1mo ago

What distro do you use and why?

yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.

289 comments

Linux Mint, because I don't like to tinker with the system, I like good defaults (and Mints has them).
- Yk what I LOVE THAT, Why i liked linux mint when i was new.
- Well technically Mint has one terrible default nowadays that is hidden unverified Flatpaks.
  
  I do agree cinnamon,mate and xfce us not enough but I found cinnamon the least buggy option.
  
  I avoid flatpaks, so I don't mind.

Fedora Silverblue
I like Gnome
I like that Fedora adopts new technology quickly
I like how it makes updates more reliable
I like flatpak
- Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.
  Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.
  
  I was using Debian and Docker for my servers, but I'm switching to uCore and Podman. It was a decent learning curve, but I think I'm going to like it better.
- I use the Bluefin flavor of Silverblue. I like not having to tinker with my laptop to keep it working, everything happens in the background.
- I like flatpak
  i am kinda the opposite of you, i find flatpacks meh its alright.
  
  I love flatpak. No more dependency hell!
- What do people use for command line utilities? The selection on flatpak is a bit sparse
  
  Options include:
  Installing them through brew; this is setup, enabled and configured correctly by default on uBlue projects like Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin.
  Installing them within a container; be it though Toolbx or Distrobox. This is what Fedora Atomic initially intended (and probably still does).
  Some users got a lot of mileage from utilizing nix to this effect.
  If all else fails (or if you outright prefer it this way), you can always layer it through rpm-ostree.
  
  Flatpak, create a shell script to call the flatpak command and pass arguments
  If the app doesn’t work well as a flatpak or isn’t packaged, I would use distrobox
  If the app doesn’t work well in distrobox, I’d rpm-ostree install it
  If I’m feeling fancy, I might look into installing homebrew. But you need to do some workarounds with PATH and homebrew otherwise it can break things; Universal Blue includes these workarounds out of the box

from the comments, there's a split between
linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.
i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it's not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want
- 'Toy' feels strange to me here. It's more of a just-works vs power-tool distinction. Sometimes people like tools that require you to RTFM because the deeper understanding has concrete benefits; it's not just fun. User-friendliness is not all upside, it is still a tradeoff.
  You're absolutely right about hurting new users by not making the destinction, whatever label is used.
- Lots of folks use those "toy" distros to accomplish specialized tasks that are cumbersome or impossible on other distros. I'd describe it more as "general purpose" vs "niche"
  Both are tools
  
  that could be true, but my comment was the takeaway i had from reading the other comments in this thread (and from previous experience elsewhere on the internet). most people answering "arch" or "gentoo" are saying, themselves, that they like it because it "teaches them how linux works" or that they "like compiling stuff". clearly the focus is tinkering with the system as an end in of itself, not using the system as a means to another end
- Yes! Great way of putting it. It's hard to explain how just using an OS can be a fun hobby in itself.
  OpenSUSE Tumbleweed does it all for me. I work and play games on it and stuff, but my laptop is less mission critical, so I run EndeavourOS on it and experiment with fun layouts and everything is all "frutiger-aero-esque". It feels like how I nostalgicallyremember those WinXP-7 days!
  Snapper rollbacks with BTRFS are incredible for letting you play around with an OS you actually use, and still giving you a cushion to fall back on. :D
  My little media streamer / guest PC has Mint. Nice, maybe a little boring, predictable, reliable. Ahhh simplicity. :)

EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.
Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
- The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
  Prob the reason why i hated garauda (Idk if is it because i picked the dragonized gaming ver)
  
  Probably. I'm definitely not a fan of Garuda Linux (never used it to be honest). The styling and the bloat are not my taste. But the most important thing to me is, if I can trust those developers and maintainers? And I don't trust most non common distros. Looking at their webpage, they also have a KDE lite version with less bloat and bare minimum packages to get started. This is actually awesome!
- What do you mean by personal package manager?
  
  I didn't say "personal package manager". Do you refer to the part "basically my own AUR package"? pacman, the package manager of Archlinux that is also used in EndeavourOS, allows for installing custom packages. There is another tool part of Archlinux that let you build custom packages. These custom packages can be installed on your system, which is then seen like a normal package and handled this way with all the defined dependencies and information about the package. You can install the package from a local location, it does not need to be online repository.
  Then you can upload it to the AUR, which is exactly that: Arch User Repository. But you don't have to upload it. Either way such a custom build package is what I referred to my own AUR package. For more information see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository
- What they said.

Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur
- Also pacman and the aur
  Another reason why am using cachyos

NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.

Debian on most my machines. Can’t trust commercially backed distros any more. I’m tired of chacing cutting edge stuff. Like things to just work.
- I can agree, my goal now is to find a distro that keeps some stuff updated not everything like kernel etc.
- And there is ever decreasing need for cutting edge with containers and sandboxing. And hardware improvement is no longer so rapid so buying the hotness of 2+ years ago is cheap and effective and well supported.

