What’s your go-to Linux distro? I’m curious what people actually use day-to-day and why they stick with it.
- Why you choose it?
- Running for how long?
- Which DE?
- Dual booting it with windows or pure linux?
Archlinux
Why you choose it?
It and its derivatives are very popular (better and broader software support), the wiki is rich and detailed, the AUR is useful for managing niche software.
Running for how long?
Got a new PC last year, so technically only a year. My work computer had an arch install running for 5 years without issues until I was forced to switch.
Which DE?
KDE. Popular, just works for most stuff, did 0 customization.
Dual booting it with windows or pure linux?
Dual-booting W11. Completely disabled updates. W11 partitions are on the right side so that I can easily absorb the space into my linux install if I decide to nuke it at some point. The only things it has installed on it is Firefox, Discord, and League of Legends.
Mint w/cinnamon most of the time.
Depending on how you determine it, since win10 launched.
Pure Linux where feasible, though I have some niche shit I dual bopt for on my laptop, and I have a media pc that still runs win7 because I’m fucking savage like that.
Mint! It’s easy and I’m about as techy as a coloring book. Match made in heaven.
mint as well, with Cinnamon Desktop! easiest to switch to from Windows.
A bunch.
Debian for servers.
Arch for my main PC
Bazzite for my console-like living room PC
KDE Neon for Plasma Bigscreen - testing it on a mini PC
Arch Linux
- I chose it because I got sick of Ubuntu lagging behind in package updates, and because the pacman package manager just made so much sense to me. It was so simplistic and creating your own packages was just writing some basic bash. I also wanted a system that was truly mine, where I could pick exactly what I wanted to have installed and nothing more. (This aspect has levels to it, of course, but for me it’s enough control.)
- I’ve been using it for about 11–12 years now.
- I was using i3 for the longest time. Then I briefly tried sway, Hyprland, and many various other, more obscure window managers, until finally landing on Niri, and Noctalia Shell. I had a mind to write something like Noctalia myself, but turns out people already did.
- Not dual booting since about 2020 or so. Gaming has really come a long way in recent years.
I really should put my Windows M.2 in and copy over the data so I can use the drive for something useful.
- Fedora.
I had tried a few times to switch to other, Debian-flavour, distros in the past, from Windows, but always seemed to run into annoying issues that would send me back. Gaming was a consideration at the time, too. Windows eventually went too far into surveillance-OS for me to tolerate anymore and so I tried Nobara, which has been great and is actually still on the main PC because I’m too lazy to change it to Fedora. I also feel like having RHEL downstream is a good thing; might as well learn the distro where the most enterprise work is. My other computers all run Fedora now.
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3 years
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KDE Plasma, when I need a DE. Love it.
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Linux. Only my wife uses Windows and that was for a game she doesn’t play anymore… I wonder if I can get her to switch back again.
Yeah man, get your wife on board again!
Bazzite vor Garuda. I use bazzite on my and my kid’s gaming PCs, and my wife’s older PC for everyday use has garuda with xfce.
Bazzite is very low maintaince, and just works for gaming. I also have a local LLM agent on it, which works well of you know how to use containers, etc.
Garuda is more flexible and easier on the hardware, so it’s great for running just about anything you need, and easier for a non-Linux person to update, etc.
Solid choice.
But, In my case it’s the opposite. Garuda every time have a network issue and also it’s flashy design is very annoying for daily use.
Endeavour. Was on Manjaro and it was mostly great. Switched to that from Ubuntu about a decade ago because of poor GPU driver support. Using XFCE. Love the rolling release and the AUR. Got no reason to dual boot. Why would I want a worst OS eating disk space?
I love seeing more people ditched Windows and actually daily drive Linux! When did you make the switch? I ditched Windows instantly right after the first boot on my new laptop back in March.
- Had an old laptop that want working well. Bought a new one and switched the old one to Linux. Used it for 5 or so more years.
Then when I bought my gaming PC I switched the new laptop to Linux, that was 2017.
And three years ago I finally switched the desktop to Linux as well.
Debian.
I would like to know why you chose it and using it how long. Are you a pure linux user or dual booting with windows ?
Debian 4 was when? 20 years ago, I suppose. I use Debian since then.
Haven’t touch Windows since… 8? What was the version where they drastically changed the UI?
Why Debian? 20 years ago we had Red Hat (corpo-shmorpo something it was even then) and Debian. Plus some experimental heavy-maintenance demanding ones like Gentoo. I’m not a sysadmin, I just needed an OS to run programs. So Debian was the only option. Never had any reason to even think to move to another distro.Using with KDE and ext4? In that time KDE was the default DE, right?
I used Gnome 2. I still use MATE (fork of Gnome 2) as Gnome 3 was a disaster to my aesthetic taste.
nixos
one config to rule all my devices. basically i have to change the config on one device, sync it to the others, and zhey will all end up with the same packages and configs
2.5 years
niri wm
no
Never tried NixOS but heard alot. Is it more like an immutable distro ?
How is the stability and usability ?
it is an immutable distro, where basically the package manager nix scans the config, checks if there are errors in it, tries to build all tbe packages and if one fails, ut just stops and rolls back to the previous working system
therefor it is very very stable, as breaking updates are basically not possible.
usability is basically just understanding the basic syntax of the config, as there is no graphical pavkage manager (there are community made ones, but they are quite limited)
for just basic package management and configuration it is mostly copy paste, only when installing custom packages you have to get into how nix works.
basically, anyone who manage the config for a window manager can also manage basic nix.
- Arch
- 8+ years (edit time. Apparently it flew)
- KDE
- No windows. Pure penguin
Debian for server. Cachyos on desktop and laptop. Laptop was the test, using it on desktop with steam big picture mode hooked up to the TV for gaming.
I went Mint on the desktop when windows 10 reached EoL. Eventually switching to cachyos when I moved my servers to a mini Debian PC. I do have windows on a dual boot for now, but only for VR, have a rift-s, or to test a game to see if it runs better. Also need it to update Xbox controller. Forza horizon ran like shit in Linux when it launched. But I’d say I’m probably 98% all Linux now.
Ubuntu on my servers for years and KDE neon daily driver for the past 8 months. I installed neon to better be able to do remote support for a friend that was running it and have just left it as it’s quite nice Plasma is very friendly and pretty. Windows can f**k off.
KDE Neon is a good choice. But I saw community and some Linux YouTubers recommend it less often because a combination of the LTS kernel with the latest KDE updates can cause dependency issues and update breakage.
I haven’t had a single issue yet 🤞🏻
