4d ago

Why do you use the distro you use?

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.

286 comments

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.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Recently I bought cheap Surface-like x86 tablet on a rather recent hardware, and running Debian and its cousins required more tinkering than I was willing to do, so I decided to go with a more modern rolling release. Tried Arch for a few months, bricked it from mixing stable and testing branches, tried Fedora, and finally settled in Tumbleweed. I like it for being on the bleeding edge and exceptionally stable at the same time, perhaps thanks to robust OpenSUSE Build Service automated testing. And it is from a European company, that can't hurt.

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The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.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.
- Same, I've been using Debian only for the last 15 or so years. I love the stability, and the old software isn't hard to work around when newer versions are needed.
  I hate the lack of support from Nvidia. I prefer AMD cards though, and they give zero trouble.
  
  Yeah. Unfortunately blender is still noticably faster on Nvidia cards. Due to cuda and optic support.
  I only have a 4060 though. Next time I upgrade, give. How bad the 50s release is. I will look again and compare higher end amd stuff. Likely a few years away though.
- How does the nvidia card fare on linux in general ? on a Wayland session ? I have a 4070Ti running Windows atm, I use Blender professionally and I know it runs the best on Linux because of compiler shenanigans I can't be arsed to understand, but this is one reason I'd like to switch to Linux (...again!). I'm interested to know if you run multiple color-managed monitors by any chance
- What was you 1st distro back in last millenium?
  
  slackware followed by red hat mothers day 2.0 also used LMDE for several years

I recently moved to Fedora KDE Plasma after years on W10, simply because I don't want to use W11 and its AI bullshit. So far, it's been a great time, and I haven't noticed any major performance issues, so I'm happy with it. Having to update everything every few days is pretty novel though, and 'sudo dnf update -y' makes me feel like Hackerman, king of all Hackers. I think I like the customization options most though. I get way more control over what happens on my PC than W10 ever gave me, and it's all wrapped in a very user-friendly GUI. Overall 8.5-9/10.
- yay I want to install Fedora Plasma when I get a new drive, see if I can gradually switch (for real this time)... Plasma has a new pen tablet utility for Wayland, and since I use my tablet exclusively... when my Windows 10 is EOL I will switch for sure. Good to know it runs well for you
  
  Yeah, I also use a pen tablet for some stuff, and it handles it decently well. One issue I've run into with it is that if I turn my monitor off while the tablet is plugged in, there's like a 50/50 chance the monitor won't load video unless I turn the tablet on too. It's funky. Otherwise, getting my RTX4070 up and running wasn't too hard. It's a good distro for idiots (me).

Slackware: because I'm old and arch is too trendy.
- 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.
- 👍🏻 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....

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

Debian, on servers and a desktop. I spent a long time using Ubuntu so I'm used to APT and Debian is suitably lightweight for my not amazing hardware. I also like the non rolling nature of it.
- You'd love PopOS then, with its working nature and privacy-focus.
  
  I've tried PopOS as I have a machine with an Nvidia card but every tine I've done the first apt upgrade it nukes grub and won't boot again. Probably something I'm doing wrong and it has been a couple of years since I last tried.

Debian stable:
Works on all of my devices, none of which are newer than 2019
Compatibility with all of the software that I use day to day
I like my system set up in a very particular way and the stability makes upkeep simple
I was a holdout on older Windows versions before I moved to Linux, so getting new features at all is already exciting

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

I jumped from Ubuntu over to Arch because I was getting fed up with all the things I wanted to do being unavailable in Ubuntu, but all in the Arch repo or AUR.
I've been using Debian-based distros for like 25 years, so it was definitely a bit of a change, but it didn't take long to adjust. I'm glad I made the change.

I'm relatively new to Linux, so I'm testing a few distros via VMs right now. My main desktop runs OpenSUSE Leap with KDE Plasma and I love it so far. I'm also trying Fedora 42 with GNOME, but I'm realizing I don't like GNOME. I'm running Linux Mint Cinnamon on a 2016 MacBook Pro, which is pretty nice too. I also ran Debian stable for a bit. OpenSUSE is my favorite of the ones I've tried.