Ubuntu because I'm old, uncool, and tired
- Hilarious to have to look this low for it, but who want to stand up and declare themselves mainstream.
  Polished, reliable, and solid, and snaps are not a big deal or an insidious evil, and neither is Canonical. They make missteps for sure. But with containers etc stability is more important than immediate updates and it's excellent about kernel updates for new hardware. It's slick Debian, and if the fuckery ever gets real switching to Debian is easy.
  
  Me too. Rock solid, with KDE. So easy to learn, make it mine.

After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn't want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it's based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that's a two-edged sword.
Right now I'm content with Tumbleweed, but I'm keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.
- I wish it was not hard getting nvidia drivers on opensuse.
  
  i see people saying that, but the process was almost automatic to me. what issues are you having?

Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it's snappy, reliable, and I don't need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it's still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop... I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.
edit: typos
- I wonder what you will think of lmde its linux mint with a debian base instead of ubuntu (It keeps some stuff for eg the desktop updated).
  
  LMDE is snappy as hell and stable as a rock
  
  I've seen lmde mentioned on Mint website but if I recall correctly they also presented it like a somewhat experimental version?

Fedora with GNOME.
I've been using it for over than 10 years in my main computer.
It simply works, it's nice, fresh packages, stable, GNOME is productivity champion (at least I know all the shortcuts, and how to tweak it to my daily use). I also know how to build and manipulate RPM packages, so it's pretty convenient.
- I've been using Fedora for the last 5 years and never had to reinstall the OS. I've been upgrading with no issues whatsoever.
  With Ubuntu, I had to reinstall everything on every update because of errors. Not on EVERY update of course, but often enough to make me want to stick to LTSs.
  
  Does Fedora have a long term support version? Last time I used it a decade ago I had to upgrade every 1-2 years.
- What is the benefit of building / manipulating packages?
  
  Mostly for fun/learning and to tweak some Fedora packages to my needs. I keep my own RPM repository.
- oh, fedora,
  fedora was so stable i had to run to arch-linux as there was nothing to tinker with
- afaik, fedora is the testing distro for RHEL. I also felt this way, when a new gnome version released much earlier than for Arch and it had an obvious bug that could be catched with little testing.
  And many issues I found in Fedora's bug tracker was auto closed by the new release. Which is quite frequent. Reviewing the bugs is not that frequent.

Debian and Linux Mint.
Debian for mission critical stuff like servers or things I don't want to futz with, like HTPCs, work machines, etc.
Mint for my gaming desktop because it's a bit newer on kernels and such.

Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.
I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it's what I'm comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to "just work" most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.
Ubuntu server is primarily because it's incredibly easy to get support when you need it.
- yeah i love linux mint just works

EndeavourOS. It's just easy to install and I basically use it like Arch

For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.
For my gaming PC, I've got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I'd either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I'd just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I'm doing on there

Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.

I use NixOS, Gentoo, and Debian:
NixOS because I like declarative configuration files.
Gentoo because I enjoy compiling from source.
Debian because the other two are more difficult to use.
- Technically NixOS is all compiled from source too (if you disable the binary caches). It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head. Debian still holds a special place in my heart too, for its simplicity and stability!
  
  It has since taken away Gentoo’s raison d’être a bit in my head.
  I wouldn't say so. We currently don't hold a candle to USE-flags. Many packages are already configurable but there's no standard on anything w.r.t. that.
  There's no technical reason we couldn't have such a standard but it hasn't happened yet.
  
  I do this with my kernel & a couple of applications that either compile super fast anyhow or at runtime benefit from further compiler optimizations.

No Void here?
Oh well... I surely don't use it because it's popular...
Runit
Pkg manager
KISS
Up to date / rolling distro
But stable
- I went into void as my first DIY distro, mainly because I wanted to mess around with window managers and it was a very good experience. Runit made my underpowered laptop boot into linux in like 4 seconds, crazy fast. XBPS package manager was always really really fast too. I like the fact that nearly everything you need is in the official repo, instead of having to delve into the depths of something like the AUR. I also managed to make a contribution to the repos with the help of the community on the IRC chat rooms which were very noob friendly. Overall just a solid experience.
- I was thinking the same thing, but I don't like void because it doesn't have every package I want And they only offer old or extremely specific ones.

