Hello Beautiful community!
I am a student/jr-level IT-guy who has used linux as a daily driver for 2 years now.
I chose Fedora because of it’s similarities to RHEL and RHEL-clone. It was also easy to set up with UEFI and LUKS/LVM, which I somewhat struggled to do on arch. Having wayland, GDM and XDG preconfigured also made starting configuration a lot easier.
When I used arch-based EOS, I usually took the “easy route” when configuring. Instead of using systemd, I just launched stuff on i3-config. Instead of compiling stuff myself I just installed it with aur. Instead of using LUKS or LVM I just had some encrypted directories.
Maybe it was because I was much more experienced when I started with fedora, or maybe it helped to have an already usable system when starting. Either way I feel I learned more using fedora than EOS, even if I heavily modified EOS as well.
However as I am now considering switching, I’d love to hear what experiences people have had with their distributions. Especially Nixos and Debian users, as those are what I’m considering myself.
How much configuration did it take to make the system usable? Are there some limitations with the repositories, distribution or OS in general? And importantly: have you learned something useful while working on your own system?
Did some distribution make you feel you were missing out on something important with your last distribution?
Have you had bad learning experiences with some distro? Have you switched away from distro for the same reason you installed it?
Would you suggest your distro for someone learning linux-admin skills? If you could go back, what distribution would you have used to 1) learning linux the first time 2) working in a jr-level position, still learning basic system administration, 3) when learning to code?
Thank you for your time and comments. I hope this post is general enough to be a worthwhile discussion.
I wanted a new OS after W10 slowed my workstation and CAD down noticably. RehHat and SUSE were the only certified distros for my CAD. So I did some reading amd went with OpenSUSE and everytging worked well, especially because nVidia hosts openSUSE drivers. Btrfs and snapshot rollbacks made learning linux easy. Anything I broke I just rebooted to a working system. The firewalld with zone rules is nice since you can "move" your wifi from home zone to public or work zone, rather than adjusting ports and services every time to suit each location.
That’s interesting: I didn’t even consider OpenSUSE. I’ll check it out! Have you tried other distros for daily use before OpenSUSE?
Not really. Since OpenSUSE, I tried Arch, fedora, elementary, Zorin, mint, Ubuntu, PopOS, Endeavor, Linux Lite. But I always come back to OpenSUSE because I have gotten used to little detail things they've done. But my wifes's system is set on NIxOS, it's an interesting way of working with the OS, but runs super fast on her 12 year old machine.
I support production servers that run OpenSUSE and its been more of a pain than other distros to keep the zypper repo links working, especially when I need to version lock stuff and do patch reviews for upgrades. It seems like SLES gets all the attention and OpenSUSE is a wild west of find this repo URL here, oh no 404 doesn't exist anymore.
I have never had repos go missing in 7 years, but I mostly stick to the ones that OoenSUSE suggests.