EndeavorOS;
Gives the benefit of having latest up-to-date packages for gaming, while negating the downsides of having to configure the OS or graphics driver upon installation.
Honestly, if think EndeavorOS comes with full UI support to download stuff from AUR and Flathub, I think it would become a pretty solid OS for any casual user looking to get into Linux. (Well, unless they are religiously against Arch. Then again your casual user probably don't even know what 'Arch' is or care enough to be religious about it.)
Also yea, usually you run Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable on servers unless your company paid for some licensing.
- Fellow EndeavorOS enjoyer here, I love the hand-holding it does for you at the beginning (calamares installer, pick whichever DE that tickles your fancy, access to AUR and other goodies by default), but then basically beyond that point, you're on your own. The fact that it's Arch based also means that 9.99 times out of 10, you can always consult the Arch Wiki for any issues.
  It's like an Arch Linux starter pack that gives you the option to take off the training wheels at any time lol.

Finally time to bust this out again.

Primarily Garuda these days. It's basically Arch with some user-friendly additions. The major reason I tried it on a then-new gaming laptop was the actually really good IME hardware detection and minimal fuss NVIDIA setup using their latest drivers.
I was having enough headaches trying to get graphics actually working properly on the Debian-based distro I had been using, that I said fuck it and tried something that would hopefully get things working for me so that I could at least see that configuration to figure out where I'd been going wrong. Then I liked it enough that I have mostly just stayed there on this machine. (Did finally get things fixed on the other side, though.) But, I was already fine with Arch, which probably helps.

Why do you use the distro you use?
People said Ubuntu is easy, but I prefer green to orange so I went with Mint.

I run SteamOS on desktop hardware because I hate windows and it solves almost every Linux gaming problem out of the box...
- Is there an official build for general release, or are you running a steam image built for a handheld?
- How?

Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I've ever had to type out.
- How long have you used it and how is it?
  I'm pretty curious about those kinds of distros, and don't really like how nixos is completely hosted on github (and all the drama that constantly comes from the community, and the bad documentation for many things, ...).
  However, guix seems such a niche project that I feel like it can't really be used.
  
  About a year and a half.
  To be honest it's not "easy" to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.
  To use it like any other distro you're going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.
  Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.
  There's also The toybox
  
  Some additional nice things about guix:
  Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.
  Shepherd is hands down the best init program I've ever used. It's just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.
  The OS documentation is built into the distro, with "info guix" you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.

SteamOS: because it came with my Steam Deck.
LinuxMint: because it is an Ubuntu-derivative and widely used which makes finding solutions and packages easier and I like MATE.

EndeavourOS because of the AUR

Arch. Why?
Arch Wiki
Pacman
Community (therefore AUR)

Arch and Fedora; package managers and repositories.

My gaming rig is on arch because i need the aur. I use my gaming rig for a bit of development too, dependencies are super easy on arch.
All my laptops, work and personal, run fedora kde because its rock solid and has the best "just works" features while still being a technical distro.
My servers are either alpine because its lightweight and easy to harden, debian for the stability and minimalism. I do have a few arch servers, but those are for testing and they get spun up, do the work they need and then killed.
DietPi for my raspberry because its debian based and has a plethora of automations to do what ever you like with your raspberry. Works on desktop too, well.
Lastly, mint, on my surface pro 5, because it is my obe device that is meant to just browse and be a portal into the internet or to play some movie or something while we are out for vacations or stuff like that.
There are many other distros that I like and use, but I use these the most. I love how each linux distro has its stregths and weaknesses, each their own usecase, you get to finetune what you need to make your life easier.

Arch, moved here from Ubuntu when I realized I have a good idea of what I want installed and have no need for a bunch of things to get bundled into the OS

I have been using Tuxedo OS for the past few months.
I just wanted to use something that was Ubuntu based with KDE.
KDE Neon sounded a bit too bleeding edge to be used safely as a daily driver. And Kubuntu is maybe a bit too conservative for me.
Tuxedo OS seems nicely balanced between that and so far it's been great.

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).
- Yepp. Started using Debian around the Ham/Slink releases, haven't found any reason to change yet.
  
