What distro do you use and why?
What distro do you use and why?
yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible,has aur(I loved how easy installing apps was) without tinkering.
from the comments, there's a split between
- linux as a tool: debian, mint, fedora, opensuse, etc.
- linux as a toy: arch, gentoo, nixos, etc.
i wish this split was made more explicit, because more often than not someone comes looking for recommendations for linux as a tool, but someone else responds expecting they want linux as a toy. then the person will try out linux and will leave because it's not what they want, not knowing that there is a kind of linux that is what they want
EndeavorOS. Because I wanted to have a rolling release distribution that is always up to date, and one that is good supported by maintainers and community. Good documentation is very important to me. And I trust the team behind EndeavorOS and Archlinux.
Also the manual approach of many things and the package manager based on Archlinux is very nice. I also like the building of custom packages that is then installed with the package manager (basically my own AUR package). The focus on terminal stuff without too much bloat by default is also a huge plus.
NixOS because it’s easy to understand—I can pop open any .nix file in my config and see exactly what is being set up, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of innumerable imperative changes I would otherwise make to the system, and thus lose track of the entropy over time.
Fedora with GNOME.
I've been using it for over than 10 years in my main computer.
It simply works, it's nice, fresh packages, stable, GNOME is productivity champion (at least I know all the shortcuts, and how to tweak it to my daily use). I also know how to build and manipulate RPM packages, so it's pretty convenient.
- Debian + Xfce on the desktop, because it (mostly, see below) just works, it's snappy, reliable, and I don't need my apps being constantly updated (I have very simple needs and use cases)
- Mint + Cinnamon on the laptop, because it's still debian-based and because unlike Debian, Mint was able to connect my AirPods out of the box and I use them a lot when on the laptop... I also quickly learned to appreciate Cinnamon, I must say.
edit: typos
Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.
Debian and Linux Mint.
Debian for mission critical stuff like servers or things I don't want to futz with, like HTPCs, work machines, etc.
Mint for my gaming desktop because it's a bit newer on kernels and such.
Ubuntu for my servers, and Linux Mint for my Workstation.
I grew up using Debian-based distros, so it's what I'm comfortable with. I like how Mint seems to "just work" most of the time, especially with samba shares and usb peripherals.
Ubuntu server is primarily because it's incredibly easy to get support when you need it.
After quite a bit of agonizing, I eventually landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I chose a rolling release distro because on my desktop I want to be up-to-date. Having used Gentoo a long time ago, I didn't want a distro that takes effort to install and set up. openSUSE is somewhat popular with an active community and decent documentation in case I run in to issues. I also considered the fact it's based in Germany, because EU has at least some decent privacy laws. I was put off by the fact its backed by SUSE, but that's a two-edged sword.
Right now I'm content with Tumbleweed, but I'm keeping an eye on OpenMandriva Lx if I feel like switching.
For devices I need to be productive on, I have LMDE 6. It is rock solid being based on stable Debian, but with the niceties you expect from Mint.
For my gaming PC, I've got Bazzite on it and so far so good. Just used it for entertainment and gaming but if I were doing coding or app development I'd either have to adjust how I do that to suit an atomic distro, or I'd just use LMDE as I feel I have easier control of what I'm doing on there
Fedora.
I've tried them all but found it's the most reliable. It's upgrades are even more reliable than Macos and Windows.
Packages are very up to date but also well tested. Sometimes even newer than Arch for short periods.
The community is awesome.
I love Gnome, I've found it's more consistent than even MacOs in its design. And it has perfect keyboard shortcuts.
EndeavourOS. It's just easy to install and I basically use it like Arch
Arch.
Because of pacman. Building and writing packages is simple and dependencies are slim. Also packages are recent. And most likely "there is an AUR package for that". Also stack transitions arrive early, like pipewire.
Also let's not forget Arch Wiki, i bet you have read it as a non Arch user.
I administer Arch on 8 machines including gaming rigs, home server, web server, kids laptop, wifes gaming desktop, audio workstation and machine learning rig and a bunch of dev laptops. I also use ArchARM on RPi for some home automation.
Never considered switching since I switched from Ubuntu over 15 years ago.
I do have experience with several other rpm and apt based distros.
Debian. Because it's the best about "Just Works" (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.
BUT I'm also not a "numbers go up" geek. I don't give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that's just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).
If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.
(/soapbox)
My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don't play the latest games anyway, I'm a PatientGamer, and I don't do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.
It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don't have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).
It all works fine, but one day I'll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs
Different distros for different uses:
- Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
- Nobara for my main gaming PC.
- Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
- Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.
