I guess I should mention, like omicron-b, I also run debian stable on a small headless server in my home. I think it's from 2010. I've replaced all the hardware in it at least once, including the drives, but the install remains.

What I like:
- Stable. Absent me doing something stupid, it's never broken.
- Basic. It's headless, not very flashy or a showcase distro, so most resources from Ubuntu forums to the Arch wiki apply. At most, maybe some of the file paths might be a little different.

I used testing as my desktop driver for a few years to game on. Worked great. Defitelt not a desktop showcase type distro. Or at least not visually. Definitely shows off the stability of Linux though. I did have one peculiar issue involving systemd, network manager, and NFS that would cause long shutdowns, but I think that was more my configuration than a distro issue.

Fedora with Gnome Desktop and Negativo17 multimedia repository:

- Up to date packages, esp. kernel and desktop, but not as raw as Arch;
- Early integrations of newer things on the horizon, e.g. wayland, btrfs, pipewire;
- Perfect vanilla Gnome Desktop integration (I do though use some extensions and a different theme);
- Very good packaging of Nvidia drivers from the Negativo17 repo;
- Very much suitable for gaming (a.o. Steam);
- I just know how to do things on Fedora ;).

Last edited by jens on 19 January 2022 at 7:35 pm UTC

[...]

What I don't like:

- Cinnamon

Yeah as nice as it is to have a desktop environment that keeps it's visual style and doesn't embrace "new fangled trends" it's also frustrating when they apply the same ideology to the underlying tech and refuses to embrace wayland, pipewire, latest kernel etc.

Which become even more frustrating when more and more google queries ends with 'only possible with wayland/pipewire/etc'

Am I missing something here ? I am using Manjaro Cinnamon, with latest kernel and pipewire, and I have had no problems so far (in fact, switching to pipewire actually fixed somme issues I was having with Pulseaudio and Jack).

Granted, the Wayland part is frustrating, but I'm still stuck with my nVdiia for now, until new GPU become available / affordable again, so...

Am I missing something here ? I am using Manjaro Cinnamon, with latest kernel and pipewire, and I have had no problems so far (in fact, switching to pipewire actually fixed somme issues I was having with Pulseaudio and Jack).

The first two are against the distro not the destop ( I tend to muddle them up as Cinnamon is a Mint project ), I could in theory possibly replace them my self... but from what I read there is a problem with the version of some libaries Mint 20.4 uses compared to what eg. Nvidia binary is compiled against in against later kernels.. or something, I pretty much glossed over the rest of the article when I read "this will likely break you installation completely"




as a side node I now finally have wireless on my laptop as somebody backported the driver to 5.13 :D so atleast In my case having the latest

Last edited by Guppy on 20 January 2022 at 11:05 am UTC

Been on Fedora since I came back to Linux ~5 years or so ago. Before that was mostly Arch.

What I like:
“Rolling enough” – maybe not as fast as some other distros to get the latest version, but I get them fast enough to stay happy and they go through a decent QA process.

DNF – Yeah it’s on the slow side at times but it comes with a lot of power and tools at its disposal.

Packages – With RPMFusion enabled I have just about everything I’ve needed or wanted

Just works – Esp for gaming. I’ve had no issues with Steam, Lutris, WINE/Proton, drivers, etc. No fiddling to get anything installed or properly configured. SELinux by default. Sane configs.


What I don’t like:
Sometimes the latest and greatest bullet point features aren’t quite ready on release – I had a lot of issues with Pipewire when it was made default as a recent example

I miss the AUR – I know COPR exists and use some things from it but it’s not the same at easily filling the gaps.

Fedoras are now a meme

Been on Fedora since I came back to Linux ~5 years or so ago. Before that was mostly Arch.

What made you switch from Arch? Arch users are loyal for their os ( https://boilingsteam.com/which-linux-distro-for-gaming-q2-2021-survey-results/ ) so it is quite interesting.

Been on Fedora since I came back to Linux ~5 years or so ago. Before that was mostly Arch.

What made you switch from Arch? Arch users are loyal for their os ( https://boilingsteam.com/which-linux-distro-for-gaming-q2-2021-survey-results/ ) so it is quite interesting.

To be honest, initial laziness really.

