Which one(s) and why?
Desktop? I settled on Arch and Fedora.
Server? Debian. Although technically I never distrohopped on servers, been using Debian since the beginning of time.
Xubuntu… It’s light weight and pretty much everything is kind of Debian or kind of redhat anyway…
The charm of rolling my own died off when I got old enough to buy better hardware if I wanted to go faster…
EndeavourOS. I like the simplicity and minimalism of stock Arch, bloated distros bother me. I have been thinking of trying out Linux Mint again though, I used it for years and it was really good.
This is precisely where I am at. Endeavor for when I need a newer kernel and Mint for when I want something that just dang works without too much config and driver work. I suggest Mint to friends but love having AUR and yay.
The just dang works part of Mint is so nice. I do like learning and tinkering, but I have to say setting up my printer in endeavourOS was brutal! I had all the right software installed, but it ended up needing a single line of code pasted in to a file I never would have guessed on my own. I’ll paste the info here on the slight chance it will save anyone else from the trauma I went through 😅
Reference article: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi
2.1 Hostname resolution
Avahi provides local hostname resolution using a “hostname.local” naming scheme. To enable it, install the nss-mdns package and start/enable avahi-daemon.service. use sudo instead of doas if that’s the tool you prefer.doas systemctl start avahi-daemon.serviceThen, edit the file
/etc/nsswitch.confand change the hosts line to includemdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]before resolve and dns. It should look like:hosts: mymachines mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] files myhostname dns
EndeavourOS is way too opinionated on i3 for my liking, and the theme is not great. Still it is very stable and offers a reasonable out of the box arch experience.
Do they customize it too heavily away from its defaults? I use KDE so I don’t bump in to that issue myself.
Not sure about KDE. On i3 they have it customized a lot and there’s some things I don’t like: when opening a terminal it will always open in a workspace assigned, by them, for terminals. The same with file manager windows, browsers, et al. I find it to be extremely irritating
Oh yeah, I get what you mean. There were a few tweaks like that in the KDE file manager too. Dolphin would open with a lot of extra features running like a terminal at the bottom of the window and extra information panes on the sides. They were all normal dolphin features that were just toggled on by default, so I was able to get back to a cleaner experience with a few clicks, but it sounds like that may be their MO: turn on ‘helpful’ features in the user space by default. That was the only app that had non - default settings in KDE that I found, it sounds like it’s not as customized as i3.
I settled on openSUSE Tumbleweed because it’s rolling and reliable. I chose KDE Plasma long before I chose my distro.
Using this right now. It’s been a little less stable then I’ve heard other people claim, I had about a day and half where I was consistently freezing up 5 minutes after login. After that was patched it has been fine.
The real test for me is if I can walk away from it for 3 weeks and update the system without the world exploding. That was what always broke Arch for me.
All my problems have been of my own making. Also I updated one computer after 18 months or thereabouts and it was fine although I wouldn’t recommend leaving it that long on a computer you actually use!
I used to use Leap but I switched to the Tumbleweed repos and updated with no issues. It did take a while though.
Same. Although I am running Debian on the server.
same!
Arch, cause it has everything I needs + I don’t have to reinstall between big updates (Arch is Rolling release)
How is Arch “making things difficult for oneself”?
I set it up once 8 years ago and have since migrated my install across several SSDs.
Still runs like butter.
I want to settle on Debian Stable, I really do, but I use Hyprland, so I’ll have to wait until we get Debian 13 (hopefully 13 and not 14 lol).
Hyprland is surprisingly easy to build/install from source.
Even on Debian 12? That’s what I’ve installed now and I really want to give it a shot.
Edit: tried setting up Hyprland via the Manual install from Releases way, it needed a few libxcb dependencies and it needed execute permissions, but after that I hit a roadblock: libxcb-errors which doesn’t seem to be available on Debian.
I guess I could have taken solving the depencies for granted. I’ve built and installed it on both Arch and Fedora but obviously those repos would be more up to date.