  Oh wow yeah I started around the same time. 1998 was a magical time. I stated with a boxed copy of OG Suse but switched to Debian like 6 months later then never switched again. I learned a lot from the thick manual that came with Suse but once I tried Debian everything just clicked. It's like you learn the Debian rules and philosophy and any package you work with makes sense.

Because it's not Windows. So fed up with it. Used Debian. But as of late gotten annoyed with them and everything seems to lead me towards Arch. Dunno. We'll see. Just a bit scary to switch as I'm used with apt and not Pacman or whatever it's called :P Need to learn to make backup on the system in case something breaks etc
- You are going to want to use the AUR, so you need yay or paru (not just pacman). You can either still use pacman (for non-AUR stuff) or just one of the others for everything.
  They all use the same switches.

Cachyos, since I like archlinux and the things it comes with I would install on arch. There's even a few things that would have to be compiled from aur that's in their repository pre-compiled.

Bazzite, Aurora, Proxmox and Ubuntu Server.
- One of these is not like the others

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.
- Agree.
  Years ago, I was troubleshooting something (can't remember what) on Ubuntu and realised the package had fixed the bug, but it wasn't in the repos yet.. like months behind.
  Looked at Arch with it's up to date repos, moved over and never looked back.
  I've reported bugs since, watched the package get updated and seen the improvement on my system... now that's what it should be like.

It's Debian. It's well-supported by software and super stable and open.

Fedora because it just works and I don't have to mess with it.

EndeavourOS. It's the only one I tried that worked with my sound card out of the box strangely enough...

I use Mint. I had a phase with different distros, but when I had my son, and he turned 3, I installed Linux Mint for him. Little by little, I started using it myself. Today my son is in the military service and I still use Mint.

@aleq
I'm using #endeavouros with Gnome on my Desktop at the moment, just because I wanted to try Arch with all the priorly mentioned arguments, rolling release, Wiki and so on.
I started with Slackware in the early 90s, SuSE and Red Hat (Fedora today) just for fun and self-education, even though Slackware wasn't fun at all. This distro brought me nights without sleep and full of tears. 😂🫣
I tried a couple of times to switch to Linux on the desktop but never got it to work satisfyingly like Windows with all my private and business applications and games.
So Linux and I had an on and off relationship over decades. I wanted to love Linux so badly, but it was never reasonable to run it on the desktop.
Let's see how we're going to end, Arch/Endeavour and me.
On a server I would not switch from a Debian-based distro, just because I'm used to it and I would also prefer stable instead of rolling releases.

I was running only arch on my surface pro 7 and my amd desktop, then last week after an update it seemed gnome and Linux surface kernel weren't playing nice and had bricked the install. I have switch the laptop to Debian but I tend to stick with arch, like op as I am used to it, I now run Debian as it is known to be stable.
I would love to find a new distro but for me its the sunk cost fallacy, I have put so much time into learning arch and to repeat all that - this new distro would need to offer something wildly different.

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

Debian Stable.
I've used plenty of distros but Debian continues to give me a stable, predictable OS that allows me to get done what I need to get done with no real surprises. I have used it for many years and know how it works very well at this point.
Its my computing equivalent of a comfy and sturdy pair of well worn boots.
- Yeah I daily drive debian stable.
  With flatpaks and docker I never run into problems with my applications being too old or whatever.
- I don't like changes, that's why I like Debian Stable.

Arch: I have the most up to date computer in the whole world, I have the AUR, no one can stop me
switches to Debian
Debian: My packages are so stable, nothing can break the eternal peace of my system's packages
switches back to Arch
- I have Debian on a laptop that I don't use that much, and I use Nix package manager for managing the apps I use.
  Running Arch was a nightmare, as I was updating once every 1-2 months and I was getting lots of conflicts.
  
  I update daily and never had issues with packages.

Nixos because... I feel like were already loud enough of a crowd everyone should know its benefits lol

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.
- 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.
  
