What distro do you use?

@plato

ElementaryOS. I don’t use the Pantheon desktop, I just don’t want to distrohop

@yogthos

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.

@Czernobog

I feel ya

@PureTryOut

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.

@early_adapter

Arch and Guix

@joonazan

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?

@early_adapter

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, zsh and 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 bash and zsh, are Turing complete.

@joonazan

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.

@early_adapter

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 nonguix software.

@Atemu

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.

@early_adapter

you can override packages (e.g. Firefox) with any Nix derivation (e.g. Google Chrome or other malware)

I see what you did there 😉

So yes, the choice is yours to build whatever system derivation you want, even if you shoot yourself in the foot doing so.

@fishinthecalculator

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.

@Atemu

My main complaint is that there is no popular and good way to structure you configuration that could be given to new users.

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.

@deauthorized

linux mint, runs team fortress 2 well enough

@qu4k

… and that’s all you really need :)

@deauthorized

nothing could be more true than this

@Atemu

NixOS. Once you go declarative, you never want to configure anything imperatively again.

Here’s the configuration common to all my desktop machines if you want to get a taste of what NixOS is like.

@mindtree

I’m with you, running NixOS+GNOME on a Razer Blade Stealth and haven’t been happier! I switched from Arch ~7 months ago - it just feels like a whole other league of portability and reliability.

@hlesesne

Ubuntu, CentOS (and a little RHEL).

@jlsturbo

arch linux btw

@verdigris

It’s been Arch with Sway for a few months, I’m gearing up to try Gentoo though.

@SirLotsaLocks

Manjaro KDE. I distrohopped for a couple months after I switched to linux in january, from elementary to ubuntu, to ubuntu with kde, to kubuntu, then finally leapt to manjaro and I now have everything I could ever want.

@baka

void linux, musl

@k3a

Mostly ArchLinux (KDE work desktop, laptop, HTPC), Alpine ans Debian (Docker containers) but also Gentoo linux (other laptop and server but I don’t recommend it on server :P). The main reason is flexibility. I can choose what software and what dependencies to install or even compile from source. In contrast to most other distros where a small network CLI utility depends on Qt5, CUPS, Cairo and Python.

@fruechtchen

laptop: voidlinux, because of libressl and linux, mostely. and because i was curious to try an systemd alternative.
server: openbsd. because of security features and libressl.

@jaidedctrl

haiku (not linux, but c’mon, unix counts) and opensuse on laptop for the past several months— before that, openbsd and parabola for years.

@obifoe

Linux Mint MATE. I’ve been using LM since 2015.

@stevo

I’m distrohopping on my pinephone between Phosh’s on postmarketOS, Arch and Mobian. Pinebook uses arch. When I get my PC upgraded I will do a complete transition from Manjaro to Arch.

@MegageM

@Qaz

KDE Neon, and Ubuntu Mate on some older hardware

@Micalet

Manjaro and others to test and fail safe.

@Echedenyan

Devuan and Debian.

vendion

Arch Linux at work, and FreeBSD for pretty much everything else.

@konky0418

Currently dual booting gentoo and Opensuse tumbleweed, literally just installed tumbleweed and I’ve had gentoo for a couple of months.

@kylejj

I was a big PopOS, Fedora and Ubuntu user but Gnome kept having a lot of issues.

I switched to Kubuntu and haven’t looked back. Kubuntu on boot taking up less than a half a Gb of RAM is super nice. Very fast OS with Ubuntu repo’s and support. Highly recommend!

@JohnFKennedy

Been using Linux Mint for a couple of years now on two different laptops. Friend gave me an old T440P and I put Linux Mint on it, haven’t used anything other than ubuntu, which I disliked for reasons I can’t remember. Loving Mint

@sgtnasty

Manjaro i3 (for my old ThinkPad), CentOS for my file server and Fedora for my ThinkPad Extreme and ThinkCentre.

@rek2

blackarch GNU/Linux with wayland/sway amdgpu. vim. tut, gomuks, etc

@hburb3ri

Arch, but my true love lies with Gentoo. I just became impatient with the compile times.

@don

It’s fun to play with all kinds of distros but when I have to set up a box for the mother-in-law xubuntu is my first choice. Xfce is very low on resources and there is a repo for pretty much anything out there.

@EmbarrassedActive4

Manjaro but will likely move to mint, just wanna use something smh

@lecagot

macOS at home, Manjaro at work.

@lainon

Currently on Fedora 32 Workstation. I’m partial to just about anything Red Hat has a hand in. Definitely the most well-put-together distributions that I’ve used (have limited experience w/ CentOS & RHEL).

@roadrunner56

My first distro was vanilla Ubuntu Gnome. I then switched to Manjaro KDE because I wanted to try a rolling release distro with a DE that was lighter and more customizable than Gnome. I really liked KDE, but the rolling release model was just not for me. I then switched over to Kubuntu, which I’m still on.

@AndreK4

Manjaro, although thinking about Arch+i3wm when I get a new machine

@ProtoDrew

been using manjaro as well. Loving it

@k_o_t

Void™

@bnaw

Same here. Void together with sway.

@RoundDuckKira

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@oriond

Debian

@dreamland

Arch, effectively (started as Antergos). In the past I’ve used Gentoo.

@Restioson

Pop!_OS

@plato

POP POP

@k_o_t

the worst name of all time :)

@SirLotsaLocks

I wouldn’t say worst but I do get that it isn’t as sleek sounding as arch or void.

Dessalines

Hrm never heard of it, I’ll take a look.