Arch. I had some tinkering with other distros in the past but wanted to configure pretty much everything. Running it with Cinnamon. I love pacman and AUR and have been able to not break it so far after a year of being installed which is a new record for me 😂

Arch.
Because of pacman. Building and writing packages is simple and dependencies are slim. Also packages are recent. And most likely "there is an AUR package for that". Also stack transitions arrive early, like pipewire.
Also let's not forget Arch Wiki, i bet you have read it as a non Arch user.
I administer Arch on 8 machines including gaming rigs, home server, web server, kids laptop, wifes gaming desktop, audio workstation and machine learning rig and a bunch of dev laptops. I also use ArchARM on RPi for some home automation.
Never considered switching since I switched from Ubuntu over 15 years ago.
I do have experience with several other rpm and apt based distros.

Fedora.
I've tried them all but found it's the most reliable. It's upgrades are even more reliable than Macos and Windows.
Packages are very up to date but also well tested. Sometimes even newer than Arch for short periods.
The community is awesome.
I love Gnome, I've found it's more consistent than even MacOs in its design. And it has perfect keyboard shortcuts.

Different distros for different uses:
Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
Nobara for my main gaming PC.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

PopOS. It was the easiest to get my Nvidia GPU set up and plays all the games that I wanna play without too much pain. I've been meaning to try something like Arch with KDE, something like what my SteamDeck is using... but I don't wanna fuck around setting up Arch.
- If you wanna try Arch + KDE without hassle, well Arch has an easier installer now, but I use EndeavourOS. It's a lovely smooth Arch experience!
  Very easy installer with lots of options to choose from. :)
- Arch based distros if that's fine?

Debian. Because it's the best about "Just Works" (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.
BUT I'm also not a "numbers go up" geek. I don't give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that's just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).
If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.
(/soapbox)
My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don't play the latest games anyway, I'm a PatientGamer, and I don't do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.
It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don't have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).
It all works fine, but one day I'll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs

I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.

Gentoo because I like it.
And portage.

I just installed Pop!_OS 22.04, after finally ditching Windows 11 entirely. I picked it because it seemed easy to use, well suited for gaming, and popular with good support.
So far, everything has been great!
- Windows 10? That's still supported ig.

Fedora because it's stable and effective.
- Fedora Core (the first one) was my first love in Linux. I tried SuSE before that but wasn't as polished as it is now. That was more than 20 years ago!

Bazzite, I want my PC to just work and not require me to maintain it, on top of that I need it to be game-ready and have good color management for work related stuff.

Plain old Fedora.
I know the hurdles, i know what to expect, and I've never been surprised by it.
Immutable sounds nice, AUR sounds nice, NixOS sounds nice, but i am utterly confident in my current choice's reliability and comfortable with its idiosyncracies. Everything i want to do works very well.
If i had less time/energy or had to switch, Kubuntu would be my second choice. Less frequent updates and fewer creature comforts, but also very reliable.
- I'm in the same boat. I was a kde neon person for a very long time, but I eventually got tired of some weird issues I was having that I couldn't find a fix for. tried fedora on a bit of a whim and everything just worked. Nvidia drivers were a breeze to set up, gnome is very nice out of the box and doesn't take the configuring I'm used to on kde, and even just having gnome boxes pre installed is super useful and I get to skip the virtualboxes setup. very impressed with it overall. never going back
  
  the 9 month update cycle is my biggest issue, and it's not a big deal

Alpine:
Rolling release (Alpine Edge) yet stable
Extremely lightweight
Very customizable
After setting it up I find that it works very well
Decently sized repo
OpenRC rather then SystemD (I prefer the way it handles services)
- I wonder how hard is it to download apps on Glibc-free systems, On Systemd-free systems ik there is Flatpack and stuff , asking this bcs many apps on Linux only work on Glibc.
  
  I personally haven't ran into any yet, tbh I have more issues with SystemD dependent apps (Also keep in mind Alpine packages and maintains apps in their repo so they don't require GLIBs/SystemD)
- Is that usable for regular Joe or enthusiast grade?
  
  I wouldnt call it enthusiast grade, every day usage is easy but installation can be tough (it gives you a barebones system).

I use Ubuntu because it's the most popular and well-supported.
I'm going to be switching to Mint at some point because it's basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don't trust Canonical anymore, but it's hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I've been using Ubuntu since 2017.
I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I'm going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.

I use Bazzite so that it matches with my Steam Deck since SteamOS still isn't an actual distro to play with yet...

Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I've used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I'm comfortable with it and it's supported in every cloud environment I've touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)
I've got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I'd go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don't find much of a difference beyond package management.
- Is aura like nix?
  
  Not used nix so can't comment on that, aura is a pacman wrapper + aur helper -S for package operations, -A for aur, gives you similar options too so -Au to update like -Su in pacman. Has a lot of other options that I'm probably not taking advantage of, but for me, gives me a single place to manage most everything (flathub too but I don't use a lot of flatpaks, just nice to have)

I use LMDE. I use it because Mint has proved that it is worth using (for example: it provide easy way to install multimedia codec by only click "Install Multimedia Codec" in applications menu) and I want it to success.
Sorry if my english is bad

Fedora, it has KDE spin, and quite recent packages.