  I'm loving bluefin and I really want to go all in on the immutable stuff, but I'm having a hard time being productive on it. The devcontainers experience has been miserable (probably because I refuse to use VSCode and every other editor having poor or no support for it); I also had SElinux fuck me up when trying to build some complex dockerfile from a project at work (something that was supposed to just work took me two whole days of debugging - and I even managed to break bluefin's boot process when I tried to mess with the SElinux configuration. This one was mostly due to my own inexperience with SElinux, combined with there being a lot less content on the internet about fixing stuff on immutable distros compared to traditional ones).
  
  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.
- 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.

Nobara: Has all the gaming features I want on my gaming pc (like gamescope) and is htpc capable. Also, it’s based on Fedora, which I’m familiar with.
Fedora: I like gnome and it’s always fairly up to date and rock solid. Great on my laptop.
Have considered switching to openSUSE though. It’s German (as am I), it’s the first Linux distro I ever used (on my granddad’s PC, more than a decade ago) and I’ve heard a lot of good about tumbleweed.

The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.
That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.
I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.
For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.

On my main desktop I'm using Fedora KDE. Arrived here by process of elimination.
Linux Mint Cinnamon didn't run particularly well with my hardware, I was looking for a distro with decent Wayland support so I could run my high refresh rate monitor properly. So that pretty much meant a switch to KDE. So who's implementation of KDE?
I've spent much of my time on the Ubuntu side of things, but Canonical has been pulling so much diet Microsoft shit that I'd rather not use any of the *buntus themselves, so Kubuntu is out. Neon? Kubuntu again. I'm not terribly interested in the forks of forks of forks of forks, I've been around long enough to go "Remember PeppermintOS? You don't, okay." So I'm looking for something fairly near the root of its tree.
I've never really seen the appeal of Arch and every time I've tried running Manjaro it failed to function, so forget that. I don't know shit about SuSe, that basically left Fedora. So here I am.

Steam OS on Steam Deck. Fedora on Framework13 cause reliability. Garuda Mokka on Framework16 cause pretty and it just works.
May move from Garuda back to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed or CachyOS at some point.

Fedora because it's boring in the best ways. Curious about NixOS though.

I was given a CD set for SUSE 8.2, then bought the 9.0 book set from a book store because I liked it but wanted the hard copy to reference when I was messing things up. I've tried a ton of other distros, but keep going back to Suse because I'm used to it.

A bunch of nerds on lemmy suggested it and I haven't found any problems with it that make me want to go for another. I use Fedora KDE

Ubuntu. It was reccomended to me by a few of my mor knowledgeable friends, and I haven't had any major issues with it. The operating system is doing what I need it to and I just can't find any motivation to want to change.

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.
  
  Yeah, i'm realizing more and more how convenient those variables are. I recently started using gtklock for example, a screenlocker that also has separate modules for extra functionality, which are also in nixpkgs, but the problem is that you have to explicitly specify the path to those modules in the config. So i wrote the config inside of home manager, and pointed to the modules path with the pkgs.foo variables. Worked like a charm.
  
  What do you use nixops for?

Wanted to try out wayland and fedora was recommended as the best experience for that during those years. Discovered the most polished, stable and smooth Linux experience I'd had to date. Mostly used ubuntu distros and arch before. Never looked back. Upgraded to Silverblue to try out the future of linux. Haven't changed anything since. Been about 3 years now on Silverblue.
- How do you install packages on silver blue? Are you stuck with flatpak only or can you get system packages as well?
  
  Flatpaks are the preferred option followed by the Fedora toolbox container. Then you can make a distrobox container if what you want can't be satisfied by the first two. You can also layer packages with rpm-ostree but this should only be as a last resort.
  There is a bit of a learning curve with regards to how you should approach package installs, but once you learn it and get comfortable with the container options it's pretty smooth sailing.

I favour Arch because I prefer everything I want to install to be in the package repo and for it to be a version actually new enough to use.
But I actually use EndeavourOS because it is 99% Arch but installs easily with full hardware support on everything I own (including a T2 Macbook). It never fails me.
And now I have realized that I can use Distrobox to get the Arch repos and the AUR on any dostro I wish.
So, I now have Chimera Linux on 4 machines because it is the best engineered distro in my view. The system supervisor, system compiler, and C library matter to me (not to everyone). All these machines have the AUR on them (via distrobox). Best of all worlds.

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