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Why do you use the distro you use? (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by aleq@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[-] madame_gaymes@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

It's for deployments and managing many environments/machines from a single CLI interface. You can do all sorts of things like push configs based on labels/groups, gather real-time data/logs, scale up/down. It's great when you have a lot of VPS/VDS/VMs to manage and you're not using a platform's specific management tools.

I mainly use NixOS as a barebones backend, keep it as minimal and hardened as I can, then most of the projects/apps that run are done through something like Docker or k8s. So for me, it's all about managing the underlying servers that provide the tools needed for a project to operate.

The tool itself is undergoing a pretty big redesign at the moment, but you can get the gist of it from the overview in the manual of the commands.

https://hydra.nixos.org/build/115931128/download/1/manual/manual.html#chap-overview

[-] marnas@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago

That's fair enough, I also host some applications on a k8s cluster, but for the underlying OS I picked talos instead.

I use NixOS and Home Manager to keep my configuration as code and shared between my PC and laptop.

The only VM I have running NixOS isn't actually doing all that much, and I don't mind ssh-ing into it to apply new configs from time to time.

this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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