Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.
Finally time to bust this out again.
Linux Mint is a nice and easy distro that is quite good :D
I’ve been using Mint for a year now and I just got a second laptop and the first thing I did was Wipe Windows 11 off of it and install Mint.
It does everything I need it too.
honestly mint really a very easy distro, I enjoyed using it too. Fedora and other distros also seem pretty cool
i been linux only for over 30 years now.
I tend to use Debian stable. At least for the last 15 or so.
The reason is simple. I use it as my main PC and the stability is my main priority.
The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.
But honestly while that was a pain in the past. Now for the vast majority of things I use. I find flat pack or appimage downloads work perfect ally.
The only exception is ham radio software. Here I tend to compile later versions if I need/want them.
Other negatives
I’m really not hugely into gaming. But use blender a lot. Due to this I use Nvidia cards as they are far better supported by blender.
Installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers is a bit of a pain on Debian for newbies. But once you know the process its simple enough. Just not obvious for beginners. The community drivers are still very limited thanks to Nvidia s weird ideas.
What was you 1st distro back in last millenium?
slackware followed by red hat mothers day 2.0 also used LMDE for several years
Slackware: because I’m old and arch is too trendy.
👍🏻 Slackware was my 1st distro. It was before kernel 2.0. Now I use windowslike girly distros…
Let’s be honest: nearly all of them now are windowslike girly distros…
Geez, I haven’t heard of someone running Slackware in at least 15 years. I mean, I know it’s still around, I just haven’t heard anyone say they were running it.
It’s much more… manual than others, I’ll admit. For me anymore it’s a labor of love.
Yeah. I remember, lol
Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I’ve ever had to type out.
NixOS. My primary reason for switching was wanting a single list of programs that I had installed. After using ubuntu for 5 years I just lost track of all the tools and versions of software that I had installed…and that didnt even count my laptop. Now all my machines have a single list of applications, and they are all in sync.
This is a big reason for me. Also because if anything breaks - even if my system becomes unbootable - I can select the previous generation from the boot menu, and everything is back to working.
It’s very empowering, the combination of knowing that I won’t irrevocably break things, and that I won’t build up cruft from old packages and hand-edited config files. It’s given me confidence to tinker more than I did in other distros.
What does that mean? Like there is one calendar app?
NixOS configuration is done entirely through code, so all of your packages are in a list (although that list can be spread across multiple files; it’s a bit to explain)
I’ve found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go “oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore”
I appreciate the way things are configured a lot, but I would not recommend it unless you really like coding and you have time to tinker. It’s not too hard to get simple config setup, but I spiraled down a deep rabbit hole really quickly.
EDIT: If my comment for some reason persuaded you to use NixOS, I recommend you get a basic config setup before installing it. I’d also recommend you look at how annoying it can be to run dynamically-linked applications (i.e. you download a random executable off the Internet and try to run it, or you try to run something you downloaded with npm)
I’ve found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go “oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore”
While it sounds sexy and attractive… Not sure the amount of time needed to configure your NixOS is worthwhile. (Except if you have time to spare and want that learning experience !)
Just put everyhting In your personal notes and you have a similar “feature”?
Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd’ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back onto it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.
Is the restoration method mentioned here really only achievable via nixos? How can you be so confident that you are truly reobtaining an “exact same system”?
Nixos consistently intrigues me because of what it seems to be accomplishing but I can never dive in because there seems to also be many warnings about the investment required and the potential for other more complicated and really nuanced drawbacks to arise.
Give it to me straight–is it offering a new approach of stability with the emphasis on reproducibility? If I’m a gentoo enjoyer hardset in my ways, what could I stand to gain in the nixos/guix realm?
Your personal files e.g. ~/Documents are not recreated, you’ll still need backups of those.
caveats are you’ve got to use:
- home-manager to generate your dotfiles.
- something akin to sops to generate and securely store your private keys and secrets.
But all this can be written in the one flake, so yes
nixos-install --flake <GIT URL>#<HOSTNAME>Is sufficient for me to rebuild my desktop, laptop or server from the same repository.I’ve never used Gentoo, and I’m sure there are other methods of achieving the same level of reproducibility but I don’t know what they are.
Nixos can be as modifiable as Gentoo with the caveat being it’s a massive pain in the ass to do some things. I have a flake for making aarch64-musl systems which has been an endeavour, and… It works? I have a running system that works on 2 different SoCs. I do have to compile everything quite often though.
There are efforts to recreate Nixos without systemd, but that’s a huge effort; because it’s very “infrastructure as code”, you have to change a lot of code where editing a build script would’ve sufficed on arch/Gentoo.
As for nix vs guix, guix was described to me as “if you only ever want to write in scheme”, whereas nix feels much more like a means to an end with practical compromises spattered throughout.