I was going to go back to Arch but my setup by that time had the case for LVM. Whichever number it was of Fedora had just released and I knew its installer was good and even defaulted to that, and could easily do LUKS with it as well. Each things I never set up manually before and I was more curious of the end result with both. I threw it on to see and honestly I was just never given big enough reason to give it up after I got going, so here I still am after years.

I'm old and tired and have less time now, so my distro hopping days are behind me really. I was (and am!) still considering going back to Arch when I build my shiny all new machine, but as you can imagine it's on hold the way things are in the market now... That said, I still think Fedora is underrated when it comes to desktop/gaming.

Arch.

What I like about it:

• Everything ships as close to upstream as possible. Arch doesn't make any or many distro-specific changes, so if there's a problem with the package, 99% of the time it's the package itself that's the problem.


• It's so simple. Everything I need is either in the official repositories or in the AUR. Building from source when necessary isn't a headache like on other distributions.


• I set up everything. I know what changes I've made, so it's easy to debug.


• Pacman is my favorite package manager by far. It's so simple and easy to use, and package management in general is very easy—upgrade everything to the latest version. If an older package is necessary, it's likely in the AUR.

What I dislike about it:

• On rare occasions, packages can suffer from breakage. They're usually fixed quickly, but I need to figure out what to do in the meantime and what's causing the issue. Such as the qt5-webengine issue with Anki a few months ago.


• Arch can get a lot of updates. It's the fastest package manager around, but some computers I don't touch for weeks and they need to upgrade 1000 packages. It can take up to 15 minutes.

I have the fewest problems on Arch. It's easy to use, and the AUR solves so many issues easily.

Arch can get a lot of updates. It's the fastest package manager around, but some computers I don't touch for weeks and they need to upgrade 1000 packages. It can take up to 15 minutes.

Heh. I have a Gentoo rig that wasn't touched in over a year. It took a little longer than 15 minutes to update.

Found the NASA employee with access to supercomputers

Heh. I have a Gentoo rig that wasn't touched in over a year. It took a little longer than 15 minutes to update.

Found the NASA employee with access to supercomputers

Sidenote, but how did this meme originate? NASA is a little fish compared to the Department of Energy when it comes to supercomputing activity.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed here, with KDE Plasma on the desktop. I've been an OpenSUSE user since 2006 and whilst I have tried both Fedora and Ubuntu at various times, I found they didn't seem to have the ease of configuration that I find with YaST.

Pros: very up-to-date, YaST and lost of excellent community repos.

Cons: manually installing the latest Nvidia driver sometimes risks a conflict with Mesa libraries. This is relatively easy to fix but still rather irritating. Nvidia does provide an RPM repo, however, but I like to be able to meddle with drivers so this is really a problem of my own creation :-)

I prefer PCLinuxOS (XFS file system), Devuan (testing branch), Calculate Linux, ALT Sisyphus, Void Linux (glibc) and Alpine Linux

I use Calculate Linux and OpenBSD as daily drivers, I use two SSDs in the same system.

Heh. I have a Gentoo rig that wasn't touched in over a year. It took a little longer than 15 minutes to update.

Found the NASA employee with access to supercomputers

Sidenote, but how did this meme originate? NASA is a little fish compared to the Department of Energy when it comes to supercomputing activity.

NASA actively shares their processing power and NASA does more impressive stuff with their super computer power(spaaace).
A.K.A NASA isn't boring.

I know the stats from Valve, the internet, etc,etc about what out there is more popular. But I also know that doesn't tell the whole story.



So what distro do you use?
AND.....
What do you like about it? What don't you like about it?





Side note: I wanted to make a bit of a joke and call the thread "Distro Wars!!! Fight!!", but figured people would just show up here already angry. Also:
1) It's against the rules. I can't find them right now... But I do remember them. No distro wars at all.
2) If the stereotype has any truth, we'd probably all hurt ourselves trying to fight anyway, being nerds and all. Except for that one person who works out 10 times a day, has 15 black belts and runs LFS (obviously, lol).
3) Remember those rules? Your talking about you're distro. No crapping on other people's choices. This is your chance to talk up your distro, not down to others.

I'm primary a debian stable user.

I like it,
- because it updates slow(I don't want to think, I want to tinker)
- Makes it easy to kill non-foss elements.
- Is what I'm used to(I've basically always used debian based distros)
- it's stable.

