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.
Finally time to bust this out again.
Debian for everything since it’s one of the few distros that has always been there. It’s one of the second distros to come after after SLS. Distros come and go, but Debian marches on.
Most big distros are old enough to drink though. Ubuntu is 20yo, Fedora 21yo, openSUSE 18yo, Arch 23yo, Gentoo 23yo. (I got curious and a bit carried away…)
But sure, Debian does have them beat by roughly 10 years (31yo).
Yepp. Started using Debian around the Ham/Slink releases, haven’t found any reason to change yet.
Oh wow yeah I started around the same time. 1998 was a magical time. I stated with a boxed copy of OG Suse but switched to Debian like 6 months later then never switched again. I learned a lot from the thick manual that came with Suse but once I tried Debian everything just clicked. It’s like you learn the Debian rules and philosophy and any package you work with makes sense.
Arch. Purely because of the Arch Wiki. I honestly think it’s the easiest OS to troubleshoot as long as you are willing and able to read every now and again.
Agree.
Years ago, I was troubleshooting something (can’t remember what) on Ubuntu and realised the package had fixed the bug, but it wasn’t in the repos yet… like months behind.
Looked at Arch with it’s up to date repos, moved over and never looked back.
I’ve reported bugs since, watched the package get updated and seen the improvement on my system… now that’s what it should be like.
Bazzite because I get an immutable install that won’t let me accidentally fuck it up. It just works. All necessary drivers for my dock and peripherals are already installed and configured. It’s the very first time in my decades long Linux excursion that I have a user experience that is similar to windows in that sense, but without the enshittifcation of windows.
I genuinely enjoy video editing, gaming, and surfing the web on my laptop when it’s running Bazzite.
I haven’t tried Bazzite yet, but I feel the same about the other ublue flavours.
I’m the most productive I’ve ever been. Tweaking everything was fun for a few years, but now I just need a distro I can trust, that comes with the tools to do anything.
I see rebases to Bazzite DX are available now. I might give that a go today.
Not exactly a product from ublue but something in the same line:
Secureblue because of the reasons aforementioned for the ublue images where things are really darn rock solid out of the box AND because Linux is fundamentally behind in security and this project is trying to mitigate some of the big flaws.
I’m asking this because I haven’t tried secureblue: in what ways is Linux behind in security, and what does secureblue do to mitigate that?
And do any of those mitigations negatively impact usability?
Some answers to your first question you can find here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html
For the second question about in what ways Secureblue do mitigate that you can find more here: https://secureblue.dev/features
The last question about usability, is very usable. If you use Bazzite you may have a similar experience. It is not like QubesOS that isolate all processes making it even not able to use a GPU.
Thanks! That first link is an excellent resource for a security tool I’m working on. Specifically, gVisor, which I hadn’t heard of, but looks like an excellent way to harden containers.
I may rebase to secureblue from Bluefin at some point to give it a try.
Bazite and bluefin for me, too. been daily driving Linux since the mid-90s and this little cluster of distros is the best experience I’ve had. really feels like everything finally came together.
I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn’t like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I’m hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it’s a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.
Everything-in-my-life-as-code FTW
Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.
Also, if you run
nixops, it’s much easier to work with if your dev system is also running NixOS.Yeah, i’m realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.
What do you use nixops for?
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
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.
NixOS. My primary reason for switching was wanting a single list of programs that I had installed. After using ubuntu for 5 years I just lost track of all the tools and versions of software that I had installed…and that didnt even count my laptop. Now all my machines have a single list of applications, and they are all in sync.
This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.
It’s very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won’t irrevocably break things, and that I won’t build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It’s given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.
What does that mean? Like there is one calendar app?
NixOS configuration is done entirely through code, so all of your packages are in a list (although that list can be spread across multiple files; it’s a bit to explain)
I’ve found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go “oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore”
I appreciate the way things are configured a lot, but I would not recommend it unless you really like coding and you have time to tinker. It’s not too hard to get simple config setup, but I spiraled down a deep rabbit hole really quickly.
EDIT: If my comment for some reason persuaded you to use NixOS, I recommend you get a basic config setup before installing it. I’d also recommend you look at how annoying it can be to run dynamically-linked applications (i.e. you download a random executable off the Internet and try to run it, or you try to run something you downloaded with npm)
I’ve found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go “oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore”
While it sounds sexy and attractive… Not sure the amount of time needed to configure your NixOS is worthwhile. (Except if you have time to spare and want that learning experience !)
Just put everyhting In your personal notes and you have a similar “feature”?
Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd’ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back onto it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.
Yeah can’t argue against that, never tried NixOS !
The configuration of nix is not the time consuming part, most of the time it’s faster than other distro if you are a developer. The time consuming part is having an issue with a niche package, the only doc you have is the code and random github issue from 3 years ago that don’t mirror your config, and the nix evaluation doesn’t tell you which part of the config is the problem.
NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.
Using your calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.
Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what’s installed.
Tinkering, really. I did a bunch of stuff with wine and virtualization and troubleshooted across versions. One time I manually updated the version of sqlite in python’s std lib to be a newer version. I picked a non LTS kernel once. All these things compounded and bloated my system. And when I went to do clean up, I didnt have a record of exactly everything I installed, what I used and what I didnt. It was guesswork to clean up my disk or even remember the tools I used to get a project working.
This is solved with declarative configuration, which is the basis of NixOS. I believe VanillaOS 2 has something similar. Likewise, this is one the great benefits of docker, vagrant, ansible, etc.
Fedora because it’s boring in the best ways. Curious about NixOS though.
Fedora just werks™
I switched to Arch Linux for the memes, but now am unable to leave it. I’ve tried a few dozen distros, but none of them are as good as arch for me, I always come back to it. It’s like arch is my perfect distro.
Do you remember any examples of things that made you turn away from those other distros?
Mostly the package manager and even the rolling distros’ packages being more outdated than arch everytime. AUR is also very nice to have. The only distro I found that did spike my interest alot was NixOS.
debian is bestian
EndeavourOS because someone said it was Arch for lazy people, and I’m a lazy people.
I did use vanilla Arch before for a while, but just ended up being more work for the same setup with more issues from stuff like missing dependencies I didn’t have to worry about with Endeavour.
Only other distro I’ve used was Pop!_OS when I first tried out Linux.
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Void linux. Both on wayland + labwc desktop and radpberrypi 4 server with multiple dockers, and a bootable usb for my work laptop. Why? Its lightweight, rolling, rock stable, and easily extendable. I love runit for its simplicity. Love xbps package manager for its speed, and love the good and clear documentation.
I run SteamOS on desktop hardware because I hate windows and it solves almost every Linux gaming problem out of the box…
Is there an official build for general release, or are you running a steam image built for a handheld?
Yep! It’s the SteamOS 3 beta… It’s got some bugs and some weirdness to it, but it’s not terrible at all
Fedora Gnome. I like it and it just works for my daily office use. I don’t have the time nor the mental strength to fiddle with different distro’s on a regular basis.
