Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.
i been linux only for over 30 years now.
I tend to use Debian stable. At least for the last 15 or so.
The reason is simple. I use it as my main PC and the stability is my main priority.
The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.
But honestly while that was a pain in the past. Now for the vast majority of things I use. I find flat pack or appimage downloads work perfect ally.
The only exception is ham radio software. Here I tend to compile later versions if I need/want them.
Other negatives
I’m really not hugely into gaming. But use blender a lot. Due to this I use Nvidia cards as they are far better supported by blender.
Installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers is a bit of a pain on Debian for newbies. But once you know the process its simple enough. Just not obvious for beginners. The community drivers are still very limited thanks to Nvidia s weird ideas.
Same, I’ve been using Debian only for the last 15 or so years. I love the stability, and the old software isn’t hard to work around when newer versions are needed.
I hate the lack of support from Nvidia. I prefer AMD cards though, and they give zero trouble.
Yeah. Unfortunately blender is still noticably faster on Nvidia cards. Due to cuda and optic support.
I only have a 4060 though. Next time I upgrade, give. How bad the 50s release is. I will look again and compare higher end amd stuff. Likely a few years away though.
I use my GPU mostly for gaming and computer science. I will say that ROCm from AMD is seriously giving Cuda a run for its money, and it’s fully open source. AMD cards also tend to be better per dollar.
Agreed. As I say blender is less fast on amd. Atm
I don’t play games much. 0ad being the main exception.
But yeah I’d never advise a non blender user to go Nvidia.
How does the nvidia card fare on linux in general ? on a Wayland session ? I have a 4070Ti running Windows atm, I use Blender professionally and I know it runs the best on Linux because of compiler shenanigans I can’t be arsed to understand, but this is one reason I’d like to switch to Linux (…again!). I’m interested to know if you run multiple color-managed monitors by any chance
What was you 1st distro back in last millenium?
slackware followed by red hat mothers day 2.0 also used LMDE for several years
Slackware: because I’m old and arch is too trendy.
👍🏻 Slackware was my 1st distro. It was before kernel 2.0. Now I use windowslike girly distros…
Let’s be honest: nearly all of them now are windowslike girly distros…
Geez, I haven’t heard of someone running Slackware in at least 15 years. I mean, I know it’s still around, I just haven’t heard anyone say they were running it.
It’s much more… manual than others, I’ll admit. For me anymore it’s a labor of love.
Yeah. I remember, lol
Linux Mint is a nice and easy distro that is quite good :D
I’ve been using Mint for a year now and I just got a second laptop and the first thing I did was Wipe Windows 11 off of it and install Mint.
It does everything I need it too.
honestly mint really a very easy distro, I enjoyed using it too. Fedora and other distros also seem pretty cool
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Recently I bought cheap Surface-like x86 tablet on a rather recent hardware, and running Debian and its cousins required more tinkering than I was willing to do, so I decided to go with a more modern rolling release. Tried Arch for a few months, bricked it from mixing stable and testing branches, tried Fedora, and finally settled in Tumbleweed. I like it for being on the bleeding edge and exceptionally stable at the same time, perhaps thanks to robust OpenSUSE Build Service automated testing. And it is from a European company, that can’t hurt.
I recently moved to Fedora KDE Plasma after years on W10, simply because I don’t want to use W11 and its AI bullshit. So far, it’s been a great time, and I haven’t noticed any major performance issues, so I’m happy with it. Having to update everything every few days is pretty novel though, and ‘sudo dnf update -y’ makes me feel like Hackerman, king of all Hackers. I think I like the customization options most though. I get way more control over what happens on my PC than W10 ever gave me, and it’s all wrapped in a very user-friendly GUI. Overall 8.5-9/10.
yay I want to install Fedora Plasma when I get a new drive, see if I can gradually switch (for real this time)… Plasma has a new pen tablet utility for Wayland, and since I use my tablet exclusively… when my Windows 10 is EOL I will switch for sure. Good to know it runs well for you
Yeah, I also use a pen tablet for some stuff, and it handles it decently well. One issue I’ve run into with it is that if I turn my monitor off while the tablet is plugged in, there’s like a 50/50 chance the monitor won’t load video unless I turn the tablet on too. It’s funky. Otherwise, getting my RTX4070 up and running wasn’t too hard. It’s a good distro for idiots (me).
Fantastic. Thanks for the feedback.
Arch has a combination of great documentation and great packaging. I use Debian on a server but for daily use, everything I need is on Arch.
I run SteamOS on desktop hardware because I hate windows and it solves almost every Linux gaming problem out of the box…
Is there an official build for general release, or are you running a steam image built for a handheld?
Yep! It’s the SteamOS 3 beta… It’s got some bugs and some weirdness to it, but it’s not terrible at all
How?
Steam deck SteamOS iso installer! It’s actually surprisingly stable for basic tasks but it is pretty locked down so you can’t really break it unless you really try. And it seems to run better if your pairing it with amd cpu/gpu hardware
Debian, on servers and a desktop. I spent a long time using Ubuntu so I’m used to APT and Debian is suitably lightweight for my not amazing hardware. I also like the non rolling nature of it.
You’d love PopOS then, with its working nature and privacy-focus.
I’ve tried PopOS as I have a machine with an Nvidia card but every tine I’ve done the first apt upgrade it nukes grub and won’t boot again. Probably something I’m doing wrong and it has been a couple of years since I last tried.
Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I’ve ever had to type out.
How long have you used it and how is it?
I’m pretty curious about those kinds of distros, and don’t really like how nixos is completely hosted on github (and all the drama that constantly comes from the community, and the bad documentation for many things, …).
However, guix seems such a niche project that I feel like it can’t really be used.
About a year and a half.
To be honest it’s not “easy” to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.
To use it like any other distro you’re going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.
Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.
There’s also The toybox
Some additional nice things about guix:
Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.
Shepherd is hands down the best init program I’ve ever used. It’s just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.
The OS documentation is built into the distro, with “info guix” you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.
Finally time to bust this out again.
EndeavourOS because of the AUR
- SteamOS: because it came with my Steam Deck.
- LinuxMint: because it is an Ubuntu-derivative and widely used which makes finding solutions and packages easier and I like MATE.
i use gentoo because i love the package manager and how in control i am of my desktop and for servers even though not linux ive been using open bsd because of secure it is and lightweight helps squeeze out little bit more performance from mt shit vps lol
Primarily Garuda these days. It’s basically Arch with some user-friendly additions. The major reason I tried it on a then-new gaming laptop was the actually really good IME hardware detection and minimal fuss NVIDIA setup using their latest drivers.
I was having enough headaches trying to get graphics actually working properly on the Debian-based distro I had been using, that I said fuck it and tried something that would hopefully get things working for me so that I could at least see that configuration to figure out where I’d been going wrong. Then I liked it enough that I have mostly just stayed there on this machine. (Did finally get things fixed on the other side, though.) But, I was already fine with Arch, which probably helps.
I jumped from Ubuntu over to Arch because I was getting fed up with all the things I wanted to do being unavailable in Ubuntu, but all in the Arch repo or AUR.
I’ve been using Debian-based distros for like 25 years, so it was definitely a bit of a change, but it didn’t take long to adjust. I’m glad I made the change.
