I’m very curious of which distro users loves the most that they have it on their daily hardware?
Personnaly, i’m using Fedora and i love it!
I really love NixOS and use it on all my devices. Its not as difficult as people say and it really makes the linux experience a piece of cake once you get it down.
The single config file to control almost everything is just what I was looking for in linux and the fact that it solved any kind of dependency hell I have experienced in the past is huge. If I had to list a top 3 it would be NixOS, Fedora, and Arch.
Arch because I like getting the latest releases of packages
Yeah. It’s a pretty good linux distro for Beginners. It was my first distro tho. 😁
I’m sorry but it’s not great for beginners. It’s a rolling bleeding edge distro that does not break often but when it does you need to know how stuff works to fix it.
I use Arch for personal and gaming, Debian for self hosting and hacking, Alpine for containerized cloud deployments.
I use Arch for personal and gaming, Debian for self hosting and hacking, Alpine for containerized cloud deployments.
Pretty much the same for me: bleeding-edge Arch for my workstation, rock-stable Debian for my server.
I just installed Bazzite about a month ago and love it! Used Ubuntu in the past and it was ok, but eventually went back to Windows. I definitely don’t feel that way about Bazzite though, I think I might stick with it as my primary OS!
Nobody has mentioned immutables yet?!
I finally dipped my toes into trying a new distro over the summer and have been really impressed with Project Bluefin. All the familiarity of Gnome for existing Ubuntu or Debian users but with a completely hands off rolling update experience.
The main drawbacks are the slight complexity of how the fuck to install stuff on an immutable system. In theory you use Homebrew for CLI apps and flatpak for GUI apps but I’m really not a fan of installing from sources other than the original dev.
Bazzite is immutable, it worked generally okay for me but I swapped back to mint because I had to use a smart card reader and getting it to work on an immutable was a royal pain
You can also run a distrobox and install stuff normally from whatever distro’s repos, then export the applications so they’re available like native. Works really seamlessly in my experience
Debian and Fedora. I use Debian on servers and Fedora on my desktop and laptop.
I use Gentoo and I love it. The installation process is a bit more complex than Arch but it doesn’t have to be if you choose the precompiled kernel.
The package management is extremely flexible and the community are great. I have a morning routine where I log onto my gentoo desktop before work and update everything; would compare it to raking one of those miniature buddhist sand gardens. Very theraputic!
Have got Debian on an old thinkpad too because it is too under resourced to compile everything. I think Debian is amazing for a solid, reliable distro if you have weak hardware.
Debian for my daily workstation. Minimal terminal-only install, and then I piece together my environment.
For smaller, headless applications I like Alpine. Containerized projects, VPS, etc.
Okay. What are your thoughts of KISS linux? It’s pretty minimalistic and have a very tiny package manager which is written entirely in Bash script.
KISS
Debian is KISS. Grab it and use, no need to overcomplicate things.
KISS-ish. Default init is systemd. Debian also provides customized configuration of services.
Building a deb package isn’t that straightforward as Arch’s PKGBUILD.
I’m unfamiliar with KISS. I don’t really distro hop, since what I use has satisfied all my needs to date.
Sounds like a remake of Slackware.
Debian, it Just Works.
Until it doesn’t /jk
If you need fresh version of some software, Flatpak is a nice solution.
You can also use Docker, it just works.Props to the maintainers and developers.
Way too boring.
Sometimes that’s the goal
There isn’t a best distro, tho I stick to the root of a distro tree, meaning arch / debian.
Why are fedora and suse often not mentioned considering theyre not forks of anything? (as far as im aware)
I didn’t mention them, because I simply haven’t used them yet.
Historically, (at least for hobbyists/enthusiasts) Fedora and openSUSE have been a lot less popular compared to Arch, Debian and their derivatives. While not necessarily representative, Boiling Steam’s chart -in which ProtonDB’s data is used- does indicate to this as well.
Just my 2 cents.
Kinda crazy considering fedoras perks and accessibility tbh. Dont know much ab suse tho as i have very little experience with it
I don’t know why, but openSUSE has had difficulty garnering popularity overall (aside from Germany).
A possible explanation, which also ties in to Fedora, is how both are the open source variants to corporate distros; SEL and RHEL respectively.
Arch and Debian are more community-driven by comparison.
For Fedora specifically, people couldn’t regard it as anything but a testing bed distro; especially if you see how back2back they were with adopting new technologies like PulseAudio, systemd, Wayland, GTK 3/4, PipeWire etc. To be fair, openSUSE was the first to default to Btrfs and auto-snapshotting with Snapper*. Fedora was also facing competition from industry darling CentOS; similar code base, but a lot more stable.
Thankfully, since a couple of years now, Fedora has recognized that it’s not cool to expect your user base to be sadistic. And together with the (unfortunate) downfall of CentOS, Manjaro and Ubuntu - Fedora has amassed a very healthy user base. And with how quickly Bazzite is becoming the face of gaming Linux (at least until Valve releases SteamOS), I don’t think it has even peaked yet.
steamos? its going to have its own release detached from the deck? thatd be so cool
Yup; at least to some extent.
Fedora Atomic, especially Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora.
Nearly unbreakable, very reliable and stable in everyday use, needs no maintenance (updates itself, etc.) and more!
If there were a universal answer to this, there wouldn’t be any others.
I myself currently use Debian (testing), have for some years now, but I have used other distros in the past too.
Xubuntu on my desktop/laptop, debian on a server. Mostly because while I really like tinkering with things, I usually just want shit to work so I can get something done.
OpenSuSE Tumbleweed is my current favourite. It’s user friendly with good system tools in Yast, it’s got good repos including community repos with lots of software.
Its also a rolling release but has been stable and reliable for me. Leap is their point release version if rolling is not right for you.
I’ve been using Tumbleweed for over a year, and it’s my main OS since I stopped using windows. I’ve dual booted Linux for many years but always mained windows up until Tumbleweed.
Previously I used to use Mint; it’s decent but switching to Tumbleweed (and in particular KDE) convinced me to completely switch from Windows. Everything “just works”, and I do a fair bit of gaming without issue with nvidia drivers, steam, and lutris.
For example I’ve been playing Stardew, Cyberpunk 2077, Distant Worlds 2, and Factorio recently - all in Linux and all without issue.
