If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?
Been using Linux for over a decade, and last few years Ubuntu (on desktops/laptops), plus Debian on servers, but been looking to switch to something less “Canonical”-y for a long time (since the Amazon search fiasco, pretty much).
Appreciate recommendations or just an interesting discussion about people’s experiences, there are no wrong answers.
Edit: Thanks for the lots of interesting answers and discussions. I will try a few of the suggestions in a VM.
Arch but it is a pain in the ass to update. 20 years here. Tried a million distros, but never Slackware or Gentoo for some reason.
Debian.
It’s pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it’s got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it’s got nonfree firmware on the disc, they’ve really upped their game.
(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It’s not for the faint of heart though.)
– Frost
Debian. I like my computer to work.
First distro was Ubuntu 8.04. Switched around to windows, and back, Mac OS and back, and distro hopped in between. But for the last 8 years I’ve been back on Ubuntu. Currently 22.04 on my server and 24.04 on my laptop and desktop. I usually run one LTS behind on the server, and wait for latest point release on my personal machines.
Ive kind of stopped caring about the ideology a little bit. And Ubuntu just works for me.
On my new laptop, I wanted to try something less “Cannonical”-y too, after many years of using Ubuntu. I already used Manjaro KDE on my desktop and I kinda liked it. So that, I decided to install Arch and maybe copy some configs from Manjaro, if needed. Well, at first glance, it was awesome. Fast, fully configurable system, that is fully mine. Alas, that euphoria didn’t last long: very soon some fundamental problems occured. Here I should specify that I’m using my laptop for live musical performance. And I focus on some specific things that other users might not need to.
- Wine - couldn’t make it work with 32bit apps and VST plugins. That’s really important to me, because some of those don’t have any native replacements. Whatever I tried, Wine just refused to create a 32bit prefix.
- At some point, several (lots of) important LV2 plugins stopped showing their GUIs. They kept working in “generic GUI” mode, but for things like equalizers having a good visualization is crucial.
- KDE+pipewire+wayland is the worst setup for live performance ever. When you move your mouse around taskbar, it creates video-streams (to draw thumbnails) that make audio graph massively crackle.
- Really bad performance with several soundcards. SOme cards just refused to work together in one graph, turning the sound into the ocean of xruns. And that possibility of several soundcards was the reason why wanted to switch from JACK to pipewire in the first place.
- No possibility to have pipewire-jack and pipewire-jack-client packages installed simultaneously.
- LADISH and Claudia - they’re quite tricky obsolete pieces of software that I use. These are really handy for making large complicated audio systems. Alternatively I tried raysession, but it didn’t work well too (didn’t restore connections).
This list could have been longer, but I will probably stop here. After a month of struggling I switched back to Ubuntu Mate 24.04. And what can I say… It works fine. It’s a bit tougher than Arch, but not much; and at the end - not a single issue of listed above. And Ubuntu has custom lowlatency kernel that helps with realtime audio applications. And it’s still Linux after all - I can easily do whatever I want - like, uninstall Snap. Some packages are too old - that’s acceptable for an LTS release; if I need something up-to-date, I can just build it from source. Also I notice the same issues on my Manjaro desktop, but it’s not so crucial there, as I primarily use desktop for gaming and video montage. But still, considering to return to Ubuntu on it too.
What I want to say is that maybe Ubuntu is not so bad, really. Cutting off some unneeded things can turn it into a good OS.
I’ve been using Linux for more than 20+
First distro: Slackware, then Debian for many years, finally Fedora, since 2014, very happy user.
What I like in Fedora: the 6 months release provides bleeding edge experience without compromising stability.
Debian Trixie headless on my router/server raspberry pi and NixOs on my laptop.
However I’m planning to switch from Nix this summer since one of the maintainers of NixOs is the one which added age verification to systemd, still haven’t decided on which Os I’ll switch to probably Devuan os but may give Alpine a shot since it’s more stable than Arch btw, so I’ll just be ricing and distro hopping this summer until I pick my new favorite again.