The configuration of nix is not the time consuming part, most of the time it’s faster than other distro if you are a developer. The time consuming part is having an issue with a niche package, the only doc you have is the code and random github issue from 3 years ago that don’t mirror your config, and the nix evaluation doesn’t tell you which part of the config is the problem.
Bazzite because I get an immutable install that won’t let me accidentally fuck it up. It just works. All necessary drivers for my dock and peripherals are already installed and configured. It’s the very first time in my decades long Linux excursion that I have a user experience that is similar to windows in that sense, but without the enshittifcation of windows.
I genuinely enjoy video editing, gaming, and surfing the web on my laptop when it’s running Bazzite.
Bazite and bluefin for me, too. been daily driving Linux since the mid-90s and this little cluster of distros is the best experience I’ve had. really feels like everything finally came together.
I haven’t tried Bazzite yet, but I feel the same about the other ublue flavours.
I’m the most productive I’ve ever been. Tweaking everything was fun for a few years, but now I just need a distro I can trust, that comes with the tools to do anything.
I see rebases to Bazzite DX are available now. I might give that a go today.
Not exactly a product from ublue but something in the same line:
Secureblue because of the reasons aforementioned for the ublue images where things are really darn rock solid out of the box AND because Linux is fundamentally behind in security and this project is trying to mitigate some of the big flaws.
I’m asking this because I haven’t tried secureblue: in what ways is Linux behind in security, and what does secureblue do to mitigate that?
And do any of those mitigations negatively impact usability?
Some answers to your first question you can find here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html
For the second question about in what ways Secureblue do mitigate that you can find more here: https://secureblue.dev/features
The last question about usability, is very usable. If you use Bazzite you may have a similar experience. It is not like QubesOS that isolate all processes making it even not able to use a GPU.
Thanks! That first link is an excellent resource for a security tool I’m working on. Specifically, gVisor, which I hadn’t heard of, but looks like an excellent way to harden containers.
I may rebase to secureblue from Bluefin at some point to give it a try.
i use gentoo because i love the package manager and how in control i am of my desktop and for servers even though not linux ive been using open bsd because of secure it is and lightweight helps squeeze out little bit more performance from mt shit vps lol
Fedora just werks™
Haven’t used the command line since installing Kinoite, it’s… weird.
I use gnome software all the time and since the new update it’s so much faster
Arch. Purely because of the Arch Wiki. I honestly think it’s the easiest OS to troubleshoot as long as you are willing and able to read every now and again.
I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn’t like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I’m hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it’s a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.
Everything-in-my-life-as-code FTW
Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.
Also, if you run
nixops, it’s much easier to work with if your dev system is also running NixOS.
Arch has a combination of great documentation and great packaging. I use Debian on a server but for daily use, everything I need is on Arch.
Debian for everything since it’s one of the few distros that has always been there. It’s one of the second distros to come after after SLS. Distros come and go, but Debian marches on.
Most big distros are old enough to drink though. Ubuntu is 20yo, Fedora 21yo, openSUSE 18yo, Arch 23yo, Gentoo 23yo. (I got curious and a bit carried away…)
But sure, Debian does have them beat by roughly 10 years (31yo).
I use openSUSE because I want to see the license used with a package before installing it, and I can do that by using YaST. Also, it seems that version numbers are used consistently which enables elegant downgrading (I found that the
pacmansystem is probably capable of supporting this too, but the operating system(s) that use it don’t seem to use version numbers consistently and I’ve had a bad experience with downgrading in the past). I reviewed packaging systems other thanrpmbut it seemed thatrpmwhile used with openSUSE was the most robust.I also like having a bootable image with a streamlined installation process that is clearly supported by the operating system maintainers: I was tired of worrying about whether I set up LUKS correctly while setting up Arch Linux, and just having a checkbox for “encrypt the disk” makes me a lot calmer. Knowing that I can use a guided process if I want to reinstall the operating system also gives me some peace of mind.
It’s also nice to get practice with an operating system that is more similar to “enterprise” Linux distributions: it’s probably useful to get practice managing my personal computer(s) and at the same time get knowledge that is probably re-usable while interacting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise itself. However, this was not a primary consideration for choosing an operating system for myself.
Luckily, my choice can currently also get some support from https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/
I also like NixOS, but it doesn’t seem to use secure boot by default, and I’d prefer to have that handled without needing input from me, so I only use it when that feature isn’t available at all.
I have been using Linux since early March 2020. I chose Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions for two main reasons: stability and my strong familiarity with the APT package manager. The APT man page is deeply ingrained in my memory.
Today I run Debian Stable/Testing and also Unstable, on all my computers 4/4 on Debian!
