Nixos, meaning to try Gnuix but I got projects to finish!

started with the classics, moved to Arch, then now I'm moving to nixos.

I'm just starting to rebuild my home server in NixOS... mainly because I do things on my server only once in a while and things are breaking and I forget where stuff is.

Like I discovered fail to ban stopped working some time ago, and I've been running raw since then.

With Nix I plan to manage both os and containers in one go, so that I can have the whole system in a couple of files

debian with mate

I am using Unix/Linux for over thirty years now, and the older I get, the more I like it simple.

Debian with Arch in a VM, and Guix as extra package manager on top of both for programming projects. I use Debian for stable stuff and Arch for new stuff.

Stumpwm as manual tiling window manager, or i3wm, or Sway if the first is not available. Somtimes GNOME.

Emacs with language server (lsp-mode) for programming. Vim frequently at work for embedded tasks.

Gollum wiki or Zim wiki for knowledge management.

GNOME OS

it's technically not for everyday use, but it has been simple and trouble free for me.

Arch but it is a pain in the ass to update. 20 years here. Tried a million distros, but never Slackware or Gentoo for some reason.

I've been fully daily driving Linux for about 15 years now, and for me it's almost all Arch now.

I started out distro-hopping between Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Slack, etc, but once I found Arch (and spent two weeks getting it installed, booted, and customized exactly to my liking) I was finally at home.

I know the meme. I'm not here to claim superiority, or diminish the value of other perfectly good distros. I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.

What I love about Arch is the lack of bloat. You get precisely what you ask for, no more, no less. You can legitimately run htop and recognize literally every program, and know if something's wrong immediately.

Every one of my Arch boxes is a perfect little snowflake, suited to exactly the task(s) I built it for. And if there was anything I had to learn or configure along the way? That's just the journey, man.

I have been eyeballing NixOS though...

Debian.

It's pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it's got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it's got nonfree firmware on the disc, they've really upped their game.

(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It's not for the faint of heart though.)

-- Frost

Arch on my personal machines, Debian on my servers.

NixOS so I can keep my config in git. I have a single nix config for all my machines (desktop, laptop and server) so I can share configuration between them. I use it to configure both my system and my user config, my dotfiles, with home-manager. Even my neovim config is in nix thanks to nixvim.

I don't think I could go back now. It can be a bit of a pain from time to time and the learning curve is steep but it has so many advantages. Being able to rollback between config versions (called generations), having a consistent config between my machines, having it all in version control… The repo have so many packages and when there is a module it's really easy to add a service. Writing new packages (derivations) and modules is also not that hard. It can be as simple as calling nix-init.

Had my main ssd fail on me a few month back and it was very simple to just replay the config and just get everything working as before. I only had to do the partitioning by hand (it can be done by nix but I've not gotten around to it yet). That's why I only backup data and home partitions, not system partitions.

Debian. I like my computer to work.

debian since forever. no reason to switch yet.

The answer is Debian like crabs on a long enough timeline it will eventually become Debian. - Linux user for 27 years

Debian on everything (well except the router is on OpenWrt).

First installed Debian more than 25 years ago. Tried some other stuff, Debian is still best for me.

Debian on the streets (servers), Arch on the sheets (laptop).

I've been using Linux for more than 20+

First distro: Slackware, then Debian for many years, finally Fedora, since 2014, very happy user.

What I like in Fedora: the 6 months release provides bleeding edge experience without compromising stability.

Debian.

On my new laptop, I wanted to try something less "Cannonical"-y too, after many years of using Ubuntu. I already used Manjaro KDE on my desktop and I kinda liked it. So that, I decided to install Arch and maybe copy some configs from Manjaro, if needed. Well, at first glance, it was awesome. Fast, fully configurable system, that is fully mine. Alas, that euphoria didn't last long: very soon some fundamental problems occured. Here I should specify that I'm using my laptop for live musical performance. And I focus on some specific things that other users might not need to.

1. Wine - couldn't make it work with 32bit apps and VST plugins. That's really important to me, because some of those don't have any native replacements. Whatever I tried, Wine just refused to create a 32bit prefix.
2. At some point, several (lots of) important LV2 plugins stopped showing their GUIs. They kept working in "generic GUI" mode, but for things like equalizers having a good visualization is crucial.
3. KDE+pipewire+wayland is the worst setup for live performance ever. When you move your mouse around taskbar, it creates video-streams (to draw thumbnails) that make audio graph massively crackle.
4. Really bad performance with several soundcards. SOme cards just refused to work together in one graph, turning the sound into the ocean of xruns. And that possibility of several soundcards was the reason why wanted to switch from JACK to pipewire in the first place.
5. No possibility to have pipewire-jack and pipewire-jack-client packages installed simultaneously.
6. LADISH and Claudia - they're quite tricky obsolete pieces of software that I use. These are really handy for making large complicated audio systems. Alternatively I tried raysession, but it didn't work well too (didn't restore connections).