I dislike it,
- because they do custom stuff with their packages causing surprises once in a while(APACHEEEEE!)
- It's not cool. I'm a tech guy and started with Kali Linux. I like the street cred a fancy distro like pure arch, kali linux gentoo or linux from scratch gives.

Right now, I'm using the KDE version of Fedora.
For me, it hits a nice balance between being stable and being current, and is finally the distro to fully get me out of my Ubuntu-based comfort zone. Where I really like a lot of Ubuntu-based distros like Mint and Pop!_OS, I wanted to find some distros that'd get me away from Canonical if they kept on making weird decisions. I mean, I realize Red Hat's a different company that makes weird decisions, but Fedora seems pretty clean of nonsense at the moment.

Im on that Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

Stop.... Sit down and listen..... Spidier is speaking...... Why hes on Mint yeah......
Its got everything that I need...... A nice base package with a simple installer..... Its all killer and no filler.....
And the software manager makes it easy...... To add other packages that I really need......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

Wait.... Whats that smell??..... Oh hell its the Cinnamon...... Its a really nice and simple DE......
Its easy to navigate..... I dont need a sat nav in place..... Eveything is logically laidout...... And my workflow is not left out......
And on top of that...... Its pretty lightweight too.....
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

I couldnt believe what I was seeing..... It was like I was dreaming.....
Installation was a breeze...... And there wasnt a single freeze..... Driver installation was so easy..... Even with my Nvidia GTX 1080.....
This thing hasnt missed a beat...... And emulating is so sweet......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

I even got Davo..... From the servo...... He was on Windows...... Now hes on that Mint yo!......
Its so easy..... It was peasy...... Now his computings really dreamy......
He will never got back to Windows...... And that really is the main goal....... Its totally crunk dilly yo!.......
Mint Mint baby...... Even hes on the Mint Mint baby...... I recommend the Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby...... Even hes on the Mint Mint baby...... I recommend the Mint Mint baby......

NASA actively shares their processing power and NASA does more impressive stuff with their super computer power(spaaace).
A.K.A NASA isn't boring.

And NASA is world-famous, whereas the Department of Energy is not.

Im on that Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

Stop.... Sit down and listen..... Spidier is speaking...... Why hes on Mint yeah......
Its got everything that I need...... A nice base package with a simple installer..... Its all killer and no filler.....
And the software manager makes it easy...... To add other packages that I really need......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

Wait.... Whats that smell??..... Oh hell its the Cinnamon...... Its a really nice and simple DE......
Its easy to navigate..... I dont need a sat nav in place..... Eveything is logically laidout...... And my workflow is not left out......
And on top of that...... Its pretty lightweight too.....
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

I couldnt believe what I was seeing..... It was like I was dreaming.....
Installation was a breeze...... And there wasnt a single freeze..... Driver installation was so easy..... Even with my Nvidia GTX 1080.....
This thing hasnt missed a beat...... And emulating is so sweet......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby....... Im on that Mint Mint baby......

I even got Davo..... From the servo...... He was on Windows...... Now hes on that Mint yo!......
Its so easy..... It was peasy...... Now his computings really dreamy......
He will never got back to Windows...... And that really is the main goal....... Its totally crunk dilly yo!.......
Mint Mint baby...... Even hes on the Mint Mint baby...... I recommend the Mint Mint baby......
Mint Mint baby...... Even hes on the Mint Mint baby...... I recommend the Mint Mint baby......

HAHAHAHAHAHA! I couldn't stop laughing!

I'm on Mint also. Mint Xfce specifically. I moved over to it after many, many years on Xubuntu (which I moved to after spending my first year with Linux on Kubuntu), and it smooths out all of the papercuts that had annoyed me for some time - it handles connecting my laptop to an external monitor better, for example, which was always a bit flaky on Xubuntu.

I love it - the Mint Xfce install has most things that I want right off the bat, and the default software choices improve upon those found in Xubuntu. Unless something changes very drastically, I'll probably stick with it from now on.

Arch.

It's been 2 and a half years, but still Arch.

But also Fedora Silverblue now, and maybe Fedora Workstation on my main computer in the future unless I can figure out how to set up dual-booting on Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite.

I like having a base system that remains undisturbed while doing my own thing with disposable Toolboxes and every graphical application managed through Flatpak, undisturbed by shared library updates. And I like Fedora's free software philosophy and general polish.