I use EndeavourOS Xfce because it's Arch with pacman and not Flathub or Snap. Plus, I love the simplicity and the performance boost you get with Xfce (even if it's a small boost with a modern gaming PC).
- yo finally someone who loves native packages more then flatpack.
  
  Flatpak annoys me
  
  Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.
  For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn't even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can't talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you're SOL.

I use Fedora simply because I got a Framework and the fingerprint reader didn’t work in (K)Ubuntu so I tried Fedora as a little test. It worked, so I just stuck with it - everything else worked as I wanted, and it gave me the opportunity to try a completely new distribution.
- Maybe bcs kubuntu is using a older kernel.

I recently installed OpenSuse, I have been using FreeBSD mostly, but have used linux through the years. I decided to go with an rpm based distro and I've always likes the chameleon mascot of Suse. I'm used to Debian based linux, so it's been a slight adjustment but it's been nice and smooth. I'm running Tumbleweed right now and all my Steam games work, as well as my 3d Windows applications via wine. It just works* I am too old and tired to spend time tweaking anymore.
- I'm curious, what's the use case for FreeBSD? Seems obscure.

Endeavour OS because once you go rolling you can never go back.
- I loved EndeavourOS, but I'm just not sure bleeding edge is for me. Mostly because I will forget to update for a week, and suddenly there are 500 updates, all with interconnected dependencies and pacman is just like "wtf dude?"
  I'm not sure I really gained any benefit from that over using a more stable release. I switched to Bazzite a few months back, and it's been amazing. Immutable is very interesting, and it's made for the most stable PC I've ever owned.
  Highly recommend Bazzite for gamers (or I guess it's good for multimedia too), or if not, one of the other Fedora-based immutable distros.
  
  This is one of the little things I love about Gentoo. It's rolling, but not bleeding edge.
  Plus, you can opt into bleeding edge either per package or for all packages. It's honestly a flexibility that doesn't even require a source-based distro, so Arch could do it too.
  
  The only time I come close to that number of updates (300 - 350) is when KDE Applications and KDE is updated at the same time. I update twice a week.
- because it keeps rolling ?
  
  😆 I meant back to static release

Mint pleb on desktop because it's stable and just works, bazzite on steam deck for installing my own games.

NixOS for most things, Debian on some servers as a docker host
- Interesting. I’ve using NixOS many years on servers but recently also started using it as a base for docker hosts. Before that I used Ubuntu or Debian for docker hosts, but I figured out I still like the declarative approach even for simple servers like docker hosts. There’s your basic security config, ssh keys and monitoring setup that I used to do imperatively, but I much rather have declaratively now, no matter how small. And enabling docker on NixOS is just a virtualisation.docker.enable = true; anyway.
  
  Oh I know it's better, problem is I host some stuff my friend group relies on so I don't want downtime while I figure things out. Also, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to get NixOS set up on a VPS without native support (I'm on Hetzner and I know it's possible, it's just a bit of a hassle). It's one of those projects that I'll get to eventually, when I got time. Or so I tell myself
- I recently started using compose2nix, and I'm enjoying it.
  https://github.com/aksiksi/compose2nix

Linux sub, post with 40 comments under 1 hour
Is this the year...
Damn, not a single pop-os enjoyer here?!
- I tried PopOS on my laptop but found it fucky so I tried Fedora KDE and it works. Too many steps Debian -> Ubuntu -> PopOS.
- maybe bcs its posted at 11pm in my timezone (gmt +3)

Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it's easy.

Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
It's been around for many years and will be around for many more
I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can't resist the software selection available on Debian

I've been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it's been amazing. I'm sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I've had.
And it's perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It's super impressive actually.
And distrobox (BoxBuddy comes installed) can be used to access the AUR or whatever if I feel the need to. Just fire up an Arch box, and have at it.

Mint for my desktop system. It just does exactly what I want it to, has good compatibility with software and Cinnamon is my DE of choice.
NixOS for my server, because being able to use one config repo and format for everything is so nice.

Tuxedo OS. Before that, I was very happy with Fedora, and then I got a tuxedo laptop and tried their distro. Now, I keep using that because I started to enjoy KDE, and I really like their hardware support and how they test and maintain the distro.

Because the logo is cool :)

Debian Testing. It isn't "recommended" but it works fine.
Obviously if you want AUR you need an Arch variant, in which case just pick Arch.
Edit: I needed the why, it's up to date enough for me and I know apt well.

I use Arch with Hyprland because it's great.
- I heard hyprland is buggy.
  
  It's quite new so bugs are expected. Now it's stabilised a lot after moving to aquamarine.

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