Original question by @POTOOOOOOOO@reddthat.com
I don’t know that it is objectively the best - but its the best fit for me right now (LMDE).
It works, has the packages I need and they are up-to-date
BunsenLabs Boron - Debian 12 with Openbox Window Mgr - no desktop, no icons. The machine is not burdened by having to run a heavy desktop environment. All navigation and execution is done with mouse (right click), keybindings or command line. Linux without the Windows artifacts. On my HP i7, boots to login in 19 seconds.
Does what I want and gets out of my way.
It’s extremely stable, and countless other distros are derived from this.
Because I can hit “next” a couple of time and have a working install
Nobara: It works well most of the time and has pretty much everything needed for gaming preinstalled. I had a bad update once that prevented booting past the command line though. Now that I’m more experienced I’d probably use a more mainline distro and install the gaming stuff myself.
It’s decent, but screw using someone’s personal distro. Glorious literally dropped every scrap of his default de config, and switched to another. No transition, no migration, just deleted everything and went on with his day.
He did literally say it’s not meant for consumer use, it’s just his build for himself that you’re free to use
NixOS. My entire config is source-controlled and I can easily roll back to a previous boot image if something breaks like cough Nvidia drivers. I also use it for my home router and all self-hosted services.
maniacally laughs while trying to avoid eye contact with 19k lines of nix config
Bazzite just works, it runs every game I have with zero fuss, it’s easy to run Windows programs / emulators / local LLMs, AND it’s basically unbreakable.
I haven’t bothered to actually search or troubleshoot yet, but since I’m here - have you had any problems with power management failing to automatically turn screens off when idle?
I don’t get consistent behavior there it seems (AKA it leaves them on when it shouldn’t), but that’s I think the only significant oddity I’ve found in the ~7 months or so I’ve been running Bazzite. And like I said I’ve done basically nothing yet to try to solve it, just wondering if you’ve seen it. I have the issue on a desktop and a laptop, using entirely different monitors (not even same brand) FWIW.
I haven’t had any problems like that, but I generally don’t leave my screen on. So perhaps I would have this issue, but just never notice it because of how I use the device.
I’m very conscious of energy use, I almost always manually set my laptop to sleep if I’m leaving it idle for a while.
I can’t claim it’s the best, but it’s the best for me right now.
On a gaming laptop I’m using Aurora because KDE Plasma btw (:
Bazzite has a KDE version too. I think it is more popular then the GNOME version of bazzite actually. At least according to the results of the latest steam survey
Yep I use KDE-flavored Bazzite and actually forgot GNOME was even offered! It works deliciously. Came over from Windows last winter finally and boy, the UI alone is just so much nicer.
I had avoided KDE for years due to some multi-screen resolution issues back in the day.
I’d be running gnome, and install a half dozen plugins to make it look and feel closer to Windows It was just a personal preference. Every other update some plugin I was using would be broken. I’d replace it with another plug-in or uninstall it and wait for a fix. Fight fight fight fight fight fight. Some number of years later I tried KDE again, and I realized that it did exactly what I was trying to do in Gnome but it did it out of the box.
I don’t have anything against Gnome. The same way I don’t have anything against OS X’s “window manager” or even Windows 11’s “window manager” they’re just not my preference.
Bottom left navigation, thin, stacked app indicators, bottom right tray. Fractional scaling, widgets.
Because I like compiling everything from source for a 0.2% speed improvement
Void made Linux fun again for me. It gets so much right with the rolling release model.
Because it lets me use a list of packages instead of needing to remember what to install, has every package I need and let’s me use them without installing them, and has a good rollback system to go along with cutting edge packages.
How about Qubes? if you have the specs, you get sandboxes (VMs) and all distros are available into 1. Heck, you can even have windows VMs…
And if you don’t have the specs, just use any linux and install distrobox (docker) !
An alternative to distrobox is toolbx
This week alone I’ve used Arch, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and Fedora. Its Arch. By a short way, and mostly thanks to the wiki. Tbh they are all converging, and I go with KDE variants when I use a GUI and no distro does too much to customise it