I have the fewest problems on Arch. It's easy to use, and the AUR solves so many issues easily.

This is still true. But instead of the AUR, it's mostly Flatpak nowadays.

openSUSE since 2004 / 2005.

Well actually started with SUSE Linux 10.something before they named he community version to openSUSE.
So I "moved" to openSUSE later on and went with all versions 11, 12, 13, 42, 15, Tumbleweed, Aeon, Kalpa

My first experience with Tumbleweed was horrible and moved back to Leap.
A while later I was "forced" to move back to Tumbleweed because I got new hardware some day which was too recent for the current Leap release (15.1 I believe) and Leap wasn't working with it at all. In the 2nd attempt Tumbleweed was a smooth sailing until 1 1/2 years ago which is when I moved to openSUSE Aeon.

What I don't like about openSUSE is configuring printers using YaST. This almost never works out of the box and you need to set up things manually. In all other aspects YaST is a very good and powerful tool no clue why printers are such a pain there.
Something which I also wish they'd improved over the years is the installation of multimedia codecs and nvidia drivers.
I mean you can get both things very easy on openSUSE but it is not very straight forwards. Especially for new users.
For nVidia drivers you have like 3 different ways of installing the driver. A "One-Click installer", using YaST / zypper or do it manually the hardway using the installer from nvidia.

For codecs it is a similar story. You first need to enable a 3rd party repo (Packman Repository) not run by openSUSE and then install all sorts of codecs from there. Or you install a cli package called opi and run opi codecs which does the above for you. However this repository runs out side of the openSUSE ecosystem can cause all sorts of issues. Not very often but sometimes it does which is annoying when it happens.

Anyway I still questioning why the openSUSE devs didn't ease up the process of getting the drivers and codecs for new users a little with some sort of first-run utility or maybe right in the installer?

What I like about openSUSE? Oh boi *takes a deep breath* You get a distribution (family) for all sorts of uses cases first hand. Without requiring to run a fork of a fork to enabled / disable certain features. openSUSE is very flexible. It usually does not come in "flavours" as you can simply choose your favourite DE / WM right in the installer.
They serve their distro for all sorts of CPUs, x86 64bit / 32bit, aarch64, arm, RISC-V, PPC. No need to run a fork either. Same distro, same maintainers, same repos, different architecture. Very noice.

Their solution for community repos is also very good. Instead of running them off 3rd party servers or requiring the user to compile stuff locally from the AUR. You get free access to a cloud infrastructure where all openSUSE packages are build and you can just submit your own package there to your very own user repo.
This also eases up the possibility to make your new package part of the main repos as you can simply create some sort of a pull request and a core maintainer will checkout your new software, look at the source, validate what it does, reviews your build receipt and eventually will give you a go and merge it with the main repos.

The community is also very nice. Sometimes short on words. But that is fine with me. Usually you get quality answers to your questions and good solutions for some issues you might have ran into.

Out of all Linux distributions and distribution families I ran so far openSUSE was in most cases the best computing experience I had.

From time to time I play around and experiment with other distros on a spare system to get an idea of what is happening outside the openSUSE bubble. Because the openSUSE project likes to go it's very own ways without caring too much what others distros do.

Meanwhile I moved to openSUSE Aeon and Kalpa on my systems. They are vastly different form the traditional openSUSE versions I talked about before. They are immutable, self-maintaining, self-healing and rolling releases which favour flatpaks.

What I don't like about Aeon is Gnome breaking extensions every new release. The shadow side of running an automated rolling release: You get new versions of Gnome before most extensions where updated. But that is more like a general Gnome issue than specific to Aeon. Maybe I'll move all my systems to Kalpa as soon as it leaves the Alpha.

What I like about Aeon and Kalpa: They solved the codecs issue as apps are from flathub.
They solved the Printer issue as YaST is not part of the system and printer now just work out of the box as they should.
They ship with distrobox which unlocks them to use any package of any Linux distribution out there. So in case you miss something on flathub you can get it as a native package from any Linux distribution. Also they integrate very well with the desktop. Something like BoxBuddy, a distrobox UI, shipped by default would be nice though.

All in all I am very happy with Aeon and Kalpa. I mean I run them on 5 PCs for a reason I guess.

