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.
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The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.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.
I use my GPU mostly for gaming and computer science. I will say that ROCm from AMD is seriously giving Cuda a run for its money, and it’s fully open source. AMD cards also tend to be better per dollar.
Agreed. As I say blender is less fast on amd. Atm
I don’t play games much. 0ad being the main exception.
But yeah I’d never advise a non blender user to go Nvidia.
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
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
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.
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).
Fantastic. Thanks for the feedback.
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.
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 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?
Yep! It’s the SteamOS 3 beta… It’s got some bugs and some weirdness to it, but it’s not terrible at all
How?
Steam deck SteamOS iso installer! It’s actually surprisingly stable for basic tasks but it is pretty locked down so you can’t really break it unless you really try. And it seems to run better if your pairing it with amd cpu/gpu hardware
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.
EndeavourOS because of the AUR
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
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).
Honestly, even with VSCode, devcontainers are kind of just ok, at best.
They are very fiddly. The containers keep running when you close VSCode (which makes sense, and sure the resource usage is minimal, but it’s damned annoying) and you have to stop them manually. Meanwhile the commands in VSCode to work with/activate the containers are not super clear in terms of what they actually do.
Oh, what’s that? Need a shell inside the container you’re working in for testing things out, installing dependencies, etc.? Well, I hope you pick the right one of VSCode’s crappy built in terminals! Because if you want to use a real terminal, you are stuck with the crappy devcontainer CLI to exec into the container. A CLI that is NOT up to date with, or even includes, all the commands for devcontainers in the editor (which is what makes working with them in other IDE/editors such a pain in the butt…).
And this gets me…. What? A container I can share with other developers, sure, but it’s very likely NOT the container we are actually going to deploy in. So…
Yeah, I’ve also had a lot of frustrations with devcontainers in Bluefin. I really like what the Bluefin project is doing. The reasoning behind it makes a lot of sense to me. But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.
They do have Homebrew and Distrobox though, which helps a lot. I have ended up doing most of my development work on Bluefin on the host system with tools installed via brew, which is kept separate enough from the rest of the file system to still keep things tidy.
Overall, I think Bluefin is great and it, or something like it, may very well be the future of Linux… but the future isn’t here just yet and there are some growing pains, for sure.
But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.
Both podman and docker are on the image, you could just use containers normally without using devcontainers if you want.
Yes! This what I usually do. I will develop on the host using tools installed via Homebrew, then package/build/test via docker.
And to be clear, I really love the ideas behind Bluefin and use it every day. I’ve just kind of given up on devcontainers, specifically.
Yep, I’m with you. Project Bluefin is exactly what I want from an OS. My previous Linux experiences had all been awful UX, having to diagnose obscure issues and copy pasting decipherable terminal commands. Until Bluefin, nothing ever worked straight out of the box.
Bluefin’s main issue right now is a lack of good documentation. Like you, I’ve tried to get devcontainers working and they just don’t.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
