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 👍
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.
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.
Fedora Silverblue. But when switching I had to wrap my head around the differences in the workflow of doing things. Once youre past that it’s rock solid and had no issues so far.
when switching I had to wrap my head around the differences in the workflow of doing things. Once youre past that it’s rock solid and had no issues so far.
This is the case with every distro nowadays.
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.
Fedora Workstation. Couldn’t be happier.
A Chevy volt. Turns out gm figured out that a PHEV is a great idea 12 years ago
Debian Sid, mostly for ideological reasons.
I assume you mean Debian for ideology, not Sid, unless you have strong feelings about breaking toys
but is that because of the community nature of Debian, or because default it’s free software only? Guessing the former, since there are other options for the latter
Yes, it’s the community nature. I just love how there is no corporation behind it.
Some people also like super stable
PopOS on gaming PC Fedora Silverblue on daily PC Ubuntu Server LTS for small servers Ubuntu Desktop LTS for digital signage
What’s fedora like to use? I dont see it mentioned as much as Debian or Arch.
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 use Arch BTW…
Joking aside I use Arch on my desktop, Raspbian on RPi1, Debian on homeserver and VMs.
Gentoo on desktop, gentoo on Rock64, gentoo on Allwinner A10 device, gentoo on Powerbook G4(don’t ask why I have it). Ah, and OpenWRT on router.
Nixos for me! But my dark secret is that I also have an Ubuntu partition those things that I can’t get working.
After years of Manjaro (and I still use it on most of my computers), I’m trying out Nobara KDE to see how it keeps up for gaming. It has a number of optimizations that Glorious Eggroll has compiled and seems pretty fast compared to Manjaro on the same hardware. I imagine I could do all the changes on Manjaro, but I also wanted to see how Fedora runs these days, it’s been a long time since I used it on the daily.
So far, so good.
i’m on manjaro kde, will switch soon to nixos if i understand how it all works :)
otherwise arch
Nobara these days. It’s based on Fedora 38.
I’m using Mint, but I’ve avoided using flatpaks (generally downloading DEB packages directly, or adding ppa sources). It’s worked pretty well so far.
I do have a handful of AppImages, but they’re a bit easier to work with.
Why avoid using Flatpaks if you don’t mind me asking
Two reasons: they’re big, and they’re sandboxed.
I was on a 5Mbit connection until recently, so a lot of flatpaks being 1GB+ was frustrating (especially when their native packages were <100MB). And I was using a 250GB SSD, which filled up rather quickly.
And it turns out I wasn’t a fan of the sandboxing aspect. In theory it should be a good thing, but turned out to be frustrating.
Thanks for the answer, I bever relized that they were larger
