From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
- 0 users online
- 6 users / day
- 14 users / week
- 56 users / month
- 393 users / 6 months
- 5.52K subscribers
- 1.79K Posts
- 5.23K Comments
- Modlog
Fedora with gnome 40
settled on Arch Linux, after distrohopping a thousand times, it’s minimal yet it feels complete…
Ubuntu for laptop, Manjaro for desktop.
I like Ubuntu’s driver support and I can go anywhere (pre-COVID) without worrying as much if a usb device is going to work.
Manjaro is awesome for steam, itch.io, GOG, etc… Most of our games work in Linux now and its been a seamless experience.
Crazy, this is exactly what I landed on as well. I install Elementary OS on family computers.
Debian Stable. Old, but it works and that’s all I want my computer to do
Started with CentOS, then Ubuntu on servers. I finally started to get comfortable in Linux on desktop with Pop!_OS. Now I’m getting into Arch and exploring i3wm and xmonad.
I started with Ubuntu, then I tried fedora, and now I’m switch to ElementaryOS because this simplicity, but i really like Debian. In the future y like try Qubes.
Tinycore linux
linux mint, runs team fortress 2 well enough
… and that’s all you really need :)
nothing could be more true than this
Alpine Linux. Originally to dogfood myself the packages I maintain for postmarketOS, but I’ve grown quite fond of it and the developer community around it. I run it on my laptop and desktop and servers now, coming from Gentoo.
ElementaryOS. I don’t use the Pantheon desktop, I just don’t want to distrohop
I found ElementaryOS to work pretty well, and it’s easy enough to install different window managers on it as well. I’ve had it for a couple of years, and it survived multiple upgrades without a hitch. This is the biggest selling point for me, as I’ve had most Linux distros shit the bed on upgrades. At the end of the day I want a distro that just works where I don’t have to keep playing a car mechanic with it.
I feel ya
Manjaro, although thinking about Arch+i3wm when I get a new machine
deleted by creator
Ubuntu, CentOS (and a little RHEL).
arch linux btw
It’s been Arch with Sway for a few months, I’m gearing up to try Gentoo though.
Arch and Guix
How is Guix? I’ve stopped configuring my Arch after installing Nixos on one machine. Configuration feels much more meaningful in Nix, as you can use it on many machines and it won’t rot.
Nixos isn’t quick to learn, sadly. My main complaint is that there is no popular and good way to structure you configuration that could be given to new users.
I’m kind of concerned about security in Nix. Is Guix even worse because the scripts are Turing-complete?
EDIT: I hate that the nix language is mostly used to glue together shell scripts. Can you avoid shell scripting in Guix?
I have Guix on one of my laptops. Currently experimenting with it. I’m not yet proficient enough to go all-in but one of these days I will.
Guix is not quick to learn either. I am fully fluent in Scheme but there are so many aspects to Guix that you need to be master before being comfortable with it that it takes time. But I see it as time well invested.
If by ‘shell scripting’ you mean
bash,zshand similar, then yes you can avoid them in Guix. It’s all in Scheme. For me that’s a huge win but YMMV.I’m not sure I understand your security concern about Turing completeness. Many scripting languages, including
bashandzsh, are Turing complete.There is a security problem if packages can alter other completely unrelated packages. Nix has some of that. The worst case would be that in Guix one package can trivially infect everything in your system.
No shell scripting sounds great! I’m also very interested in GNU Shepherd.
How is running nonfree software? In nix I gave up on running some ML model because Cuda was a pain to get working.
Guix is fully funcitonal. Each package lists its dependencies and depends only on them. In that way, completely unrelated packages have no effect.
As for nonfree software, the Guix maintainers do not encourage it but there’s a whole channel of
nonguixsoftware.I think the problem is rather that, when building a system derivation, you can override packages (e.g. Firefox) with any Nix derivation (e.g. Google Chrome or other malware) from many places.
All of this is still purely functional and I’m pretty sure Guix has similar functionality.
This isn’t as big of a problem though IMO, your configs should be in VCS which guarantees their correctness and you should only be activating system closures built from trusted sources like Nixpkgs.
I see what you did there :winking face:
So yes, the choice is yours to build whatever system derivation you want, even if you shoot yourself in the foot doing so.
I use Guix as a daily driver on my laptop, coming from Arch and Debian.
What I like the most about Guix is the hackability of it all. In my (about one year long) experience the consistency of iterfacing with a single API and syntax to almost everything in a system is a breath of fresh air after years of copypasting snippets from the web to the most disparate files under /etc.
Of course Scheme has a little steeper learning curve w.r.t.
PKGBUILDs but imho it’s much easier than to learn the APT packaging system, that requires you to understand the purpose and syntax of many different DSLs.There’s been work on a GUI configuration.nix generator/editor which has the potential to make configuring NixOS more user-friendly than any other Linux distro out there.