Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself “maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point”, but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn’t make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it’s what I’m used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it’s good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don’t have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don’t think it would make a difference at all.
The 6-month release cycle makes the most sense to me on desktop. Except during the times I choose to tinker with it at my own whim, I want my OS to stay out of my way and not feel like something I have to maintain and keep up with, so rolling (Arch, Tumbleweed) is too often. Wanting to use modern hardware and the current version of my DE makes a 2-year update cycle (Debian, Rocky) feel too slow.
That leaves Ubuntu, Fedora, and derivatives of both. I hate Snap and Ubuntu has been pushing it more and more in recent years, plus having packages that more closely resemble their upstream project is nice, so I use Fedora. I also like the way Fedora has rolling kernel updates but fixed release for most userspace, like the best of both worlds.
I use Debian stable on my home server. Slower update cycle makes a lot more sense there than on desktop.
For work and other purposes, I sometimes touch Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch, Fedora Atomic, and others, but I generally only use each when I need to.
Cachyos, since I like archlinux and the things it comes with I would install on arch. There’s even a few things that would have to be compiled from aur that’s in their repository pre-compiled.
I use Trisquel because it is recommended by FSF, is based on Ubuntu and I like Mate environment.
Guix because I love the idea behind Nix but Nixlang is the most painful language I’ve ever had to type out.
How long have you used it and how is it?
I’m pretty curious about those kinds of distros, and don’t really like how nixos is completely hosted on github (and all the drama that constantly comes from the community, and the bad documentation for many things, …).
However, guix seems such a niche project that I feel like it can’t really be used.
About a year and a half.
To be honest it’s not “easy” to use. The guiding principle behind mainline packages is that everything has to be built from source, so most somewhat unpopular things are missing from the mainline channels.
To use it like any other distro you’re going to need to learn how to write packages fairly quickly. Luckily the main draw of guix is the entire OS being based on guile so once you get a little under your belt you can just read the specs from other channels to see how a package is written.
Took me maybe a week to start writing guix packages.
There’s also The toybox
Some additional nice things about guix:
Everything is guile. The system definition, the service definitions for shepherd, everything.
Shepherd is hands down the best init program I’ve ever used. It’s just incredibly simplistic but because it just runs the guile definition you give it, you can do some incredibly complex things that systemd etc. can do as well.
The OS documentation is built into the distro, with “info guix” you get reams of configuration information for the distro without ever needing to look it up online.
EndeavourOS because of the AUR
Artix as my daily driver because of the AUR, and I like runit. I no longer feel the need to distro hop; I’m happy here.
It was the first one using Wayland by default that worked on my machine out of the box.
I use Debian-Testing. It’s very stable, more so than most other distros IMHO (despite being -testing), and it has the latest packages.
Arch. Why?
- Arch Wiki
- Pacman
- Community (therefore AUR)
Manjaro, because Arch-based, rolling release, but with a dev test cycle to try to eliminate breaking patches.
I use Debian on machines I don’t want to fuck with or have change much.
I use Endeavour because it was recommended to me for the bleeding edge hardware I had just bought for gaming.
Arch, moved here from Ubuntu when I realized I have a good idea of what I want installed and have no need for a bunch of things to get bundled into the OS
I’m using #endeavouros with Gnome on my Desktop at the moment, just because I wanted to try Arch with all the priorly mentioned arguments, rolling release, Wiki and so on.
I started with Slackware in the early 90s, SuSE and Red Hat (Fedora today) just for fun and self-education, even though Slackware wasn’t fun at all. This distro brought me nights without sleep and full of tears. 😂🫣
I tried a couple of times to switch to Linux on the desktop but never got it to work satisfyingly like Windows with all my private and business applications and games.
So Linux and I had an on and off relationship over decades. I wanted to love Linux so badly, but it was never reasonable to run it on the desktop.
Let’s see how we’re going to end, Arch/Endeavour and me.On a server I would not switch from a Debian-based distro, just because I’m used to it and I would also prefer stable instead of rolling releases.
Arch (EndeavourOS but it’s the same with an installer, basically): AUR, great Wiki, great community and fresh packages. I’m always open to new stuff but all of this is really hard to beat.
Vanilla Arch, because for me it’s the easiest to use and everything just works and never any had instability issue like other distros I tried