I use Fedora 38, it’s stable, things just work, and the software is up-to-date.
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Running Endeavor OS. Painless installation, everything works outta the box, good community, no release/lts bullshit. If it breaks, just rollback.
I use Arch because it’s so customizable and there’s so much more freedom. Once I installed Arch I realized I’d never go back to Ubuntu. I’m so used to using the command line all the time now it feels weird and annoying when I have to use something with a GUI desktop environment (I use i3.) People always tell me when they see my system in public (it’s a ThinkPad) it looks clunky, but even the inability to set custom time/date settings in KDE was mildly annoying to me.
I sincerely think CLIs and TUIs are no harder than “user-friendly” GUIs but they’re just too far from the average modern person’s experience for this to be acknowledged. Using nmtui to connect to WiFi is hardly more difficult than what Windows or macOS do.
I also really love pacman, the AUR, and the Arch Wiki.
Rock stability. Everything works. I run debian oldstable, even bookworm is too much for me at the moment. Yes, seriously. I tried to connect to my work office using azure web client and the keyboard layout was wrong. When I went back to debian bullseye, it worked as expected. By the way, this bug also happens with arch and fedora.
I have installed arch as well because sometimes I just want to play with things. I’m very interested in immutable systems, but NixOs is too difficult for me and I’m afraid I will spend too much time on it.
It has the most accessible package manager of em all. And ofc I’m talking about Arch Linux (bah teh wei.)
It feels great that if something is not present in the upstream repo, I can still usually find it in AUR.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I like it for being a rolling release with quality control. On the one hand I don’t like its restrictive defaults but on the other hand I know enough to work with them and that’s given me a leaner system.
I like Tumbleweed because it’s utterly boring and predictable while being rolling.
I like it because I can appreciate a good lizard.
I use Mint. As a beginner the Windows-like feel is convenient for me but once I get the hang of it I could see myself trying something else
@Anolutheos @Lolors17 I use Mint Debian edition. I got fed up opening my laptop and having to update when MS said so, so switched to Ubuntu, then Mint, the LMDE and have stayed for 4 years. It’s not exciting, cutting edge, etc but neither am I! It just works all the time. Updates are easy and everything is boringly reliable - I love it!
Hopefully LMDE6 is a game changer for the most popular first Linux distro. If the CosmicOS by System76 doesn’t win that title.
My grandparents were 1,5 years with Mint but LMDE5 has now been for 10 months and it is awesome. Literally 0 issues since day 0 whereas Win7 and Win10 caused constant headaches for me over the phone.
@Nuuskis Are you using a System76 machine? If so, how do you find it? And importantly how would you rate the keyboard against a ThinkPad / Lenovo?
Unfortunately I’m not. I’m running numerous Thinkpads until System76 releases their in-house produced Virgo laptop with hot-swappable mechanical keys and open source bios (Coreboot). It’ll also have the trackpoint from Thinkpads.
This is what I recommend for Linux newbs. And they can stay with it if they’re happy with it. It’s also a decently competent Linux distribution which is a hell of a bonus.
It’s easier to install when using DualBoot.
EndeavourOS is just what I needed when I started to DualBoot with windows, besides being just easier to install, some games I play still require Windows, like most dx12 games since they’re currently broken due to some driver error in the latest Nvidia drivers.
I love Arch and can’t see myself using anything but it, but I don’t have the patience to do a manual install every other week or so because I got bored or am to lazy to actually fix my system, especially while dualbooting.
Easy installation, just works™, and it’s basically a Debian Sid so it’s relatively up to date. Siduction!
Debian Bookworm. On my laptop and all my servers.
I’m a seasoned professional Linux sysadmin, so getting a distro installed has never been a problem for me (thanks to my first proper distro being Gentoo).
In the end, it’s the stability and “knowing what to expect”, that always makes me come back to Debian.
I don’t know how you deal with non rolling releases on your machines you actually use for work. By the end of the lifecycle all the tools are ancient
ChojinDSL It depends on your use case. In my case I mostly manage bare metal servers running certain services or docker.
For servers I don’t want rolling releases. That just means stuff is going to break on a regular basis. In my opinion, Arch Linux is the worst offender here. I don’t know if it’s gotten better since last I used it. But with Arch Linux the problem was, that you had to keep up with the updates. If you forgot to update some machine in a while, it could happen that you missed some update that changed some critical things, and everything else already moved on, and the only way to fix it was to hunt down the intermediate package version and try to install that manually, or just wipe and reinstall.
As far as “ancient” tools is concerned, it depends on what those tools are. Bugfix and security patches is what I’m most interested in on a server. Just because there is a newer version of software out there with some new features, doesn’t mean that I need those features, or that they’re relevant.
For the cases where I need something newer, there’s docker, flatpak and backports repos, (if not third party repos for certain tools).
For servers I don’t want rolling releases
Yeah I wasn’t talking about servers.
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Nobara for my gaming rig, same as OP + lots of out of the box gaming fixes.
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Tumbleweed for the laptop, rolling release while (in my experience) being a bit less likely to break than arch.
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Ubuntu/Debian/MicroOS/Alma for servers depending on whether I want stability + some fresher software, mountain-like stability, automatically updating container hosts or if I need redhat compatibility.
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Mint if its someone elses old computer they want to “just work”, since I dislike being tech support more than necessary.
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Arch: I like the knowledge and understanding that comes with regular usage. I’ve learned a lot about my system that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. Also the PKGBUILD system / AUR.
Debian as a server base OS is well-tested and (for me) ultra reliably stable.
i use arch, it’s amazing, everything i wanna do works other then games since i have some old cheap nvidia gpu which is hardware fault itself, i wanna do developer tasks just works, wanna do tweaks just works and it’s fun to use. i tried using other Distros i just can’t use debian based or arch based just bare bone arch with gnome or xfce depending on my mood. if i switch fedora is always my 2nd choice but not sure after some news released on red hat I didn’t stick to fedora because of lack of package or something like that just package management things kept me in arch.
I use Fedora. I like the combination of recent, stable, up-to-date software, new releases every six months, and firmware updates for my ThinkPad direct from Lenovo.
Gentoo. Great rolling release that is stable and had timely updates, but has the flexibility to configure my system down to the tiniest details, with a great and knowledgable community. I love source-based distros and Gentoo is definitely the best.
Had to scroll too far to find Gentoo.
Does source-based mean you need to build every package from scratch? How long does it take to update? Do you use it on a laptop or desktop?
Yes, though there are some prebuilt binaries for large packages. I use gentoo on a desktop and updates don’t take too long, minutes. Big updates that cause lot of packages to rebuild can take hours.