Arch. I had some tinkering with other distros in the past but wanted to configure pretty much everything. Running it with Cinnamon. I love pacman and AUR and have been able to not break it so far after a year of being installed which is a new record for me 😂
I have Bazzite on a laptop for the ease of use and general resistance to breakage, and Spiral Linux in a VM. The latter works flawlessly that way, like it was always meant to be in a VM.
Gentoo because I like it.
And portage.
Bazzite, I want my PC to just work and not require me to maintain it, on top of that I need it to be game-ready and have good color management for work related stuff.
Plain old Fedora.
I know the hurdles, i know what to expect, and I've never been surprised by it.
Immutable sounds nice, AUR sounds nice, NixOS sounds nice, but i am utterly confident in my current choice's reliability and comfortable with its idiosyncracies. Everything i want to do works very well.
If i had less time/energy or had to switch, Kubuntu would be my second choice. Less frequent updates and fewer creature comforts, but also very reliable.
Fedora, it has KDE spin and quite recent packages.
I use Ubuntu because it's the most popular and well-supported.
I'm going to be switching to Mint at some point because it's basically a community-run fork of Ubuntu and I don't trust Canonical anymore, but it's hard to justify installing my OS from scratch considering I've been using Ubuntu since 2017.
I recently ordered a Thinkpad T14 Gen1 with an R7 4750U, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD and you better believe I'm going to be putting Mint on that as soon as I get it.
I use LMDE. I use it because Mint has proved that it is worth using (for example: it provide easy way to install multimedia codec by only click "Install Multimedia Codec" in applications menu) and I want it to success.
Sorry if my english is bad
I use Bazzite so that it matches with my Steam Deck since SteamOS still isn't an actual distro to play with yet...
I recently installed OpenSuse, I have been using FreeBSD mostly, but have used linux through the years. I decided to go with an rpm based distro and I've always likes the chameleon mascot of Suse. I'm used to Debian based linux, so it's been a slight adjustment but it's been nice and smooth. I'm running Tumbleweed right now and all my Steam games work, as well as my 3d Windows applications via wine. It just works* I am too old and tired to spend time tweaking anymore.
Tuxedo OS. Before that, I was very happy with Fedora, and then I got a tuxedo laptop and tried their distro. Now, I keep using that because I started to enjoy KDE, and I really like their hardware support and how they test and maintain the distro.
Mint. I used to distro hop so much and just got tired of having to reload everything. That was the last one I had done prior to having no more time to switch. 😅 Plus, it just works and it's easy.
I've been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it's been amazing. I'm sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I've had.
And it's perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It's super impressive actually.
And distrobox (BoxBuddy comes installed) can be used to access the AUR or whatever if I feel the need to. Just fire up an Arch box, and have at it.
Debian and derived is my go up generally, stable and I like apt, great out of the box on every machine I've used and personally found pretty much everything I want to use or run has debian and Ubuntu explicitly called out in their setup documentation. I use Ubuntu server a lot for work, I'm comfortable with it and it's supported in every cloud environment I've touched. Debian on my laptop, bench machine, armbian on my 3d printers, Ubuntu server on my home server (though I kinda want to move that to debian too, just lazy and it works)
I've got arch on my desktop, could have probably gone for debian unstable, but figured I'd go for it. I use aura for package management. Linux is linux though, be real that I personally don't find much of a difference beyond package management.
I'm currently using bazzite due to its really solid out of the box support for gaming hardware and peripherals.
I'm really surprised everyone uses arch. I have three theories as to why:
- There actually aren't that many arch uses but when arch users have the opportunity they won't hesitate to say "BTW I use arch" were as others don't really bother.
- There are lots of arch users and everyone uses it because they want to be able to say "BTW I use arch"
- (Very unlikly) There are lots of arch users and it's because it's actually a good distro that people like.
(This is mostly a joke jsyk I'm sure arch is a great distro)
Xubuntu. Convenience of ubuntu, less cluttered UI.
Fedora KDE.
I was happily using Windows 10 until a few months ago, but needed to build a new PC. I got a glimpse of Windows 11 on a friend's laptop and didn't like it. So I asked my Linux-friend which distribution he would recommend to someone who wants to try Linux, but doesn't want to stray too far away from the windows look and feel.
Mint pleb on desktop because it's stable and just works, bazzite on steam deck for installing my own games.
- Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
- Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
- It's been around for many years and will be around for many more
- I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can't resist the software selection available on Debian
Mint on my ancient MacBook because I didn’t really know any better and it’s working just nice for me, and Asahi/Fedora on my M1 mini, because it’s the only option.
Debian Testing. It isn't "recommended" but it works fine.
