Alpine!
More stable then arch, but just as if not more lightweight and customizable. I have nothing against systemD or GNU but for my usecase I just want something small and simple
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
Mint on my work PC, because my dear IT colleagues made the effort to provide standardized installations for us that are mostly carefree and can just be used; you can even get them preinstalled on a laptop or VM.
Debian on my work servers, because everyone is using it (we're a Debian shop mostly) and there's a standardized self service PXE boot installation for it. Also, Debian is boring, and boring is good. And another thing, Debian is the base image for at least half of the Docker images and alliances (e.g. Proxmox) out there, so common tools. The .deb package format is kinda sane, so it's easy to provide our own package, and Debian has a huge community, so it's going nowhere in the near future.
Ubuntu LTS latest on my home servers, because I wanted "Debian but more recent packages", and it has served me well.
Not yet, but maybe Fedora on my private PC and laptop soon, because I keep hearing good things re hardware support, package recency, gaming and just general suitability for desktop use. There's still the WAF to overcome, so we'll see.
I eventually decided on openSUSE Tumbleweed for a few reasons: rolling release, because I like to stay up-to-date; non-derivative, not a fork or dependent on other underlying distros; European, for (perceived) privacy reasons; a relatively well known and large distro with a decent community, for troubleshooting reasons; backed by a company, though that has both its ups and downs; lastly, support for KDE Plasma.
I actually had trouble finding a distro that suited all my criteria at the time, but openSUSE is good enough for now and I am pretty much satisfied.
I'm well past the age where distrohopping is "cool" (and I don't have the time for it anymore). So I take a pragmatic approach to choosing which distro to install on my systems.
I've used many others in the past (Arch, Endeavour, openSuse, Slackware, Slax, etc.), but right now I think that the Fedora-Debian-Mint combo is the best for my needs.
CachyOS, because I wanted something arch based due to the archi wiki and rolling releases.
My media boxes run Ubuntu, but that will change when they get rebuilt/replaced at some point, most likely to Debian
Arch on the Desktop, Debian on the servers for peace oft mind.
Every single time I try something new I reinstall Fedora within a day, pretty sure it's just Stolkholm Syndrome at this point
Over the past few years I went from using Debian Stable, to Debian Testing-Unstable mix (this is a supported way of using Debian look it up), to Debian Unstable/Sid on my main PC.
I think they all can be used for different purposes, and because they all use basically the exact same tools and utilities I don't have to fiddle with figuring out the specific commands I need to run if I need to tweak a server.
The amount of software available in the package manager, without adding external repositories, exceeds that I've seen in any other distro I've used. Even with epel, I feel like others fall short.
The ability to modify the build time flags of software while still using the package manager is also huge. I hate when ffmpeg doesn't have speex support because some upstream dev figured it was a corner use case.
It's me, I'm the target demographic. I'm the one asshole who wants to build ffmpeg with speex support, clamav without milter support and rxvt WITHOUT blink support.
There are some pretty great userspace helpers too. Things to ensure your kernel is always built with the same options. Things to upgrade all your python or perl modules to the new interpreter version for you. Tools for rebuilding all the things based on a reverse dependency search.
Slotted installs are handled in a sane, approachable, and manageable way.
The filesystem layout is standards compliant.
I recall someone on /r/Gentoo saying something like "Gentoo is linux crack, when you get a handle on it, nothing compares."
When I boot my laptop into fedora/arch/mint/etc (or really any non-bsd based distro), I feel like I'm using someone else's laptop. There are a bunch of git repos under /usr/src for the software I wanted that wasn't in the package manager. I need to manage their updates separately. Someone else has decided which options are in this very short list of GUIs. I'm using whatever cron daemon they chose, not the one I want. Why is there a flat text log file under /var/db/? Why won't you just let me exist without any swap mounted? $PATH is just a fucking mess.
Arch because I wanted to see what the hype about installing it was about and then i just kept it
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it's very up to date yet reliable, package management doesn't require me to get my head around anything complicated, automatic btrfs snapshots allow me to rollback if I mess anything up, and I like KDE Plasma and the YaST utilities.
Mint here. It looks like Windows and runs the software and hardware I want. Simple as that.
Arch (EndeavourOS but it's the same with an installer, basically): AUR, great Wiki, great community and fresh packages. I'm always open to new stuff but all of this is really hard to beat.
Variants and derivates of Debian on my servers and other headless devices because no reason except I know it, it is stable, it works.
Been trying linux for desktop every five-ten years for the last twenty odd years and went back to Windows every time because it was too bad experience despite I really tried to like it.
