Very happy. My two daily drivers (Desktop and Laptop) are on Ubuntu but user space is managed with Nix.
All other machines are Nixos proper. Only thing keeping me back from moving to Nixos fully is I decided to piecemeal my own DE and I’ve just lacked the time to debug some issues related to gnome-keyring, computer locking, and coding up some system setting widgets.
Surprised I don’t see any Fedoras on here yet. Very happy on Fedora KDE.
On my desktops and laptops, I’ve been slowly migrating from Mint to EndeavourOS. Mint will always have a special place in my heart and I don’t think I’ll ever abandon it completely, but I’ve been falling in love with Endeavour lately. The Arch ecosystem had a bit of a learning curve, but once it clicked, it felt great. And then for servers, I’ve finally switched away from Ubuntu over to Debian. The familiar environment without all the bloat feels perfect to me.
Because of all the nice feedback about OpenSUSE:
SUSE was my first (bought) Linux distribution, at a time when I would have spent days downloading an ISO, SUSE was available with a manual in store. That was nice.But then I had an AVM Fritz! ISDN card and it was a complete shit show to get this working. Especially as YAST(2?) didn’t support the configuration I needed, but every time you opened it, it would overwrite your manual changes in some configuration files.
(Edit: I’ll probably need to add, that this was like 25 years ago. So besides “fuck, I’m old”, my perspective in SUSE is very probably not up-to-date)After that I hopped through a few distros and mostly stayed with basic Debian.
Nowadays I’m mostly using Manjaro (or just Arch itself, if I don’t need X), because I like the Arch package system and actually also the whole system architecture… Don’t exactly know what it is, but I feel much more at home.
With apt I sometimes found myself in situations, where a fresh install will resolve things faster than trying to restore/save the system. With Arch I always was somehow able to restore everything.Can someone tell me how Tumbleweed differs/excels?
Thanks in advance!
Currently waiting for my new laptop (Framework 16 :-D) and that would be a nice opportunity to try something new.
But as I need my device for work, it’s important to me, that I really have it under my control and am not depending on some half-baked configuration utility like YAST was.Edit: I’m also playing with the thought of moving to something immutable. NixOS looked nice in concept, but the more I read about it, the more I see that it’s more suitable for more server than my laptop - but maybe I’m wrong here, as I don’t have any hands-on experience
The main difference between Arch and Tumbleweed, apart from the package type, is the update system. Tumbleweed does it through snapshots, which allows you to use the openQA automatic test to test the snapshot before sending it to the community. Arch upgrades on a package-by-package basis, regardless of the other packages that are part of the system.
My Framework 16 is arriving Monday! And I use Tumbleweed on my desktop. I currently use clonezilla every couple days and am starting to mess around with some other distros, but I keep coming back to Tumbleweed. My desktop is mostly for gaming, and it has pretty new hardware, so I like to have more leading edge packages.
I keep trying NixOS, and while I like it and it’s cool, I have a mouse capture issue in World of Warcraft that I just can’t solve, so it’s taking a back seat. Also tried Bazzite, but had some issues during install, so didn’t try it much. Currently trying endeavour, I’ve been using Arch off and on since 08, it’s nice.
But Tumbleweed just works. It has sane defaults, updates frequently, has snapper just in case something goes wrong (but other distros can do that too), has yast for people that like it, but I’ve been trying to run some benchmarks between endeavour and Tumbleweed and I can’t really tell a difference.
I’ve settled on Manjaro for this computer, and I’m pretty happy with it (I’ve stooped distro-hopping, I just don’t have the energy, nor the time to entertain that on my only laptop), though I’m considering changing to base Arch for my next one (which I hope is still 3 years or so in the future; this machine is only 4 yro still). Why? Because the version wait on Manjaro seems a bit arbitrary sometimes and that lag often doesn’t play nice with the AUR (which I love). Sometimes I think of switching to more esoteric distros, such as the neat Alpine (which I’ve been using on servers for a while) and reproducible NixOS, but then I question the day to day usability and pain points, which are quite relevant to me atm.
Why do I like Manjaro though? I like the Arch made easier, the mhwd tools, the support forums (which I know people have mixed feelings on, but my experience has been nothing other than very pleasant).
Feel free to discuss my points!
If you want to learn about Arch, I recommend you to use ArcoLinux, a distribution that uses the direct Arch repositories (unlike Manjaro) and serves to acquire knowledge about Arch.
Debian and very. Sorry I strayed to Ubuntu for as long as I did.
We all make mistakes
I was quite satisfied with Debian Stable for a few years on at least two different laptops, and felt I had found my “forever distro”, until I got a Framework laptop whose AMD graphics were quite buggy on it. In order to get rid of all the issues, I had to upgrade to Testing and install a mainline Liquorix kernel (and along the way, I briefly made a Frankendebian and fiddled with kernel parameters). While my years of experience with Debian and derivatives has prevented me from breaking anything, I do wish I didn’t have to use all of this beta-quality software just to prevent games from freezing and crashing constantly, just because I bought “new” (about a year old) hardware.
I still want to keep Debian, because I’ve found nothing else that works quite as elegantly or stably, but I’m hoping to find ways to get the performance I need without Liquorix, and if something forces me to reinstall between now and the time Debian Trixie becomes stable, I’ll probably give Fedora or KDE Neon another try.
Really happy with EndeavourOS for the last few months - started daily driving Linux in October last year.
blendOS has caught my attention though, I’m very interested in using immutable distros more and more.
Debian 12. It just works, except for buggy Wayland, thankfully KDE still supports Xorg.
I love Debian, but want Plasma 6, so I’m installing openSUSE right now.
Switched from Kubuntu to Mint + KDE last week. Very happy indeed.
I’ve been using NixOS for the past few months and it’s been great. Before NixOS I was using Fedora Silverblue so immutable distros aren’t a new thing to me. I like that NixOS has a configuration I can keep backed up. I can copy different options from my desktop to laptop easily. I’m still learning about flakes and the nix language to be able to do more advanced things, but overall NixOS is a great distro if you want something you can configure once and be done.
Since I installed Arch 14 years ago, I’ve never looked back. I guess I’m happy with it!
My distro hoping days are about done. I started with ubuntu -> KDE Neon -> Arch -> Manjaro -> Solus -> Manjaro -> Pop_OS -> Fedora.
I’m sticking with fedora because I love the ideology behind the project and the pace of updates works perfect for me. Not too fast but still very up-to-date. Also I used to hate gnome but after using fedora I love it, I realized I didn’t hate gnome but hated all the clunk other distro would add to it. I am interested in NixOS but for now I’m gonna continue to stick with fedora, might hop to fedora silverblue tho.
I’ve been with Fedora for awhile now because I like the project and how it pushes things forward. Changed to Silverblue and never returned.
Now I’m using Bluefin because I like the little tweaks on top of Silverblue. Would recommend.
Definitely gotta try it out. Been on the same install for years and I need a fresh start
I’m using Bazzite for games and I like it so much I started moving homelab machines to Fedora IoT.
