First, thanks for reading and commenting.
I would appreciate any\all feedback from all of you, if there are recommendations for a stable, consistent setup - both hardware and OS. Or comments that I am asking for something unrealistic. Either a desktop or a laptop connected to a docking station.
a. I would like to suspend the machine at night and continue working in the morning.
b. To be able to support three monitors.
c. VM app to test stuff - virt network to test varied apps\code on different clients and servers.
d. Libre Office to create docs and presentations.
e. LTS.
Currently using a System 76 laptop w\ Pop OS and a docking station. The first laptop was warrantied to poor construction (keyboard and bezel weren’t flush, they separated and you could see the motherboard…) and now the second one is having the same issue - let alone sporadically working with suspend or the docking station (will have to reconnect the docking station, most times rebooting).
I’ve distro hopped for years, so I would consider myself a beginner\intermediate user. I am more than willing to pay\donate for consistency, and right now that leans towards MS and Windows (sigh).
What are corporate users using? I think that is my standard, as I’ve worked at places that were primarily windows shops, And it is pretty easy to come in in the morning and resume from yesterday. “RH for workstations” ?
Thank you!!
+1 for Debian, if you just want a stable, reliable system and don’t care about the latest and greatest features there is no better choice
Debian and Fedora, Debian and Fedora. That is a lot of the recommendations I’ve gotten.
Fedora Atomic for the win, it’s been my one and only ever since I first used it.
I love it. Fedora atomic is amazing.
Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.
As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I’m not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.
ooo, I went to the Framework website. When I get a some ‘disposable’ cash, I will get a framework lappy.
Second the NUC suggestion. I’ve got a 10th gen i7 model that I use primarily as a media server. It draws <6W at idle so it runs 24/7 and barely makes a blip on my electricity bill. It’s been rebooted exactly twice so far this year after switching from Windows 10 to Arch (BTW), once after a planned upgrade and a second time unexpectedly when my cheap UPS’s battery died. It works fine with the two docking stations I’ve tried and two different USB-C displays. I think my model might need a small adapter to support a third monitor but I’m not sure that’s the case with newer generations, though you may have to look beyond the Intel-branded hardware if you do want a more recent edition since they sold the brand to ASUS.
Another vote for Fedora. I’m a docker user so I find regular ol Fedora Workstation 40 to be a damn near perfect Linux distribution
Seems to be the consensus - Fedora with Docker.
For the OS: Debian
Hardware: a modern thinkpad
What are corporate users using?
Windows on PCs, Linux is used mostly only on servers (RedHat/SuSe), hardware brands are usually HP, Dell and Lenovo.
I think that is my standard
Why? Do you expect companies to ask you to use your own PC for work instead of providing the tools you need? Be wary of those who do, using whatever personal PC for company work can lead to data breaches and that’s a very serious problem.
Sorry, I should have elaborated when asking about ‘corporate users’. I was thinking what does Red Hat or Ubuntu or System 76 employees use? and I thought that was a ‘standard’ that I just didn’t know about that I would adopt.
As for companies asking to use your own pc - I’ve run into it a couple of times now since working from home/remote, that companies will ask you to sign in to some cloud apps to start onboarding before they send you hardware. Also, contracting / small gigs on the side!
I’d say that if you want a stable, “just works” experience, try fedora. It’s the only distro I’ve had truly 0 issues or complications with…
I’ve always liked Fedora. I think I messed up in the past by trying to ‘tinker’ with different WMs instead of just doing my work. My next install will mostly be Fedora.
If you wanna try rhel they let you install to a handful of machines for free.
I was mostly using Fedora desktop with CentOS servers many years ago. Though, will soon spin up Fedora again.
For hardware stability you should check out:
Search for the Distro or Laptop you want and chrck the user reports for the other factors. I noticed that some Laptops work better with some distros than others so lock the factor that is more important to you.
For distro stability, something others have not mentioned:
Zorin OS has a pay once option where allegedly everything just works. Maybe thats interesting to consider as an option.
nixos is great - as long as the software you need is in nixpkgs, and it usually is. reinstallation is almost never necessary. You can switch your system to the unstable channel, and if you get tired of that, back to stable again, no problem. Experiment with software and remove it without a trace left in your system. If you mess up your config, you can roll back to the previous config in the bootup menu. Your system config is in a text file which you can put into source control if you wish, which allows you to replicate your config onto another machine, or revert to what you had 6 months ago, etc.
Thank you for the rec. I will have to try nix when i get some time.
I don’t think it applies here, but I’d like to tell you my perspective in case you find it interesting anyway.
I am a developer and I often need relatively new versions of everything dev related.
Contrary to popular belief - I had the best experience in regards to stability with archlinux. I have it installed both on a PC (when I need to do some Blender or heavy Photoshop work) and on a thin and light Laptop (for a flexible work space and stuff on the go) - and I use both about 50/50 of the time.
To be fair, I am knoledgable in the Linux user libs/apps space and it took a lot of knowledge to set everything up in a reliable way just the way I want and need it. I’d say arch is extremely customizabe and there exists a narrow path where you can make it pretty reliable, but there are also many sidepaths which can be unreliable and break often.
After setting it up though, my maintenance times for archlinux were significantly lower than each of the following
- Windows (Going to ~30 different websites weekly to check for new releases and manually downloading and installing them)
- Mac (homebrew constantly breaking dependencies)
- Debian/Ubuntu (which I was upgrading to the newest release every 6 months and it was a PAIN)
But also take this with a grain of salt, because my so. also has a pretty similar arch linux setup on similar hardware and they have more issues than I do and we don’t really know why :D
Thank you for the reply. Many moons ago I tried to spin up a Arch lappy, but failed. I haven’t tried since (complaints about no free time and such), but I kinda took that fail that I always wanted to go back and try again!
There is
archinstallnow, which is pretty easy to use and usually just works. I recently used it again and it took me about an hour from start to fully installed, running arch with all the packages I need.If you try again, make sure to use btrfs filesystem and set up snapper and bootable snapshots. That way you can always recover from a fuckup in a minute.
Windows 10, duh 🙄
I feel like you are being a little snarky, but well given because of my post. I will admit I had to spin up Win 10 to finish up some projects as I have so little free time lately.
workstation
fedora… workstation?
