Linux

Xubuntu - great ootb configuration, lightning fast on my old thinkpad without compromising on functionality

I’ve hopped around to a bunch of different distros, but I always return to Debian Stable. I don’t really need the most bleeding-edge packages for my system, due to my use case.

Most of my actual apps are installed via Flatpak, so they’re all pretty recent, while still being on a rock-solid stable distribution.

unless we're talking about my main machine, which runs gentoo, i'll always default to alpine. super solid base system and packages. super accessible when it comes to upstreaming packages. I only wish they had s6 as an option for init/service manager

I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It's currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

Reasons: 1.) It's light on resources 2.) It's very simple and clean. 3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine). 4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.

I've been using MX, formerly known as Mepis, for over 15 years now. It's the most stable release I've ever used, and their repos are pretty up to date. The community is great also.

Fedora. Mainly because I work at a RHEL shop and I want a daily driver that is somewhat similar to my work environment.

Go to? Probably Mint. Such a good distro. Unfortunately I recently joined camp KDE Plasma and no other desktop environment can even compare.
I'm on Fedora KDE now. Solid distro for now at least.
If I need to return to monkee: EndeavourOS

U want stability stick to debian, bleeding egde apps? NixOs.

Middle ground? Ubuntu Rolling, u get reasonable up to day updates, and reasonable stability.

And remember, the perfect distro is the one u configure, and personalize for u. The distro is only gonna make ur life easier in making it urs, but that's all, I wasted a lot of time understanding this.

Void Linux is the way to go, I've been using it for a few years now with no issues. Currently gaming with arch but I was gaming on void for a while, before I decided to hop. Might go back but switching over is such a hassle at the moment.

I use Debian for servers. I recently began migrating from Arch on my desktops to NixOS. The shift from the fantastic Arch wiki documentation to the NixOS documentation was a huge stumbling block, but I got through it. It took a lot of time to get NixOS to a nice state on my main laptop, but once I did, installing it to my 2013 macbook air and configuring it to be exactly like my main laptop took all of 15 minutes. That was a huge deal for me. The next hurdle is going to be installing it on my desktop with nvidia GPU, but I don't expect it will take too long.

I'll probably start migrating servers to NixOS where I can, too.

Here is my NixOS config repo, if that helps: https://github.com/thejevans/nix-config/

VanillaOS is pretty neat. It has an immutable (kind of) OS, lets you choose which package formats you want to use (flatpak, snap, appimage, etc) and leverages containers (a la Distrobox) and their package manager Apx to give you seamless access to packages on other distros. It's Ubuntu-based right now but the next release is switching to debian.

To be fair, I don't have much time on it. My daily drivers are a chromebook and a steamdeck, but I did dust off an old laptop just to check it out for a little bit.

Don't yell but Fedora/Ubuntu was my first exposure to Linux so I'm prejudiced toward them. I didn't have a lot of exposure to 'nix in the 90s since the family only had Windows.

Alpine Linux, repositories contain most software for a desktop and server, minimal base system, fast package manager. I would only recommend it to an advanced user that does not use proprietary software as most of it will not run because it is linked against glibc but alpine linux uses musl libc.

Lubuntu my beloved. Ubuntu enough for me to google myself out of anything but lightweight enough to make me feel good about what I'm spending cycles/battery on... and familiar enough that I don't need to learn a whole new desktop paradigm when all I'm gonna do with the desktop gui is start an app anyway.

draft - am I allowed to type "chromeos"

An immutable OS with flatpak, snap or appimage :

Fedora silverblue, nixos, vanilla os, guix, steam deck...

While there is still lot limitation using only flatpak, snap or appimage, i believe that in the next decade they will slowly grow and end up that packaging nightmare.

So we can have an OS up to date, latest app without worrying any breakage. But i'm not well versed and dunno if people and dev will follow that road.

I think it's time to ditch apt, dnf, rpm, aur. I imagine it would ease dev work but i'm not sure.

Debian and Mint are my favorites. I love the included games in Debian, the UI for both (Using cinnamon), and their ease of use.

I keep coming back to Fedora and I used to hate GNOME but I've learn to appreciate it "just working out of the box". I used to be config tweaker master but now appreciate things just working for the most part without me touching it.

I use Arch because it is generally the easiest one I've found to pretend it's 2010 again. Most Linux distributions are fine, but they've all been busy trying to solve problems I don't have and accepting that some niche corner cases are fine to break. I'm just a niche corner case in general.

I have nothing against Wayland trying to modernize the UI stack, but if their answer to half the things I need is "well the compositor should do that" and the compositor doesn't in fact do that yet, then I don't want to use Wayland yet. I have nothing against Flatpak trying to modernize application packaging, but their current story for making applications available from a shell is effectively "why do you want to do that", and well...I do want to do that, so I guess I don't really want to use Flatpak yet.

That's just me. Like I said...I'm a corner case. I understand that everyone else wants their computer to be an appliance that does what most people need without requiring any tinkering. And I'm not opposed to getting rid of the need to tinker. I'm too old to view tinkering to make something work as I thing I look forward to. I just view tinkering as a one-time cost with perpetual returns. I'm OK editing an xkb file to make some obscure input device work the way I want it to, because that might take me an afternoon, and then I just have that device do exactly what I want for the rest of its life with no further effort. Make it so that I never have to edit another xkb file again and I'll be just fine. But you can't do it by just saying, "no more needing xkbcomp because it doesn't work anymore, and if you needed it, go see if the compositor vendor will write some code for you".

Arch Linux. Because... it's rock n' rolling!