Except this time.
Fedora KDE on my laptop, soon on my stationary as well. No more Windows for me.
I can't stand seeing my father struggling with windows...I tried to make him switch, but he has old piracy blood in him and just want Windows things and pirated software, some which do not have any alternatives on Linux.
Also, he's getting old and he always talks about he don't want to relearn a whole system. But everytime we see each other and talk about computers he trash talks how bad windows is...
Maybe that's just something he needs... And boring distros are going to make him depressed? Dunno
Sorry for the story time, but you switching fully to linux made me think of my Dad in hope sometimes he will also take the steps to get out of there 😅!
Why do you use the distro you use?
People said Ubuntu is easy, but I prefer green to orange so I went with Mint.
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.
Long time user of Fedora. Tried Ubuntu but came back to Fedora. But now almost migrated to Almalinux. For software app, use flatpak, which has the latest and no library dependencies. Using Wayland too on Almalinux. So not missing anything since moving to away from Fedora to Almalinux.
For my main desktop I use Mint because it just works, widely supported and Cinnamon is good (sadly no Wayland yet. ;_;). I also use Home-manager for my configuration because it allows me to easily just specify my config as a set of files I can check into git.
For my server, I use NixOS, because having all my configuration in a few text files is very nice to get an overview of what my server is doing.
I use Devuan on my servers, changed because I was annoyed that systemd was forced on me. (I have mellowed a bit since and accept that systemd is here to stay)
I chose Mint for my laptop, because I just want a OS that works and still gives me a taskbar. (Here I got fed up when Ubuntu switched away from gnome)
All of them are apt based Linux because it just works and when apt shoots itself in the foot during dist upgrades you can still wrangle it back in working order.
I use openSUSE because I want to see the license used with a package before installing it, and I can do that by using YaST. Also, it seems that version numbers are used consistently which enables elegant downgrading (I found that the pacman system is probably capable of supporting this too, but the operating system(s) that use it don't seem to use version numbers consistently and I've had a bad experience with downgrading in the past). I reviewed packaging systems other than rpm but it seemed that rpm while used with openSUSE was the most robust.
I also like having a bootable image with a streamlined installation process that is clearly supported by the operating system maintainers: I was tired of worrying about whether I set up LUKS correctly while setting up Arch Linux, and just having a checkbox for "encrypt the disk" makes me a lot calmer. Knowing that I can use a guided process if I want to reinstall the operating system also gives me some peace of mind.
It's also nice to get practice with an operating system that is more similar to "enterprise" Linux distributions: it's probably useful to get practice managing my personal computer(s) and at the same time get knowledge that is probably re-usable while interacting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise itself. However, this was not a primary consideration for choosing an operating system for myself.
Luckily, my choice can currently also get some support from https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/
I also like NixOS, but it doesn't seem to use secure boot by default, and I'd prefer to have that handled without needing input from me, so I only use it when that feature isn't available at all.
PopOs! Familiarity, stability and the fact that it fulfils 95% of my needs perfectly.
Laptop is Linux Mint, because my wife also use it and i want my laptop to be as easy to handle as possible.
Servers are Debian, because it's very light on my hardware. Mostly used for containers.
Garuda on desktop:
Fedora on work laptop:
20 years ago it was easier to find rpm packages for some enterprise apps, then just stuck with it
ChimeraOS on minipc:
does couch gaming well
CachyOS is making my old ass 2012 desktop feeling snappy again. I'm by no means a pro user and everything seems to work and god damn installing and updating stuff is easy and fast!
I started on Ubuntu, tried 8.04 and went back to windows XP, tried 10.04 and stayed.
20.04 was my last Ubuntu, bounced around for a while, but I have settled on Mint. Been running it for 3 years now.
Mint isn't too fancy, it is just there and lets me get my work done, very much the way Ubuntu used to be.
I'm running the 6.14.2 kernel, to get the latest drivers for my RX 9070, I'm playing around with local AI.... Mint isn't fancy, but you can do almost anything you want.
Pop OS
Lots of people were hyping it in 2019/2020 so I thought I'd give it a try as my first real Linux experience. It works great and has a Nvidia driver option when I need that. So I never really tried to switch.
Distro hoping never appealed to me, but I did try Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian 12.
I use Kali for work and considered swapping to XFCE DE but pop is fine.
Debian Sid, the unstable rolling release branch of Debian. It has the worst of both Debian and Arch!
On a more serious note, it allows me to have a somewhat standard Debian system with bleeding edge tooling.
It was the first one using Wayland by default that worked on my machine out of the box.
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.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0