Using Arch for almost a decade now. Started with Ubuntu, fedora, mint but finally landed on arch. But am thinking about switching to gentoo; arch has gone too mainstream that im afraid it might be plagued with “age verification” virus
Arch on my personal machines, Debian on my servers.
Same. This is the profile of the Lemmy user I think.
This is also my setup. I’ve tried nix a few times on desktop and servers, but didn’t stick. Keep going back to arch and debian
I’ve been fully daily driving Linux for about 15 years now, and for me it’s almost all Arch now.
I started out distro-hopping between Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Slack, etc, but once I found Arch (and spent two weeks getting it installed, booted, and customized exactly to my liking) I was finally at home.
I know the meme. I’m not here to claim superiority, or diminish the value of other perfectly good distros. I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.
What I love about Arch is the lack of bloat. You get precisely what you ask for, no more, no less. You can legitimately run htop and recognize literally every program, and know if something’s wrong immediately.
Every one of my Arch boxes is a perfect little snowflake, suited to exactly the task(s) I built it for. And if there was anything I had to learn or configure along the way? That’s just the journey, man.
I have been eyeballing NixOS though…
I just used NixOS daily for maybe a month? I really love how it’s designed, but I had to give up because there were just so many small fixes I had to do and I found myself banging my head against the wall when I couldn’t build something that depended on python-tk. You will see this criticism around a lot, but the documentation just isn’t there yet. If you try to search for a fix, the packages have changed how they’re configured since a solution was posted or they depend on a Nix flake which 50% of searches say not to use because it’s experimental and 50% are all in on flakes.
I have since moved back to Arch, but I’ve started to use the nix package manager for some cases since you can on-demand non-permanently install a package.
Almost the same story here, I ran nixOS on my laptop and was over my head instantly, but kept treading water for almost a year before I got tired of the quirks and went back to arch. Much as on desktop; it just works and works well.
Since bouncing off I’ve found myself using the nix package manager for my Steam Deck, allowing it to serve as the “laptop” now. It just so happens that Valve recently added a persistent /nix folder to steamOS and so I’m declaratively back at it again. Thankfully the syntax is now starting to stick.
I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.
“You’re cool, you’re cool, screw you tho , you’re cool…” XD
Half Baked 🤝
Glad someone caught that XD
exact same story as I. have also been eyeballing NixOS lol. big time investment for me though
Same, with one exception I don’t really like Debian. Ubuntu, I’m surprised it’s still around. I wonder who uses it, especially on a server.
I’m eyeballing NixOS. And Gentoo too. And I’m looking for excuse to try FreeBSD.
You’re surprised the most popular desktop distro is still around?
I’m surprised this shite is the most popular distro, let’s start with that.
Really? They did a ton of work to make Linux accessible to the masses, have an active and helpful community to help out if you get stuck, works really well out of the box on most hardware and you’re pretty much guaranteed there’s going to be a compatible deb available for it if you’re looking for software outside normal repos. Seems like a no brainer tbh.
You’re correct, if that’s true. I wasn’t following them since almost twenty years ago. They were great at the time, all these free CDs you could get, I’ve ordered some as a kid and they really arrived, that was magic. I have some gratitude for that.
What I don’t like is quite a number of very questionable decisions they made over these years after. That’s why I am surprised someone thinks they are a great distro. You want Deb, why not go with Debian? Especially on a server. I truly have no idea who are the people who install Ubuntu on a server.
In my experience, Fedora just works. And hence, I recommend it to everyone. Ubuntu, not. Snap alone made me not considering it ever again.
Why don’t you like Debian?
I’m not old enough to appreciate its obsolescence. It broke on me so many times, basically every single major update on various machines. Arch Linux never broke on me, and I still run my very first installation. Basically on every single machine. Had no need to reinstall anything. I wasn’t deliberately breaking Debian even, never introduced any unusual repositories, used the default flavour of the desktop environment I chose from the installer. Didn’t change defaults too much. Yet every upgrade I did, something was wrong, it simply broke, and the easiest was to simply reinstall than attempting to fix anything. Arch, broke just a few times, most of which was either me doing something, and I knew that was me, or it was on the main page of the distro, in their news, the breaking changes announcement, plus the steps to mitigate them.
