If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?
Been using Linux for over a decade, and last few years Ubuntu (on desktops/laptops), plus Debian on servers, but been looking to switch to something less “Canonical”-y for a long time (since the Amazon search fiasco, pretty much).
Appreciate recommendations or just an interesting discussion about people’s experiences, there are no wrong answers.
Edit: Thanks for the lots of interesting answers and discussions. I will try a few of the suggestions in a VM.
I’ve been fully daily driving Linux for about 15 years now, and for me it’s almost all Arch now.
I started out distro-hopping between Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Slack, etc, but once I found Arch (and spent two weeks getting it installed, booted, and customized exactly to my liking) I was finally at home.
I know the meme. I’m not here to claim superiority, or diminish the value of other perfectly good distros. I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.
What I love about Arch is the lack of bloat. You get precisely what you ask for, no more, no less. You can legitimately run htop and recognize literally every program, and know if something’s wrong immediately.
Every one of my Arch boxes is a perfect little snowflake, suited to exactly the task(s) I built it for. And if there was anything I had to learn or configure along the way? That’s just the journey, man.
I have been eyeballing NixOS though…
I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.
“You’re cool, you’re cool, screw you tho , you’re cool…” XD
Glad someone caught that XD
Same, with one exception I don’t really like Debian. Ubuntu, I’m surprised it’s still around. I wonder who uses it, especially on a server.
I’m eyeballing NixOS. And Gentoo too. And I’m looking for excuse to try FreeBSD.
You’re surprised the most popular desktop distro is still around?
I’m surprised this shite is the most popular distro, let’s start with that.
Really? They did a ton of work to make Linux accessible to the masses, have an active and helpful community to help out if you get stuck, works really well out of the box on most hardware and you’re pretty much guaranteed there’s going to be a compatible deb available for it if you’re looking for software outside normal repos. Seems like a no brainer tbh.
You’re correct, if that’s true. I wasn’t following them since almost twenty years ago. They were great at the time, all these free CDs you could get, I’ve ordered some as a kid and they really arrived, that was magic. I have some gratitude for that.
What I don’t like is quite a number of very questionable decisions they made over these years after. That’s why I am surprised someone thinks they are a great distro. You want Deb, why not go with Debian? Especially on a server. I truly have no idea who are the people who install Ubuntu on a server.
In my experience, Fedora just works. And hence, I recommend it to everyone. Ubuntu, not. Snap alone made me not considering it ever again.
None of which makes the distro shite. The things I remember them getting shit for are:
Unity/mir
Upstart
Snaps
Amazon ads
Advertising their premium version.
Of all of those the Amazon thing is the only one I have a strong objection to. The rest I can’t say I’ve even particularly noticed the changes if I’m honest and most other Ubuntu users probably haven’t either. They seem to get a lot of crap for “doing their own thing all the time” which seems odd coming from the Linux community.
I came to Ubuntu initially because it was the new hotness, I’ve never really had an issue with it functionally in 12 years or so, so no real need to change.
Why not deb? Why not any number of other distros? I do run deb on my NAS as it goes and I’m not trying to stan for Ubuntu (honestly) but it gets a lot of undeserved hate. It’s not a super exciting distro or anything but it tends to work fine for me.
Why don’t you like Debian?
I’m not old enough to appreciate its obsolescence. It broke on me so many times, basically every single major update on various machines. Arch Linux never broke on me, and I still run my very first installation. Basically on every single machine. Had no need to reinstall anything. I wasn’t deliberately breaking Debian even, never introduced any unusual repositories, used the default flavour of the desktop environment I chose from the installer. Didn’t change defaults too much. Yet every upgrade I did, something was wrong, it simply broke, and the easiest was to simply reinstall than attempting to fix anything. Arch, broke just a few times, most of which was either me doing something, and I knew that was me, or it was on the main page of the distro, in their news, the breaking changes announcement, plus the steps to mitigate them.
I see no point in using Debian, at least for me personally. I use its flavours, DietPi and Armbian on the SBCs, as there’s no Arch, and I don’t really like Arch ARM. Also, Debian’s website yells unprofessionalism, and it’s a bit difficult to tolerate. And the cherry on top, each time I’m about to download it, I have to hunt that BitTorrent link. I know it’s less than a gigabyte, and I could just download it as is from the website. But it’s a matter of principle, if I can download via BitTorrent protocol, I’d do that. Less pressure on the servers, easier and faster for me. Arch, you don’t have to hunt that link. Debian isn’t simple enough for me, I don’t understand its ideas and approach. Having obsolete everything because of stability … how do you know the updated versions are worse, huh? I don’t know, perhaps Sid is stable too, but my bet it’s less stable than Arch.
