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)
Laptop and Workstation run Fedora. Servers run Proxmox.
Can’t say that there is anything new and exciting. Big change for me has been that I have accepted flatpacks. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t care about being a purist, don’t care about customizing and theming everything. I just want to use my computer.
Arch + XFCE on my desktop. Have been for a while now, and everytime i try something else, I always come back to it. For my laptop, I’ve been using Gnome + extensions (Arch as well. That way I don’t gotta switch gears and remember two different sets of commands) before i had to take it in for repairs. Was pretty good because of the mousepad gestures IMO.
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.
Zorin OS for now. Old kernel and stuff, but it’s stable, and I like the looks more than I did PopOS!. Maybe PopOS! is cooler now with their Cosmic thingy.
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