Obviously if you want AUR you need an Arch variant, in which case just pick Arch.
Edit: I needed the why, it's up to date enough for me and I know apt well.
Mint for my desktop system. It just does exactly what I want it to, has good compatibility with software and Cinnamon is my DE of choice.
NixOS for my server, because being able to use one config repo and format for everything is so nice.
Because the logo is cool :)
I use NixOS for my desktop because
I hate myselfyou can configure everything without needing to edit a bunch of different config files that use different configuration languages.I use Arch btw for my Minecraft server because I am crazy.
Bazzite for my gaming pc, steam deck, and family members. It just works and they cant fuck it up. Even brother laser printers official drivers installed for my mom's comp. Gotta check the details of that cups exploit though. My gamig pc is also the fallback pc I expect to always have working and for servicing any others if problems come up.
Arch or arch based, except manjaro which has screwed me over too many times, for having easy access to pretty much any software that can run on linux, or just stuff that requires too many hoops to jump through to get working on atomic distros like bazzite.
Dietpi on my SBCs like the ones running klipper for my 3d printers
Debian for my servers, homeassistant etc, but I'm planning on checking out coreos.
Also alpine just because.
Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would've picked Debian or Mint.)
I don't love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can't be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.
I started with Slackware in the late nineties. Have been through Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch, Tumbleweed. These days I just can't be bothered, I just want to game and code and I prefer an out of the box well configured Ubuntu derivative, they also upgrade easily and have lots of application compatibility - mostly everyone provides .deb packages. I could also choose Fedora for these reasons.
So now on Pop!_OS 24.04. Pop is has a stable/lts base but still gets Mesa/Nvidia/Kernel updates on a regular basis. I use it mainly for gaming and Rust dev, writing some COSMIC applets as well.
COSMIC Alpha does still have problems with some games but not the games I play.
btw i use Arch, i use it because i found lot less effort it takes to do anything and it's stable, i do think there is some bug with QTcreator, gotta see it's os issue or QT issue.
I used to use Arch btw.
Now I am on Nix, I just love shell.nix files. I haven't spent much time on my configs yet, but once I finish them, they'll be super easy to set up again, thats cool.
Debian Testing (laptop, workstation and RPIs) since it works best for me. Tried Gentoo, Arch, OpenSUSE and several others. Also, I've been using FreeBSD for some time.
CachyOS. I use it because I am a fan of Arch based systems, rolling releases etc, but CachyOS is optimised for my generation of hardware, and has lots of good default configurations for various apps. They have a customised proton version, a good default fish profile etc.
tl;dr It's Arch, but optimised, and slightly more pre-configured out of the box.
MX Linux. It is Debian with setup and tools I really want but would be too lazy to prepare in one go. Love it as much as I love Debian.
I use Debian on my server and Arch on my gaming PC and laptop. Both distros offer minimal installs so I can just add the packages I need and avoid the ones I don't. Debian offers a nice stable base for running my services with minimal downtime and Arch has the most up to date packages for all the cutting edge features I want on desktop.
Arch, pacman is why
Arch. I need the AUR for certain applications, and the high degree of customizability and opportunity for learning appeal to me as a relatively new-ish Linux user (going on a few years now, most of that time having been on Arch).
Bazzite (with KDE). My desktop is mostly for discord and gaming - I don't have the kind of job that can be done from home. So when I get to use it I want it to just work, and look good.
I've used a bunch of distros and I've sort of become an atomic evangelist. Which put like that sounds like a great band name.
Void because I don't like gnome, primarily because it uses more than 50% of my resources, so I need something lightweight and have had bad experience with arch. I've had some hiccups with void but it wasn't something I couldn't fix. The downside is that it there are no package repository mirrors in my region, and sometimes I have to change mirrors to install packages, and some applications are not packages for void, so I have to look for open source alternatives that I have to compile.
Kubuntu 24.04 because it's a solid desktop and I have nothing against Snap. If it works then I don't care if it's a deb flat or snap. p PPAs were fun and exciting but I broke my system more than once with them back 10 years.
2 flavors of Fedora with KDE on it:
- Aurora-DX for some dev work on the side. Once you get used to distroboxing / devcontainers, it's rock-solid and mean dev environment (saw some minor issues with how certain GUI apps were scaled, but that's about it).
- Nobara for gaming (tried Bazzite and it'd prolly work for that purpose as well).
Unfortunately, had to keep Windows on one other machine (fuck you KORG for not providing anything working on Linux), but that's limited to being a glorified music player now 😄
A few for different use cases. NixOS on my wife's 14 year old laptop because it proved to handle the hardware the best, and she struggles with change so if that system dies the NixOS configuration can be redeployed identical to how she had it with no additional effort.