@wesley

Been using Manjaro on my laptop and my desktop for a while now, but I am in a hopping mood so that might change soon.

@Ziln

openSUSE Tumbleweed returning back to the first distro I ever used way back in 2002 when it was called SuSE Linux its had few name revisions in its time.

@ProtoDrew

wish I could get that working on my machine but it really resisted every step of the way for me

@kuarup

EndeavourOS (pure Arch )

@ajz

Interesting. (And this looks kind of funny : target audience == distro hoppers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EndeavourOS#Target_audience

@randomrhino

Which isn’t too bad. Many distro hoppers end up using arch. The problem is, that many hoppers try to go more and more minimal without losing too much comfort. Arch is THE way to go. It’s simple to install and use. It is not necessarily bloated with a lot of useless shit. It gives the user the freedom to design the distro just in their favor.

I am not saying, that this isn’t possible with other distros. But in my opinion, Gentoo, Debian, LFS can be used with the same intention, but they end up being way more time consuming to setup. Arch is a nearly perfect trade off between usability & minimal OS. And if you can cope with the rolling release system and systemd, then you’ll be happy with Arch.

After years of struggling with distros I finally found my passion in Arch. I customized my system quite a lot to be kind of a power user. My OS is pretty much perfectly fitted to my needs.

For server-use, I am still a fan of debian. Easy to setup, and no rolling-releases. Software is well tested. Currently, I am checking out Alpine Linux on one of my servers. So far, I am satisfied with it as well, but old habbits die hard. And it’s not that easy to get used to Alpine.

@ajz

+1 I like Arch Linux a lot too (but without Systemd), and I’ve tried Alpine Linux on servers. Has very nice pros but one con was that I couldn’t manage the software and OS upgrades very well. Went back to Debian and Ubuntu where I love the unattended-upgrades package, and the “apt upgrade” “apt dist-upgrade” features.

@randomrhino

Yes, as I said, I am mostly using Debian. It’s an amazing and incredibly stable server system. I mainly digged into Alpine, to try a new system, that wasn’t too popular a couple of years back. I mean, if you go for well known server systems as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, then of course, you will be satisfied. But trying things, that weren’t a trend a couple of years back might surprise you with great features, that other distributions doesn’t offer. That’s my hope with Alpine. But sadly, I have too little time to dig into it

@orangelamp

I’m on Stock Debian but seriously considering moving to Ubuntu because it gets more support on stuff like stackexchange

@nyex

i’m a new manjaro user after almost 15 years of using ubuntu. loving the simplicity >.<

Dessalines

Manjaro is great, definitely deserves to be one of the most popular ones.

@alexbuzzbee

In the process of switching from Void Linux (a systemd hipster distro) to Gentoo.

@ajz

In the past I was interested in Void Linux because it uses LibreSSL (OpenSSL is apparently so messy), but I moved on, partially because this distro with their “off-beat” package manager seemed too obscure to me (A not too small community is nice for Q & A) to use it as my daily drive. btw, it does not use Systemd (That was another reason I was interested in it) -> https://voidlinux.org/usage/runit/ And, that reminds me. I still want to play with Bedrock Linux again, which has a fascinating concept : https://bedrocklinux.org

@Tucumano88

PuppyLinux also AntiX

@muesli

Arch, btw.

(just couldn’t resist)

@nutomic

Manjaro

@ajz

Arch Linux (btw - Without Systemd https://artixlinux.org) and also busy with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. In the past I’ve used Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware.

@AgreeableLandscape

openSUSE Tumbleweed currently. I’ve also used Ubuntu, Debian, and Manjaro.

Dessalines

Arch btw. Have used lubuntu, mint, manjaro, eOS in the past. U?

@ProtoDrew

switching from ElementaryOS to OpenSuse Tumbleweed rn

@Lofenyy

Arch as my current daily driver (laptop) but I’m likely going to switch to Trisquel netinstall soon. I’ve already migrated my desktop to Trisquel Mini.

@AndreVallestero

Alpine on my main laptop, Manjaro ARM on my Pinebook Pro, Arch on my desktop.

@nollo

Debian on my work desktop, Ubuntu on my home desktop, and Manjaro on my laptop.

Been trying to get Debian on my work laptop too but it’s a cheapo 32-bit notebook designed to only run Windows 10, and it’s been resisting the installation every step of the way. Soon it will learn that the Debian text installer wins (almost) every time!

@u03c6

Arch Linux on my main machine, Ubuntu on work notebook

@Cfheofzf

Manjaro - xfce and xubuntu on a couple of laptops, and thinking about using Pop! on my desktop

@smudge

Been using Slackware lately. 14.2 with all the security packages, and additional software from SlackBuilds.org built with sbopkg.

@lemmy

Currently using fedora because it ‘just works’. Manjaro and stuff i’ve always had problems with nvidia drivers and stuff

@Tommstein

Arch. Current install is nine years old.

@lxs

Windows 10 at home and Windows XP at work.

@Atemu

I’m not sure which is worse

@EldritchBoat

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@lemmywinks

deleted by creator

@soda

deleted by creator

@developred

deleted by creator

@artifuchs

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@fturco

deleted by creator

@LucasDondo

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@wesley

So what you are saying is you used to use arch btw?

@k_o_t

It seems I cannot escape the btw arch meme here, so I will pour all my effort into fighting it. Here’s your downvote, good sir!

@wesley

Aww I apologize. Wasn’t trying to annoy anybody. Sorry. :(

@LucasDondo

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