I see no point in using Debian, at least for me personally. I use its flavours, DietPi and Armbian on the SBCs, as there’s no Arch, and I don’t really like Arch ARM. Also, Debian’s website yells unprofessionalism, and it’s a bit difficult to tolerate. And the cherry on top, each time I’m about to download it, I have to hunt that BitTorrent link. I know it’s less than a gigabyte, and I could just download it as is from the website. But it’s a matter of principle, if I can download via BitTorrent protocol, I’d do that. Less pressure on the servers, easier and faster for me. Arch, you don’t have to hunt that link. Debian isn’t simple enough for me, I don’t understand its ideas and approach. Having obsolete everything because of stability … how do you know the updated versions are worse, huh? I don’t know, perhaps Sid is stable too, but my bet it’s less stable than Arch.
And the names, I personally dislike them. You choose a random Pixar movie and stick to that. Why? Even Ubuntu’s animals are just so much better. To me that’s as weird as naming your software as Gimp, or having fun with these GNU is not UNIX and other recursive abbreviations. It may be fun when you’re a teenager, or a part of some community, but I just don’t like it either.
I just don’t feel like I’m the part of this community. I’ve been around Debian for like two decades, and never grew liking it. Not my cup of tea.
As much of the meme of an arch user will tell you they are using arch.
NixOS is SO much more accurate to the meme.
My custom Kinoite-based system using ublue-builder. Gets me updates with 0 interference with my daily use, secure boot, tpm based FDE, and I can still install packages during the CI step (although distrobox is the main way to do that).
I’ve been on Linux since my childhood (found it in a tech magazine in 2008), hopped through Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro until like 2022 when I settled on Fedora KDE, then shifted to their immutable stuff 1-2 years later.
On my server I run Ubuntu and on my desktop I’m running Linux mint because it just fucking works and I don’t got to mess with shit.
i used to use debian heavily in the past, but switched to ubuntu because of kkkernel liveeeeeee patching.
now that i have to switch back because of age verification; i find myself wishing that debian has live patching so i can go back to it.
Been using Linux for about 8 years now. My DE of choice has pretty much always been XFCE. Here’s an overview of the distros I’ve daily driven.
Linux Mint -> Debian -> Arch -> NixOS -> Arch
I tried NixOS for about a year before switching back to Arch recently. There were just too many problems I couldn’t find a solution to, and I realized that the advantages of an immutable OS just aren’t that important to me.
Arch really is a dream to use, and the setup is pretty easy if you use the archinstall script. And most importantly, their wiki is amazing.
Debian on everything (well except the router is on OpenWrt).
First installed Debian more than 25 years ago. Tried some other stuff, Debian is still best for me.
NixOS so I can keep my config in git. I have a single nix config for all my machines (desktop, laptop and server) so I can share configuration between them. I use it to configure both my system and my user config, my dotfiles, with home-manager. Even my neovim config is in nix thanks to nixvim.
I don’t think I could go back now. It can be a bit of a pain from time to time and the learning curve is steep but it has so many advantages. Being able to rollback between config versions (called generations), having a consistent config between my machines, having it all in version control… The repo have so many packages and when there is a module it’s really easy to add a service. Writing new packages (derivations) and modules is also not that hard. It can be as simple as calling nix-init.
Had my main ssd fail on me a few month back and it was very simple to just replay the config and just get everything working as before. I only had to do the partitioning by hand (it can be done by nix but I’ve not gotten around to it yet). That’s why I only backup data and home partitions, not system partitions.
I was messing with the NixOS system config in weird ways and accidentally bricked it a few times, but I just booted into a previous configuration and fixed it. Whereas with Arch you would be fucked and have to pull out a rescue disk.
You just need to be careful not breaking your bootloader, but on the other side this is fixable too with a live environment
I’ve had a similiar experience to yours but with Guix.