Debian on my old IOmega NAS.
OpenSUSE on my personal PC and Work computer, since it supports my proprietary CAD software, and nVidia releases a driver specifically for SUSE/OpenSUSE use.
Bazzite for personal stuff because it looked neat and just worked after installation with a small learning curve. Due to interia I went with bluefin on the work computer for the same reasons
Fedora Silverblue. It does what I need so I can get on with my life.
Currently, Arch btw. I was on Ubuntu in the 12* days, but arch wiki had the solutions to every problem I encountered, so naturally migrated. I want to switch to NixOS but ran into some issues getting my finicky nvidia/amdgpu laptop to work. I might go blendOS as a holdover, it seems like a good mix of the two. Also I have some issues with Manjaro (tried for a while) but pamac cli at least handles all of my aur and pacman needs properly.
Fedora.
Most of the others either booted to a black screen after install, or the track pad was somewhat uncontrollable when scrolling. Older Asus laptop with separate GPU.
mint cinnamon because on my system it has no major issues and everything is easy to configure. i don't have a lot of spare time so i can't spend hours or even days troubleshooting why something won't install or run. most other distros have been annoyingly buggy or too difficult to set up.
At work a mix of red hat, fedora, centos, and red hawk. At home mint debian spin. It just works and games run great. I don't have time to deal with the red hat crap if i'm not getting paid.
NixOS & OpenWRT are my two. NixOS’s Nix language as declarative config is such a great tool for setting up & maintaining a machines for the long-term that despite the initial learning curve has paid off in the long run (Guix or a Nix successor should also be in the same category). OpenWRT is the purpose-built tool it is for having an OS for a router with low overhead & a UI that can be easier to understand the config when networking isn’t something you do on the regular.
Manjaro on main pc and phone. Proxmox (debian) on server
Gentoo for anything my I use a mouse with, Arch for everything else. I like Gentoo for the customization. For things where I want to run a service, Arch is my go to as it keeps working without drama. Anything complicated, Gentoo is better.
I use Fedora on my desktop, and mint on my laptop (this one is going to get wiped soon for Fedora as well). I tried manjaro but it just wasn't for me. I installed it on the recommendation of my friend, and I like it a lot. Except for it not staying asleep because a part on the motherboard kept sending a wake command -__- . But a CMD fixed that issue.
im a notorious distro hopper lmao, right now i am using manjaro for the first time. previously i was using Pop OS where i had plasma installed for the DE rather than using cosmic or whatev they call it... but it seemed like there were a few issues between Pop and plasma, so i hopped to manjaro
first time using a distro that uses pacman so there are a few growing pains for me
Began moving all my hardware to Linux this year since none of them will run win11 without fk-about-ing - and I just don't want to. So my server, media box and laptop are all cut over, only my main desktop left on windows a bit longer but it's goose is cooked too.
I've tried dozens of distros over the years but I've settled on Fedora KDE.
The why:
- Skipping x11 and head straight into Wayland so I don't have to worry about that in the future.
- I wanted something more up to date than debian-based and less cutting edge then Arch-based.
- Stability and support of being in the RHEL family
- Flatpaks
- Tried to get on with gnome to get away from the 'start menu' paradigm but ended up getting on with kde better.
Debian. Used to use others but realized they all just added crap I didn't want, or could add myself with a simple script.
I was a Slackware then Fedora, then Ubuntu as my daily drivers (whipe trying other distros, or Kali for specific purposes) before settling here.
Been using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment for a few years now. Does everything I need it to.
Fedora 41 KDE at home on my daily driver laptop and desktop.
Antix on my dell mini netbook.
Multi machine VMs I manage at work run on red hat enterprise with no DE or WM.
My web app servers at work run Ubuntu server 24 LTS with no DE or WM.
My home lab runs on fedora 41 server, no DE or WM.
Kubuntu, because it's the most solid distro I've used that meets my needs.
Lubuntu
My first foray into unix-likes was oprnbsd with fluxbox. I eventually moved to openbox. Lubuntu with lxqt gives a nice simple openbox experience with a menu and stuff. I customize it to have openbox present the mouse menu instead of the whole pcmanfm desktop thing.
Fedora 41 KDE Plasma
For the simple, shallow reason it looks great and feels snappy.
Personal rabble:
spoiler
I would say that it does not feel as "set and forget" as Mint, but I enjoy the feel of of environment.
I am pretty new at Linux in general - only have experience with a Mint environment before.
