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)
I recently switched my laptop to Garuda, it's an Arch based gaming distro. It seems to mostly work right out of the box, but I did have to tweak a few steam games to force them to use my dedicated graphics.
I guess I could go in and force steam itself to use the graphics card via env... But I only have a handful of large games at the moment. It's just as easy to set the requirement per game right now.
I’m about ready to hop back in and daily drive Linux again after the nightmare that was attempting debian w/KDE plasma and Wayland. I have a Nvidia GPU on my laptop and for some reason I did not have luck at all after moderate success daily driving opensuse tumbleweed and kubuntu for a while.
I’m admittedly looking to onboard myself to the gnome workflow and leave the comfort of the windows style desktop environment experience. Gnome seems a bit more polished and stable than KDE plasma but it’s interface isn’t intuitive to me yet.
Ideally I’ll be using Debian or Arch when the time comes for me to dive back into desktop Linux.
KDE fixed a lot of Wayland bugs over the last months and especially with the upcoming launch of Plasma 6.0, so I’d give it a try again now or in half a year.
Nvidia also constantly fixes the problems with their Wayland support so it’s only getting better. Debian doesn’t have recent enough packages to have a good KDE Wayland experience.
Gnome Wayland doesn’t support features like vrr/adaptive sync or tearing, so it isn’t a good gaming experience. Otherwise it’s great.
Yeah I imagine the struggles I had with Debian had something to do with enabling proprietary drivers and firmware and leveraging those. Before getting those drivers, the default nouveau drivers were awful, the performance was comically bad.
I’m also not a Linux power user though, so for sure any or all of the above could be meatware issues.
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.
I tried nix actually. Personally, I think it would make a great server os, but I do not enjoy it as a daily driver. I didn’t like the fact that I was forced to install everything through nix and couldn’t compile software from source.
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.
I installed Linux and the feeling of freedom and privacy hit me so hard that I immediately began committing crimes, knowing that the FBI could never track me. Piracy, sexual assault, trademark infringement, petty larceny, tax fraud, you name it. I also own several fully automatic firearms even though I live in the state of California, but it doesn’t matter. Ever since I removed Windows 10 from my computer and replaced it with Arch Linux, and began using a PinePhone as my daily driver phone, police can’t even stop me in traffic. Windows may have a lot of video games, but the benefits of Linux should not be understated.
Most services just need the init system to start, stop and monitor them. There’s no special integration needed for each of them beyond running a command, monitoring the PID, and killing the PID when it’s time to stop.
If you mean the special integration of docker and podman with systemd, first of all that’s only required in rootless mode and not everybody runs rootless (most users probably run root docker). In rootless mode you have to manage each container individually as if it were a standalone service instead of just managing docker. Basically you have to integrate each container into the init system, whatever that is. There are some tools that make it easier to with podman+systemd because they write the systemd units for you but you can do it with any init system. The distro mostly doesn’t care because you have to do the work not them.
I’m rocking two dailys right now. Tumbleweed and Nixos. I jabe tumbleweed on my work laptop as well as one laptop at home. Rock solid go to that I trust for all the things. I started using nix on a number of other machines at home a few months back, and I’m really really enjoying it!!
Accidentally wipes out Mint last week, but have been meaning to try out Fedora 39 Plasma. So far, I love it. I have been really busy recently, but it has been a great system so far. My SteamDeck really made me fall in love with Plasma.
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