I’m between distros and looking for a new daily driver for my laptop. What are people daily driving these days? Are there any new cool things to try?
I have been using linux mint recently. I have used nixos and arch in the past. Personally, linux mint uses flatpacks too much for my liking. Although, I might have a warped perspective after using arch. (the aur is crazy big)
OpenSuse tumbleweed + kde plasma for a peace of mind 👍
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I am amongst you scholars and noblemen.
Indeed there are my dude!
For laptops, I’ve been using EndeavourOS lately. All of the Arch goodness, but with an easy installer that handles the DE too. It’s as close to “just works” as you can get while still having pacman + AUR at the end.
I still love raw Arch, but I leave that for server installs.
Same, EOS is awesome and cured my distro-hopping.
archinstall let’s you choose a DE too
Not saying anything bad about EndeavourOS, because it’s great, but:
All of the Arch goodness, but with an easy installer that handles the DE too.
Arch has a guided TUI installer included in it’s ISO that does this too.
It does, but it’s done me wrong a few times so I never recommend it. For all I know it’s fine these days, but old grudges are hard do shake.
NixOS user here! Fedora is a very good contender as well
+1 on NixOS. On all devices except Android phones since 2014 for me.
NixOS too. I really like having a “fresh” install every time I restart.
Opensuse Tumbleweed. A rock solid rolling release.
I’m surprised by how many people are rocking opensuse in this thread. What made you go with opensuse?
I would say the benefit of OpenSUSE is that everything is preconfigured to work right out of the box, including btrfs snapshotting with snapper. Once you boot it’s time to download apps, and go. Very windows like for those who just want the system to work. Updates are one click.
In my case not at all. But that is by choice. I always start from a server install. For me i like rolling as i do not get major version updates. And with tumbleweed it is very solid at the same time. Snapper and btrfs are also great aditions.
The only downside is that they don’t support zfs properly, and the package selection is more limited. The community repos aren’t always maintained.
Until the kernel updates to something unsupported and you find out that they don’t keep old kernels in the rolling release. An amazing experience.
Never hat issues on my 10+ year old system. I did how ever with rocky linux 9.4. It is unsupported on my old dell r610s
I had it on two systems. Some peripherals stopped working after an update on one system and the attempt to downgrade it to the LTS (Leap?) failed miserably --> Ubuntu. On another one the graphics card stopped working and somehow forced it to the LTS with a custom kernel. That worked until trying to upgrade it by two minor releases (X.2 to X.4? Can’t remember if it was 13.Y 14.Y or 15.Y). There were so many conflicts and messing around with the source lists (or whatever they’re called)…
It was the most difficult system to update that I’ve ever had. YaST is great though. Best GUI for system configuration I’ve had so far.
A Chevy volt. Turns out gm figured out that a PHEV is a great idea 12 years ago
What kinda rpms you getting on that
- It probably uses apks.
Not sure, just realized this is a computer post lol
If you want mpg it’s anywhere from 75 to 130mpg per tank of gas.
Haha, welcome. rpm was just the first vaguely-car-sounding Linux term I could think of.
What is rpms in Linux? I just lurk on /all so I see a ton of Linux stuff that I don’t understand haha
RedHat Package Manager. It’s also the file extension for their packages, so you’ll see stuff like firefox_nightly.rpm
OpenSUSE TW for me. Used to be Arch but it’s just too much faff for me.
Same, I’ve used Linux since the late nineties and know my way around but I have other things to do. TW with Plasma/Wayland is great.
Fedora Workstation. Couldn’t be happier.
Same, it’s a “it just works” distro.
Arch for many, many years. Absolutely zero reasons to switch. I used to distro hop alot back in the day but I don’t bother with that anymore. I need a system that works and Arch gives me exactly that.
Why distro hop from arch if you can make any distro out of it anyway lol I use arch btw
I like Debian with GNOME
Until a couple of weeks ago I used Fedora Silverblue.
Then, after mostly using GNOME Shell for about a decade, I (reluctantly) tried KDE Plasma 5.27 on my desktop due to its support for variable refresh rate and since then I have fallen in love with KDE Plasma for the first time (retrospectively I couldn’t stand it from version 4 until around 5.20).