This list could have been longer, but I will probably stop here. After a month of struggling I switched back to Ubuntu Mate 24.04. And what can I say... It works fine. It's a bit tougher than Arch, but not much; and at the end - not a single issue of listed above. And Ubuntu has custom lowlatency kernel that helps with realtime audio applications. And it's still Linux after all - I can easily do whatever I want - like, uninstall Snap. Some packages are too old - that's acceptable for an LTS release; if I need something up-to-date, I can just build it from source. Also I notice the same issues on my Manjaro desktop, but it's not so crucial there, as I primarily use desktop for gaming and video montage. But still, considering to return to Ubuntu on it too.

What I want to say is that maybe Ubuntu is not so bad, really. Cutting off some unneeded things can turn it into a good OS.

Debian Trixie headless on my router/server raspberry pi and NixOs on my laptop.

However I'm planning to switch from Nix this summer since one of the maintainers of NixOs is the one which added age verification to systemd, still haven't decided on which Os I'll switch to probably Devuan os but may give Alpine a shot since it's more stable than Arch btw, so I'll just be ricing and distro hopping this summer until I pick my new favorite again.

I used a linux desktop for a few years back in 08-09, started on ubuntu then got on the Gentooooooooooo bandwagon. (Went back to Windows after this due to college + games, naturally)

Ever since then, I just use stable LTS versions of either debian or ubuntu for server applications. Recently changed back to Linux on desktop and went with CachyOS, it's been super solid.

Debian

Using Arch for almost a decade now. Started with Ubuntu, fedora, mint but finally landed on arch. But am thinking about switching to gentoo; arch has gone too mainstream that im afraid it might be plagued with "age verification" virus

I've tried many distros over a 20 year period. I'm happy with CachyOS.

15+ years on Fedora

Solid

On my server I run Ubuntu and on my desktop I'm running Linux mint because it just fucking works and I don't got to mess with shit.

Debian and alpine. Coming up on 27 years of linux for me.

Fedora

OpenSUSE if you want something non American and not directly related to RedHat

If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I've been trending toward Debian for everything.

My custom Kinoite-based system using ublue-builder. Gets me updates with 0 interference with my daily use, secure boot, tpm based FDE, and I can still install packages during the CI step (although distrobox is the main way to do that).

I've been on Linux since my childhood (found it in a tech magazine in 2008), hopped through Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro until like 2022 when I settled on Fedora KDE, then shifted to their immutable stuff 1-2 years later.

I'm using Linux.

For almost 30 years Debian somehow.

First distro was Ubuntu 8.04. Switched around to windows, and back, Mac OS and back, and distro hopped in between. But for the last 8 years I’ve been back on Ubuntu. Currently 22.04 on my server and 24.04 on my laptop and desktop. I usually run one LTS behind on the server, and wait for latest point release on my personal machines.

Ive kind of stopped caring about the ideology a little bit. And Ubuntu just works for me.

Been using Linux for about 8 years now. My DE of choice has pretty much always been XFCE. Here's an overview of the distros I've daily driven.

Linux Mint -> Debian -> Arch -> NixOS -> Arch

I tried NixOS for about a year before switching back to Arch recently. There were just too many problems I couldn't find a solution to, and I realized that the advantages of an immutable OS just aren't that important to me.

Arch really is a dream to use, and the setup is pretty easy if you use the archinstall script. And most importantly, their wiki is amazing.

Debian stable, it works fine for a workstation and for the few games I play

Arch everywhere (desktop with KDE, personal laptop with GNOME, work laptop with COSMIC, a remote raspberry pi) except a Raspberry Pi Zero (Raspbian) and the Steam Deck

Arch, btw

I started using Linux in '98 with Red Hat 5.2. I have swapped between many, many different distros. But for the last 10 years or so, I've mostly stuck with Fedora. It generally just works, is up to date, and I've never had issues upgrading on their 6 month release cycle. My desktop probably started on Fedora 20-something and has been upgraded to the latest (43) without ever doing a reinstall!

My primary computer is my Frame.work laptop running Fedora 43.

Approaching 20 years full time., basically Ubuntu or Debian with xfce desktop for desktops. I know it's not what all the cool kids are using or doing but it works. Going back nearly 30 years I was messing around and failing with all sorts of distros

RIP Mandrake my first ever Linux experience that actually worked

Debian. For decades.

My first installation was slack and from then until now has been a mix of more things than I care to list, but includes things like freebsd on a DEC multia, a sparcstation pizza box with a 2.6ish kernel maybe?, along with things like Ubuntu, suse, fedora, centos, gentoo, ive built from scratch, I ever remember the days of configuring x with fvwm95 because I thought it would be easier for my parents.

I always go back to Debian. Though I'm happy with arch when I want something 'current'.