I’m wondering what the current favorite distros are besides the most popular ones like Arch, Debian and Fedora.
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NixOS for me. It’s a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there’s also an entire distro based on it.
Yeah I’ve gotten into Nix recently and it’s slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I’m on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I’ve got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It’s very up to date, yet it’s somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven’t had any problems finding software, yet it’s not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.
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Opensuse TW
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I’ve been using Opensuse since it was called SuSE. Tumbleweed is great.
Can it still be a favourite if I haven’t touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.
Same! I’m on Ubuntu and Pop these days but I fondly remember my old distcc build cluster…
Portage is still far and away my favorite package manager.
Hahaha same on the distcc cluster. It was a rare proud moment for me many years ago. I rememeber when I got the cross compiling working it felt like magic. Good times.
OpenSUSe. Tumbleweed as a rolling bistro is amazingly stable, yast is nice, and it all just works great. Leap for the servers, and things are solid.
I, too, get my coffee from the rolling bistro.
Loool I’ll leave it
Same. Tumbleweed here. All the benefits of the rpm ecosystem but with less hassle and more updates
OpenSUSE for me too.
I also switched family & friends to Thimbleweed (since a bit too snappy Ubuntu) & it’s been great.
I should think so too. A Thimbleweed sounds an excellent plant for an Evil_Shrubbery.
My evil plans have been discovered!!
Regardless the evil plant army must grow. Rolling thimbleweeds are usually our scouts and assassins (rarely kamikaze when on fire, looks cool tho).
What I’m saying is that you better be on the lookout, maybe hide if you see a thimbleweed with a gun or knife.
I’m enjoying what Nix does. That said, the learning curve is very steep, and the documentation is very inconsistent and usually poor.
The repositories for both nixpkgs and nixos are absolutely colossal, which is a huge plus, but their configurations are not listed on the same page, and it can lead to a lot of confusion. Unlike Arch’s PKGBUILD, which practically tell the build system exactly what to do, you’ll have to learn the structure of current configuration files, or the more recent flake system, to setup things how you like.
Maybe I’ll wait until things aren’t a mess
Its actually not that bad. A few google searches on how to setup config files and going to https://search.nixos.org/packages to show you what info to fill in in the NixOS configuration is all you do.
And, even more importantly, https://search.nixos.org/options to figure out which options to set. Always search for options first. “Installing” something by just adding the package to systemPackages etc. is usually the correct thing to do for end-user applications but not for “system things” such as services.
I recently had the same thoughts but was Ted to try nonetheless. Asked for some beginner friendly resources here on lemmy a little while back. Might be to further help for some 😊
Do you mean http://search.nixos.org/packages Because that has config info on the page of the listed package. Unless I am misunderstanding what you meant by their configurations?
That’s technically correct. The “NixOS configuration” tab is sufficient to just install something, however out of ever package I’ve personally used, none of them have listed the available options there. For example: this theme, and what the extra options are
the documentation is very inconsistent and usually poor.
So many excellent projects are crippled by having little but reference docs and scant, over abstracted descriptions.
Damn Small Linux was a favorite a long time ago.
PopOS! Is it for me these days.
I’ve started to dip my toes into NixOS. I really love their design concepts.
Damn Small Linux became tiny core linux! it’s still something that’s fun to play around with
OpenSuse tumbleweed
Alpine.
I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.
So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.
I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!
Came here to say the same thing
It will bite you after a while. I remember using alpine in a docker image many years ago and running a python program that needed some modules installed, where one of them required compiling c code. Naturally that didnt work on alpine since its using its own c library. So couldn’t run the python app at all on alpine.
I remember having all of these libseat and elogind errors when I tried to use anything wayland-related: Sway, Hyprland, even KDE. Since then I switched back to Arch because I felt like everything Just Worked™️ there
Gentoo. It’s amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.
There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.
+1 for Gentoo - Portage can be fun in a weird way. I’m more of a “just work” type of person though, so I’ve stuck to Arch, but the time I had with Gentoo was pretty great and the new binary package format might bring me back. I do have a 7950X nowadays so I wonder if that’d fly through Gentoo on bare metal.
Another vote for openSUSE Tumbleweed
If we allow derivatives, I’d say SteamOS despite being Arch. It’s putting Linux in non-technical people’s literal hands and it’s not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It’s almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I’ve seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It’s been a really long time since we’ve last seen a fundamentally different distro that’s got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they’re still very package oriented. We’ve been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It’s incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they’re atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.
I’ve seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Read in an New Zealand accent this is classic Sales.
