a spotlight-like search; it uses the alt+space keybind by default

  • I use Guix. It's fully free, it's basically the de-facto GNU system, and I like the features of the Guix package manager.

    • How is the experience? Packages, updates, desktops, flatpak, podman etc? Nowadays most apps work everywhere but the core is different

      • I've not been running it for very long, so I can't comment in depth. But, installing packages is easy (guix install), updates are quite easy (guix pull && guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm) (but it is an unstable rolling distribution so sometimes updates need to be pushed along with --keep-going if they fail). I'm using EXWM so I can't really comment on DEs but it has Plasma, Gnome, XFCE and a few others so it can be quite familiar.

        A nice thing about updates is that you can very easily roll back to a previous point in GRUB. Whenever you run system reconfigure it puts a new point in that menu.

        I haven't used Flatpak so I can't comment.

        The only thing that might be annoying to some people is the kernel it uses by default. The mainline Linux kernel, which for some reason permits proprietary blobs, is not used. Linux-libre is used, which kicks them out. Which means if you don't have hardware that has been fully freed, you'll have problems.

        I believe mainline Linux can be installed by changing some things in the system config and adding an extra repository, but it'll build by source instead (since Guix is a build-from-sourve distribution with transparent binary substitution where they are available). And of course, then you'll make the de-facto GNU system run proprietary software. Which is certainly an odd thing to do, but if your hardware requires blobs to run then you unfortunately don't really have much of a choice.

        Oh, and that's another point. You configure pretty much everything in config.scm. Users, kernel arguments, etc.

        You can also use the GNU Hurd kernel if you want, but unless you have very specific hardware it won't work because of the lack of drivers so for most people right now that's meaningless.

        It's not really a distribution friendly to new users, but I'd love to see it succeed. Maybe I'll write a nice installer and package manager GUI for it in the future?

  • Short answer: Custom Fedora Silverblue image through uBlue's template, because it offers a relatively mature and easy to use distro with unique features in terms of stability and security that's (almost) unmatched within the Linux space.

    Long answer: ::: spoiler spoiler

    which distro and why do you prefer it over others?

    Personally, I'm very fond of atomic[1] distros. What they bring onto the table in terms of stability and ***"It just works."***[2] can't be understated[3]. I've been running Fedora Silverblue[4] for the last one and a half years and it has been excellent barring some smaller issues[5]. While on the other hand, the distros[6] I've experienced in the mean time through dual-booting happened to be a mess and I eventually couldn't continue to use them as they accumulated issues all over the place.

    So far, it should be pretty clear why I prefer atomic distros over traditional ones. However, why do I favor Fedora Silverblue over the other atomic distros? Well, I try to be very security-conscious. And, unsurprisingly, this has influence on my choice. In this case; Fedora is the only one (together with openSUSE) that properly supports SELinux. While AppArmor is also excellent, it's not ideal for the container workflow atomic distros are known for; which is probs one of the reasons why openSUSE has only recently started supporting SELinux while they've been supporting AppArmor for a long time. Furthermore, while both Fedora's and openSUSE[7]'s offerings are excellent. Fedora has been working on theirs considerably longer and therefore their atomic distros are more mature. Thus, I ended up with Fedora. Silverblue, however, wasn't actually initially preferred over Kinoite. I started on Kinoite, which I was attracted to for how KDE Plasma was relatively similar to Windows[8] and for how it allowed easy configuration out of the box. At the time, Kinoite wasn't that polished yet. So I had to rebase[9] to Silverblue and the rest has been history.

    There are actually atomic distros that don't heavily rely on the container workflow to do their bidding and thus don't necessitate the use of SELinux over AppArmor. Those distros would be NixOS and Guix. These are on my radar and I might even switch to either one of them eventually[10]. Heck, I've even installed the Nix package manager on Fedora Silverblue through Determinate Systems' Nix installer. But, to be honest, I'm most interested in Spectrum OS. Which I would define as the love child of NixOS and Qubes OS[11].

    1. Perhaps more commonly referred to as 'immutable'.
    2. Built-in rollback capability. No system corruption due to power outage or anything. Automatic background upgrades.
    3. Obviously, there's a lot more I like about them. I won't do a complete rundown, but the following is worth mentioning: (Some degree of) declarative system configuration. Reproducibility. Improved security.
    4. To be more precise; at first just the stock image, but I've since rebased to uBlue's Silverblue image and more recently to my custom image using uBlue's 'template'.
    5. As much as I like Fedora, their repos could be a lot better; both in terms of available packages and how up-to-date the packages are. Furthermore, though more GNOME's issue than Fedora's, extensions add IMO excellent functionality to the table. However, they sometimes behave very unpredictable in an otherwise very predictable environment. For example, enabling the blur my shell extension somehow forces me to log out right after I try to unlock my screen; probably caused by the gnome-shell crashing for some random reason.
    6. Which would be EndeavourOS and Nobara.
    7. Which would be openSUSE Aeon and openSUSE Kalpa.
    8. Fedora Kinoite was indeed my first experience on Linux 😅.
    9. Which actually felt like a magical experience for how easy and effective it is.
    10. After their infamously steep learning curves have been conquered.
    11. Best desktop OS in terms of security and privacy. :::

  • Kubuntu. The support and stability of Ubuntu but with KDE Plasma 5 (not a huge fan of gnome), and probably one of the more straightforward distros to use in my experience alongside Linux Mint or Pop!OS

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