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’ve never tried NixOS, but it looks really promising.
I usually use Fedora or OpenSUSE, which have good software availability (unfortunately not as good as the AUR). Fedora provides selinux by default, and has profiles for basically everything. SUSE uses AppArmor, but Arch doesn’t provide convenient configuration for either, and only supports x86_64 (which is why I switched away from it).
In my case it was because Ubuntu broke on me for whatever reason (and the threat of snap packages looming).
I did not feel like putting anymore effort into getting the computer back to working so I just switched to something not Ubuntuoid at semi random to anything that promised an easy installation.
A year later and it’s still working. I’ll notify you when it breaks so you can tell me “I told you so”.
me too, but i will switch to arch or nix soon. not because it broke, just to have a frash start. after 3+ years i have a shit load of stuff i don’t really need anymore
I’ve been running Fedora for years. I tried out Arch and OpenSUSE a bit this year just to see if I was missing anything, and went right back to Fedora afterward.
Not as fussy as Arch and better package availability than SUSE (for my needs at least). Also dnf is my favorite package manager despite being relatively slow.
I meant alternatives to systemd-homed, systemd-machined and the likes. Since I’m on NixOS, I’m restricted to most of the systemd stuff. I’m not even sure if I need all of them.
Now I’m being dragged into the anti-systemd ideology. I have a bunch of CLI utility that I have never ever touched since the three years I’ve been on Linux. I just came across homectl, machinectl and timedatectl, and I’m convinced that the part about “bloat” does make a lot of sense now.
I don’t really care either way. I like things to be more minimal, but I’m not really anti-systemd or anything like that. I’ve just been using openrc for a few years now, and haven’t used systemd enough to learn about the homed stuff I guess
Fedora immutable (ublue kinoite) has been so bulletproof. Moved from Arch, which is now on distrobox, so painless. Now ~ 1 year… 2 laptops + desktop, other is destined for NixOS…
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=x11 override) 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.).
After having used Ubuntu LTS for 6 years, I find a little more peace with Debian. I do not like systems that break. Debian Stable is IMPOSSIBLY HARD to break, even more than Ubuntu LTS, which only broke once because of my stupidity of installing ProtonVPN client and using VPN killswitch through it. Switched to using OpenVPN/Wireguard config files.
Debian doesn’t break often because they don’t change things just for the sake of changing them. Nice and stable. Even if you do break something, a guide published 5 years ago describing how to solve the problem would probably still mostly work today.
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