Yeah, I switched to AwesomeWM for the time being, but I’ll be honest, I’m getting fed up of it all. I think I’ll try Fedora later and if that doesn’t work for me… I really don’t know what I’ll switch to.
Fedora has an official package of it as well.
Yeah. I’m on Fedora currently and it turns out that, through Copr and rpmfusion, I could get everything set up and all my packages installed so I’ve been on it for a few days now, and with dnf5, install speeds are actually good so I’ve decided to stick to it, and I think I’ll keep on using it for the foreseeable future, probably at least until the release of Fedora 40 (at which point, if all my packages and Copr repos are updated for Fedora 40, I’ll probably upgrade to it, as it seems there is really nothing better for me out there: I’ve tried Arch, NixOS, Tumbleweed, Debian, Ubuntu, Void, and many others and they all lack something I need). So, Fedora might just become my forever distro, but who knows? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Which one(s)
Arch.
why?
- The Arch-Wiki
- I like pacman
- The Arch-Wiki
- I wanted a rolling-release distribution.
- The Arch-Wiki
- It just works. I had only one more serious problem in ~8 years of running Arch
- Did I mention the Arch-Wiki?
Edit:
Having said that, I have an eye on immutable distros. Maybe one day I’ll try one out.
Is Manjaro good if I want in on this Arch goodness but don’t want to spend hours configuring stuff? Coming from Fedora
Endeavour is better for that, after the install you’ll have plain arch but with a bunch of stuff installed and already set up
I’ve been running it on my work laptop for 6 years at this point and I’ve had no major issues I couldn’t solve.
Having said that, I recently switched my gaming rig over to endeavour and it’s been great.
If you plan to use the AUR, absolutely not.
If you don’t plan to use the AUR it’s probably fine, but I haven’t used it personally in the last few years so I’m not sure.
I really have bad luck with Manjaro, even when I don’t use the aur it always breaks on me. I just stick to arch, I started with it and I’m sticking with it.
I’ve been daily driving Manjaro for 4 years without any issues. Generally speaking I’d recommend seeing if there is a flatpak for an app before using AUR. I don’t update as soon as updates are out though, so usually any issues there may have been have been shmoothed over before I get to it.
I haven’t used Manjaro myself but I heard that it is not as good as Arch. Rumors I heard where that it is not as solid as vanilla Arch. YMMV.
@SubArcticTundra @Haven5341 I personally think Manjaro is a false good idea.
You’ll have an “out of date” system (i.e., one-month-old) but packages from the AUR which are made for the up-to-date system.
Quite a nightmare to use IMO (and that’s not talking about Manjaro leadership and certificates problems)
I’ve been using manjaro for around a year. It broke on me once, probably my fault, idk. I enjoy it! I’ve distro hopped many places and a year is a long time for me, so much about it is right for me. You’ll certainly get a worthy experience of what arch is capable of, I believe.
That being said, I plan on swapping to arch really soon.
No. Manjaro is more likely to break than arch because they hold of updating their pakages. What you are looking for is EndavourOS. I consider it to be “the new manjaro”
The Arch wiki really is amazing. It’s also still very useful for Linux stuff in general. The qemu page has come in handy more than a dozen times.
Yeah, I use Mint and the Arch wiki is still one of my first stops when I have an issue
EndeavourOs makes it super simple too
So does archinstall.
you forgot arch wiki
I switched to guix and haven’t looked back.
Mostly because:
- I like the idea of functional package managers
- I like guix’s dedication to making every package buildable from source (thus the no non-libre code rule)
- I like the expressiveness of scheme vs Nix’s package description language
Guix is the smoothest time I’ve ever built packages for a distro before (well outside arch). Which is good because there’s a lot of out of date and unadded packages for potential.
there’s a lot of out of date and unadded packages for potential.
The main reason why I’m running nix over guix. I need it to freshen up Debian packages, and it’s giving me even older ones.
