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.
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.
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Username tells me this is a trap
The worst crime here is using Arch.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Fedora Workstation. Couldn’t be happier.
Same, it’s a “it just works” distro.
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
Debian with KDE works great for my needs.
Popos on the Framework laptop. It’s pretty good so far.
Never omit the space
I use Arch BTW…
Joking aside I use Arch on my desktop, Raspbian on RPi1, Debian on homeserver and VMs.
I have 2 PCs running Arch currently. My SBC is running Ubuntu but that is just a print service for my 3d printer. I have a few Ubuntu & Fedora vns for testing and self study
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.
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.).