And the names, I personally dislike them. You choose a random Pixar movie and stick to that. Why? Even Ubuntu’s animals are just so much better. To me that’s as weird as naming your software as Gimp, or having fun with these GNU is not UNIX and other recursive abbreviations. It may be fun when you’re a teenager, or a part of some community, but I just don’t like it either.
I just don’t feel like I’m the part of this community. I’ve been around Debian for like two decades, and never grew liking it. Not my cup of tea.
NixOS so I can keep my config in git. I have a single nix config for all my machines (desktop, laptop and server) so I can share configuration between them. I use it to configure both my system and my user config, my dotfiles, with home-manager. Even my neovim config is in nix thanks to nixvim.
I don’t think I could go back now. It can be a bit of a pain from time to time and the learning curve is steep but it has so many advantages. Being able to rollback between config versions (called generations), having a consistent config between my machines, having it all in version control… The repo have so many packages and when there is a module it’s really easy to add a service. Writing new packages (derivations) and modules is also not that hard. It can be as simple as calling nix-init.
Had my main ssd fail on me a few month back and it was very simple to just replay the config and just get everything working as before. I only had to do the partitioning by hand (it can be done by nix but I’ve not gotten around to it yet). That’s why I only backup data and home partitions, not system partitions.
I was messing with the NixOS system config in weird ways and accidentally bricked it a few times, but I just booted into a previous configuration and fixed it. Whereas with Arch you would be fucked and have to pull out a rescue disk.
The answer is Debian like crabs on a long enough timeline it will eventually become Debian. - Linux user for 27 years
That’s how it should work, I think. All the downstream distros do their crazy experiments, the community identifies what it likes and doesn’t like, and what it likes makes its way upstream to spawn. The further upstream it gets, the wider its influence is felt. Debian is what makes it that far upstream.
I used a linux desktop for a few years back in 08-09, started on ubuntu then got on the Gentooooooooooo bandwagon. (Went back to Windows after this due to college + games, naturally)
Ever since then, I just use stable LTS versions of either debian or ubuntu for server applications. Recently changed back to Linux on desktop and went with CachyOS, it’s been super solid.
I have had a look at CachyOS kernel patches before, I don’t game but seems like they have a good team.
I’m daily driving it and it’s pretty nice. I was on fedora before and mint before that.
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I’ve tried many distros over a 20 year period. I’m happy with CachyOS.
Debian.
It’s pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it’s got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it’s got nonfree firmware on the disc, they’ve really upped their game.
(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It’s not for the faint of heart though.)
– Frost
Debian
Arch on my personal machines, Debian on my servers.
Same. This is the profile of the Lemmy user I think.
Arch, btw
Been daily driving Arch on my laptops for the last 10 years. It’s been great. Getting the latest software has been especially handy for laptops, where the kernel sometimes needs time to catch up to the latest hardware.
I ran Guix for a few months when I had some extra time and I liked it, but it was very different and not all software I needed ran on it (or ran well). I ended up going back to Arch, but I brought Guix with me, as a package manager.
I also ended up trying Fedora for the first time (ok, I was unemployed) recently and was pleasantly surprised. Turns out Fedora is pretty close to how I configure Arch. And it’s got some extra polish that was neat. I ended up installing Fedora Silverblue for my parents 6-8 months ago and it’s been working out great for them.
Anyway, Arch has been my reliable companion for the last 10 years.
Debian. For decades.
My first installation was slack and from then until now has been a mix of more things than I care to list, but includes things like freebsd on a DEC multia, a sparcstation pizza box with a 2.6ish kernel maybe?, along with things like Ubuntu, suse, fedora, centos, gentoo, ive built from scratch, I ever remember the days of configuring x with fvwm95 because I thought it would be easier for my parents.
I always go back to Debian. Though I’m happy with arch when I want something ‘current’.
If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?
I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I’ve been trending toward Debian for everything.
Debian mostly. I appreciate the democratic, non corporate governance, the classic Free Software ethos, the stability, and their not going blindly along with upstream defaults (e.g. telemetry).
My server runs OpenBSD because I find it more tightly designed, and simpler. Laptop Fedora because the hardware wasn’t originally well supported by Debian stable.
Ive swapped around but for now im good on Arch, I like the AUR too much and tbh it does what I need (other distros are great and I installed Debian on my families computers but for me I use Arch).
People are going to hate me for this, but here goes…
I’m using Ubuntu.
Ubuntu Studio, to be precise.
How do you like it? I’ve seen it around but never installed it to play with it. Is it helpful in your creative endeavors?
Been working fine for me.
Honestly, though, haven’t noticed any real difference between Ubuntu Studio and vanilla Kubuntu, except that it came pre-installed with a few of the things I would have installed anyway.
