If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?
Been using Linux for over a decade, and last few years Ubuntu (on desktops/laptops), plus Debian on servers, but been looking to switch to something less “Canonical”-y for a long time (since the Amazon search fiasco, pretty much).
Appreciate recommendations or just an interesting discussion about people’s experiences, there are no wrong answers.
Edit: Thanks for the lots of interesting answers and discussions. I will try a few of the suggestions in a VM.
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…
I just used NixOS daily for maybe a month? I really love how it’s designed, but I had to give up because there were just so many small fixes I had to do and I found myself banging my head against the wall when I couldn’t build something that depended on python-tk. You will see this criticism around a lot, but the documentation just isn’t there yet. If you try to search for a fix, the packages have changed how they’re configured since a solution was posted or they depend on a Nix flake which 50% of searches say not to use because it’s experimental and 50% are all in on flakes.
I have since moved back to Arch, but I’ve started to use the nix package manager for some cases since you can on-demand non-permanently install a package.
Almost the same story here, I ran nixOS on my laptop and was over my head instantly, but kept treading water for almost a year before I got tired of the quirks and went back to arch. Much as on desktop; it just works and works well.
Since bouncing off I’ve found myself using the nix package manager for my Steam Deck, allowing it to serve as the “laptop” now. It just so happens that Valve recently added a persistent /nix folder to steamOS and so I’m declaratively back at it again. Thankfully the syntax is now starting to stick.
I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.
“You’re cool, you’re cool, screw you tho , you’re cool…” XD
Half Baked 🤝
Glad someone caught that XD
exact same story as I. have also been eyeballing NixOS lol. big time investment for me though
Same, with one exception I don’t really like Debian. Ubuntu, I’m surprised it’s still around. I wonder who uses it, especially on a server.
I’m eyeballing NixOS. And Gentoo too. And I’m looking for excuse to try FreeBSD.
Why don’t you like Debian?
You’re surprised the most popular desktop distro is still around?
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.
This is also my setup. I’ve tried nix a few times on desktop and servers, but didn’t stick. Keep going back to arch and debian
Same. This is the profile of the Lemmy user I think.
The answer is Debian like crabs on a long enough timeline it will eventually become Debian. - Linux user for 27 years
That’s how it should work, I think. All the downstream distros do their crazy experiments, the community identifies what it likes and doesn’t like, and what it likes makes its way upstream to spawn. The further upstream it gets, the wider its influence is felt. Debian is what makes it that far upstream.
I see this view as true. Downstream shit sucks. I’ve tried them all. Debian 8s the only thing that keeps bugs out. Sometimes you need a work around for a game or whatever but atleast shit works everytime.
I think the ideal is to have some people who gravitate toward the bleeding edge, and some people who gravitate toward the stable center. I think, when the system works well, each group benefits the other. For example, I like debian for my servers because I like my servers to be as stable and low-maintenance as possible, but I am also really fascinated by NixOS and its approach to system administration. Personally I still need to play with it some more before I trust it with a production service, but I could see running a Nix-based distro at some point. And I appreciate all the brave testers out there right now, finding problems and fixing them. What they do makes my life as a simple server manager a lot easier.
debian since forever. no reason to switch yet.
Same here, Debian since Squeeze. A couple of years ago I just decided to go a step further and go with Kicksecure. Which is basically just hardened Debian.
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.
I was messing with the NixOS system config in weird ways and accidentally bricked it a few times, but I just booted into a previous configuration and fixed it. Whereas with Arch you would be fucked and have to pull out a rescue disk.
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).
Have I been on 10 years? I dunno, but I like to think I’m pretty experienced for an amateur.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed! It rolls! It games! It works with newer hardware and gets along sorta reasonably with Nvidia!
Best part? If any of that ISN’T true (rarely after an update), it seamlessly integrates BTRFS snapshots with the boot menu, to just roll back and wait like a week til the wonderful souls working on it, fix stuff.
The community is also very supportive.
Gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)
Personal laptop - Linux Mint
Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition
Junk/Test laptops - Void
Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)
NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)
Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.
Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve’s immutable spin of Arch.)
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
debian on my server. it’s rock solid. I run a LOT of shit on it, and it rarely cracks about 4-5 GB RAM out of 32GB.
Debian
I’ve tried many distros over a 20 year period. I’m happy with CachyOS.
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.