Other distros I am (activelly) running are

SteamOS on Steam Deck dual booted with openSUSE Aeon (for desktop use)

What I don't like about SteamOS is it somehow feels a bit flunky to me at times.
Sometimes there are random issues with games not starting, sound issues after long periods of standby and sometimes it just randomly crashes... Valve somehow managed to build the Windows experience into the system. Reboot to solve your issues.

I even sometimes run into the issue that the power options are shown, the background is blurred out but with the controller you can only navigate stuff in the currently blurred background ... I did not yet found which combination of actions lead to this issue but sometimes I managed to get to this point. Usually when the Deck is hooked up to a TV and I sit like 3 meters away and have no touch screen to bypass the issue.

With the lack of something like Distrobox I deem SteamOS also not very suitable for a Desktop OS. But that is okay. It's a gaming handheld. As a gaming handheld it does a hell a good job. If it is not randomly flunky. Which tbf does not happen very often. But annoying if it does.

Also I wish the Steam Store Page would be more controller friendly. Duno. Browsing the Steam Store on the Deck feels hard, or not so well integrated like literately everything else.
Sometimes it randomly jumps around when selecting another element or it has selected an item outside of the view or below another item.
Some buttons are not even reachable with the controller especially in the steam community section. Sometimes items are miss aligned and you only see like the top 50% of them.
If you ask me they either need to implements an entirely different store front for the Deck than for Desktops. Or a massive overhaul of the current store to fix this.
Under some circumstances the help bar at the bottom of the screen showing the controller glyphs manges to span 2 lines because some text is too large and wrpas around if the deck is set to German. Which then reduced the available area of everything above. The Deck UI does not like this at all and almost everything is misaligned in that case or only partially readable because it is covered by the bottom bar.

What I like about SteamOS? Like everything! I generally love the controller UI. Except the store. How well everything integrates and such. I love things like decky loader which offers so many new great things. Wine Cellar, love it, Decky Recorder, love it, Auto Flatpak, love it. Screenshot Uploader, hell yeah! In all honesty for just a gaming handheld I can nothing but recommend this well made little device. Gaming wise it is the most hassle free Linux system I ever used! For basic desktop tasks it is fantastic! Watching YouTube or Netflix on your TV for example. I love to do this while eating and then afterwards boot straight back into the gaming mode without leaving the couch!

Also navigating the Desktop with an external controller works unexpectedly well too. With the on-screen-keyboard not needing to rely on the GUI toolkit used by an application to work is fantastic! Unlike Gnomes on-screen-keyboard which somehow only works in GTK apps ... and there not even always.

RaspberryPi OS on a Pi 4 serving as a container host for various network services

Well there is not much to dislike or like tbh. It's Debian and the age of the software is not important as it is a container host anyway.

I once ran openSUSE MicroOS on that thing but I had a little of bad luck with this all so well crafted self healing server distro which made me switch back to something different.
Somehow I managed to hit a time frame in running that system where the U-Boot package was broken with one update. Which is kinda of an issue with a self-updating and rebooting system. If the boot loader is borked you won't get to the point where it could fix it self in rolling back to a previous snapshot.

Therefore RapsberryPI OS it was out of lazyness.

3x LibreELEC on two Pi 3's and a Pi 400 for home entertainment systems.

Well not much to dislike here either. I use it for a very specific purpose. The only purpose it was made to serve. So yeah. What should I say. It serves it's purpose.

Primarily to not need to rely on the good will of TV manufactures in supporting your TV and the software. With LibreELEC and Kodi I know things will work and there will be working plug-ins and such.
Ofc sometimes they need manual troubleshooting and the quality of some Plugins can vary but in the end I have the same system running (on) all my TVs and I know the drill and how to workaround certain issues. Or be it just manually downloading the git repo of a plugin with a hot fix, deploy it on the TV and wait for the Plugin to get updated/fixed in the official repos in the coming weeks.

It updates all it's software itself and if it breaks its a matter of minutes to flash a fresh image on the Pi and restore a Kodi backup to not need to setup all the plugins again.


That's it for me. Sorry for the lengthy read.

Last edited by Vortex_Acherontic on 20 June 2024 at 3:26 pm UTC

Uhh.. can I change my answer? I kind of switched distro's since then