The close runner up was horrible prebuilt bin coverage(a year or two ago). I had to separate browsers into a manifest of their own, because Firefox didn’t get a prebuilt even days after the update. It’s not fun having to leave your browser compiling over night with 100% CPU fans as a lullaby.
Oh I completely forgot about RedHat! Yes, that was my first one too. Then Ubuntu was kinda the thing to go to and it worked for a good while until it just didn’t work for me anymore.
Today I’m on Mint because it was the first distro I tried that was able to get the Wifi working on my super old/bad HP Laptop. I started to like it and then also moved to Mint on my desktop. Running it for a year now and since my PC isn’t the youngest anymore, I doubt I will switch distro again anytime soon.
This is a misconception. Arch breaks only if you mess enough with AUR. If you keep with official repo and maybe Flatpaks, you’ll be fine
You can use AUR with moderation as well and you’ll still be fine
We’re using Arch 2
(No it doesn’t, it just has some bugs here and there, e.g. my media keys don’t work after a couple days of uptime (gnome). I stopped actively looking for and reading the release notes years ago as it just works… and if it doesn’t, I still have a btrfs snapshot from before the update)
That’s not my experience - have been using arch for around four years and it broke only once by not letting me log into the system after I failed to update pam configs after the system upgrade.
I tried Manjaro for awhile and had some major system breaks. Manjaro is/was often pitched as newbie-friendly arch, so having it break made me think arch was going to be even worse.
Been running endeavour for a few years now though, and haven’t had any real issues. Much smoother than my Manjaro experience.
Agree about manjaro they doing really weird things about their system and it’s breaking.
Bodhi Linux (when trying out on a 32 bit laptop) -> Xubuntu (main laptop) -> Linux mint (the distro I’ve used for the longest time, both on main laptop and a desktop got along the way). On the side, I briefly tried Arch first on a wm (as well as Haiku and TempleOS), and later, debian on that 32 bit laptop for earlier. That’s when I first went for a minimal install with i3. Later switched to Arch with i3 on tower, and just yesterday, Debian, also with i3 on main laptop.
My reasoning behind using these two different distros for essentially the same type of setup is that my laptop is more likely to be the only computer I have at my disposal when I urgently need it, so stability is more important, I can’t run the risk of having an update break it. I can be bolder and test more stuff on my desktop knowing I have a backup if mess up. Arch on my desktop is also partly because I use it to play games on Steam, and since SteamOS is based on Arch, I figured it’d have better integration.
Arch Linux (Endeavour OS if you are scared of the terminal) for personal use. It’s almost all the software you want one click away, plus the best documentation ever.
Debian on my company’s computer because Debian.
Fedora atomic GNOME aka silverblue
- It has very good defaults, works out of the box, I can switch anytime to another de or a ublue image without messing around with my setup
- selinux
- podman
- flatpak centric
- auto updates
- widely used
Current Cons:
- openssl is not installed by default (for gsconnect)
- gnome-tweaks is not installed by default
- uses toolbx instead of distrobox. Toolbx is better for servers, distrobox better for desktop, imo.
- flatpak firefox isn’t used
Opensuse micro has distrobox as the default shell. It still needs some work before i daily drive it tho
And it uses firefox flatpak and iirc it installes gnome tweaks by default. Opensuse does right what fedora missed until today.
But, ostree is incredible. There’s no ostree on opensuse and what do I want with btrfs snapshots if I can have ostree’s image based approach? I love opensuse for tumbleweed but fedora rocks with ostree. I could switch to a ublue image but I can also just overlay the packages which isn’t that bad. It’s just bad for newcomers. And no newcomer should have to use ublue because the official image lacks stuff. But it is what it is.
Arch linux. Minimal install, hyprland. $ROOTSYS* set to ro, ~/.cache and ~/Downloads to tmpfs. alsa, bemenu, wine-staging, lutris. Couldn’t be happier.
Eh, did a little “oopsie” there, my bad.
Fedora and I can’t point down a specific reason other than it kinda just works. Their jank, because every distro has some time of “jank”, feel more reasonable than other distros jank.