Now I am using Fedora 39 Kinoite on two of my three devices and Fedora 39 KDE on a 2-in-1 laptop that requires custom DKMS modules (not possible on atomic Fedora spins) for the speakers.
Personally I try to use containers (Flatpaks on the desktop and OCI images on my homeserver) whenever possible. I love that I can easily restrict or expand permissions (e. g. I have a global
nosocket=x11override) and that my documentation is valid with most distributions, since Flatpak always behaves the same.I like using Fedora, since it isn’t a rolling release, but its software is still up-to-date and it has always (first version I used is Fedora 15) given me a clean, stable and relatively bug-free experience.
In my opinion Ubuntu actually has the perfect release cycle, but Canonical lost me with their flawed-by-design snap packages and their new installers with incredibly limited manual partitioning options (encryption without LVM, etc.).
i’m on manjaro kde, will switch soon to nixos if i understand how it all works :)
otherwise arch
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s been great having a rolling release distro that I don’t have to worry about breaking with updates
After using NixOS, I don’t think I could go back to a regular distro. At the very least, maybe debian with the nix package manager
As someone who uses it as well:
Yes it is. Especially if you use Gnome. Because you can set dconf settings right in your Config.
It takes a while to remember to configure your User Account not in the normal Settings App but instead in the Config, but once you do it’s amazing.
I reinstalled on my Laptop and i was back on my old Desktop with all my Programs, Extensions, Settings etc within 20 Minutes
When i change a Setting on my Laptop, i use Git to synch the Config to my Desktop and all the changes i made to my Laptop are also on my Desktop.
Also: no more accidentally breaking your system. I don’t have to type random Commands in my Terminal to try and fix something and then try ans revert them. I just add the Config. If it doesn’t work, i remove the Config again and it automatically reverts everything back as if nothing ever happened.
It is trily amazing
Now if only SELinux or Apparmor finally were supported.
@Neon maybe I’ll install it on my Kubantu
Just know: it takes time and effort to learn. The Documentation is often not that good and you’ll go digging in blogs, Forums and Github Issues.
All in all i’d say i’ve spent probably more Time learning Nixos than i’ve spent learning Linux. Which, admittedly wasn’t much as i started recently with fedora which has gotten really beginner-friendly, but still. I’d say i spent at least all in all 20 hours learning how to fix a fringe Problem in Nixos.
Most of that time was wasted on useless fringe stuff you’d probably never want to do, but there’s also some rather normal stuff in there: i remember that my SWAP wasn’t decrypring correctly from LUKS, which wasn’t really bad or anything, it just annoyed me that it didn’t work, and i spent about 40 Minutes debugging that.
For me it was totally worth it. I would do it again in a Heartbeat. However, if you have a full-time Job and a Family, maybe you should just get a Fedora Workstation Laptop. Or a Macbook even.
@Neon luckily I have no life so yay I guess but it seems intriguing so maybe I’ll try it out later as school slows down so I have the time
Gentoo. Been using it for over 3 years now, and I haven’t found a reason to leave yet.
What systems do you use? I mean boot, init, home and all of that…
I just use the defaults for everything, haha! Just grub2 for the bootloader, openrc for the init system.
By “home” do you mean DE/WM? If so, I use dwm for my laptop and sway for my desktop.
I meant alternatives to systemd-homed, systemd-machined and the likes. Since I’m on NixOS, I’m restricted to most of the systemd stuff. I’m not even sure if I need all of them.
I don’t even know what that stuff is, so I guess my answer is that I just don’t use it 🤷♂️
Now I’m being dragged into the anti-systemd ideology. I have a bunch of CLI utility that I have never ever touched since the three years I’ve been on Linux. I just came across
homectl,machinectlandtimedatectl, and I’m convinced that the part about “bloat” does make a lot of sense now.I don’t really care either way. I like things to be more minimal, but I’m not really anti-systemd or anything like that. I’ve just been using openrc for a few years now, and haven’t used systemd enough to learn about the homed stuff I guess
Oh god so many notifications. My inbox is flooded. I only expected like 20 replies Lol
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Not only that, you asked for their opinions.
The only way they would have gotten more replies is if they had posted “I’m thinking of switching to Ubuntu. What do you think?”