I did have some issues with Fedora - mostly audio problems in Steam games and it can feel slightly more intimidating to work with ( compared to Mint) but after digging into various help threads and trying stuff( responsibly) I did reach a point where I reached a satisfied conclusion - even if I am not sure what exactly I did that solved the problem
What distro do you use
I daily drive secureblue.
and why?
Long story short; I love me some security. Unfortunately, My device is far from ideal for running Qubes OS. From within the remaining options, secureblue comes out on top for me.
Primarily I use Arch on my desktop (and by proxy, my Steam Deck which runs SteamOS), which is what I've landed on after a ton of distro hopping. The idea of Atomic distros catches my eyes, but for me in its present state there are too many steps needed in order to make deeper changes (for example, installing a kernel module) - but I quite like SteamOS on my Deck since I know it will always be in a "consistent" state, for example.
On servers I run a mix of Rocky Linux and Debian.
I use TuxedoOS. I wanted something that kept up with the latest KDE updates which ran a cleaned up version of Ubuntu... that's TuxedoOS to a T. I had looked at other options like Kubuntu or just installing KDE over something like PopOS, but TuxedoOS was the most stable and up to date of those options in my testing.
That said, I have run into innumerable problems on it due to apt repos that it doesn't include which come standard on Ubuntu.
Arch, cause I set it up to my liking once out of curiosity when I was procrastinating, wrote a script that automates https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance and now am too lazy to switch to something else.
Especially since maintenance involves typing Update.sh once a week or so, and nothing else.I like Manjaro
- I like it
- Its user friendly if you don't want to spend a month fiddling with it
- Feels comfy and relatively lightweight
- If you are living on the edge of latest and greatest versions, it can be a pain to wait for official repos to be updated. Though I only noticed this problem with Discord desktop app, however since I realised that it spies on every process that runs and you cannot turn that feature off. Uninstalled. Problem gone. Happy me.
Fedora. I like the rolling release but with large updates separated into point releases, as well as the ability to perform offline updates. I also like the preinstalled security stuff
I started with mint cinnamon and then tried out bazzite and nobara but they both gave me issues so I'm back to mint because it really does "just work"
My server is running mint currently, but I'm going to switch to fedora at some point soon. Mostly because I have to deal with RHEL at work and I'd like to better familiarize myself with it.
Mint, first one I tried, and works just fine. It's xfce with i3wm.
Arch with KDE on ThinkPad T460s (studying and bullshit pc).
Nobara with i3wm on home studio/gaming desktop. Switching to Arch on it one day but CBA at the moment.
Honestly which distro I use isn't all that important to me these days so long as I'm getting decently new kernel updates. Depending on my use case that's not even important. Used Debian LTS on a home media center for probably 8 years.
elementary! I like it, been using it since ~2018, I like its style and I don’t mind reinstalling for major updates. They’re pretty seldom if you’re on the LTS branch anyway
Artix because I love Arch and the AUR but networkd kept causing my home network to act like the mad hatter's tea party with IP assignment.
Elementary OS.
I really like the focus on delivering a solid, intuitive and snappy desktop environment. It is absolutely what I recommend to newbies, who are looking for a Windows or macOS replacement.
Tuxedo OS. Same idea as smth like mint or PopOs but (imo) done much better. It also has rolling release for some stuff (like the DE) and non-rolling for other stuff (not even sure what bc I don't really look in detail). It also uses KDE plasma my favorite (and imo the best) DE. It's got pretty good app availability in terms of official packages because it is based on Ubuntu LTS (now 24.04). There are a couple things that are vestigial on most computers bc it was made for tuxedo computers but these have no negative effect on other devices in my experience.
Gentoo on my home computer. Started way back in the day when you had to recompile source RPMs on RPM-based distros to get CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) language support. Debian language support was excellent, but I didn't enjoy always being 5 package versions behind, especially as fast as some software was being developed.
CJK isn't an issue anywhere anymore, but I stay on Gentoo because it has all the packages I want, and it doesn't force systemd on me.
Will be moving away from Ubuntu on my work computer because of all the foolishness with 'is it deb or is it snap?'. Not sure what I'll go to.
Kubuntu on my desktop, I prefer KDE as a DE and I'm used to the Debian ecosystem.
Linux Mint on my relatively low powered laptop that I rarely use.
Debian stable on my media server.
Alpine Linux. It's pretty lightweight (uses ~250MiB on idle with sway), is easy to install and is super stable. My only criticism is that there is quite a lot of software not available in the repos, but this is mainly fixed by flatpaks.
Nix because I have a bad memory and hate doing things more than once
NixOS because all the other ones differ about as much as Windows 10 from Windows 11. Guix doesn't count.