I use ArchLinux BTW, because
- It’s very minimal, no bloatware
- AUR
3. I feel superior - It just works™*
I’m still using Windows 10 on my personal computer. Oh I’ll probably have to upgrade someday, some game or other program will come out with exclusivity of some kind and I’ll eventually install Windows 11. But for the most part, I don’t want to fuck with it, everything works and I really just don’t want the hassle.
Running Linux Mint on an old laptop, mostly because it’s too old to decently run Windows 10. Don’t use it for much, mostly troubleshooting things.
At work the laptops are Windows 10 and I don’t think there’s a push to update. Of course all the servers are Redhat Enterprise Linux, and that’s where the majority of my work takes place.
So actually companies using RHEL! I only know of the giants like Meta leeching on CentOS, which drives me nuts.
Meta uses CentOS but they aren’t leeches. They contribute a ton to CentOS, EPEL, and further upstream in Fedora and in individual software projects.
Fedora is the most solid thing I’ve ever used. I use the KDE version on my desktop and silverblue on my laptop. Never have any problems
Why not Kinoite?
Kinonite is nice and all but on my desktop I am downloading packages far more often and I don’t want to deal with the hassle of restarting my system every time. I know there are ways around that but eh
Debian Stable 11, shitjustworks
I’ve been running debian stable for work laptop, gaming PC and servers for years now. Can confirm it just works!
Debian 12 upgrade coming up soon. Probably (maybe not) some effort to upgrade everything, and that back to smooth sailing. :)
I agree. After all the distrohopping, I realized I needed a system that just worked for media consumption/browsing/office purposes. Debian stable just worked without the hassle of updating/upgrading packages every other day.
If I wasn’t on a RHEL respin due to work compatibility, I’d be on debian.
Debian is really nice!
I use macos. I find that it gives me a lot of the UNIX stuff (most of the terminal tools that I love) and has a good compromise with quality apps and integration with my phone.
Don’t you just love your phone and mac sharing the same copy/paste clipboard
You can have this feature on linux pretty easily and I think windows has it as an option as well.
Yeah KDE connect can get you the same behaviour, but you know Apple has a special level of polish hardly reached by anything else.
+1 for macOS!
I mostly use it becuse it came with the computer and works really wel for everyday use, so i see no need to replace it… And Manjaro on my second machine
macOS as well here + a VM with Fedora Kinoite for anything else that macOS can’t quite satisfy. Really digging these “new” immutable distros from Fedora
Btw I use Archlinux
I switched to it 50% for the AUR: I regularly install softwares not from the classic repos, and the AUR is a godsend compared to cloning a Github, make install and thinking about updating it. The rest is a mix of the ArchWiki, its lightness and openness.
Blindly recommending the AUR is dangerous though, as you really should check what you’re installing/updating every time.
Arch+Plasma+Wayland+GTX1660Ti+Samsung monitor with freesync120Hz. Great freedom. Great custom. Nice performance in gaming. Great software management. Awesome usability for technical user. I had also install apparmor and firewalld for security and timeshift for btrfs snapshots. I think, for me, there is no sense to switch back to windows.
Brave soul to run Nvidia on Wayland. For me it kind of works but has weird issues randomly, as is typical for Nvidia.
The are some bug, especially with xwalyand apps like steam. I found a bug where steam doesn’t find adwaita theme and crash after few seconds, but the most of games I ran works preety well or perfectly.
Yeah I actually had no problems with games either, just Gnome and KDE having buggy behavior.
Arch.
One day several years ago I had to replace some hardware and the copy of Windows that I had installed decided that I was no longer authorized. I got fed up and left Windows behind for good. For a few years I had Manjaro installed, but eventually I needed a change and wanted to start fresh so opted just to go straight to Arch.
Arch here as well. For me it’s rolling release that’s the selling point. I’ve maintained the same arch install on my desktop for five years with minimal maintenance required. The only reason it’s not ten years is I built a new PC and didn’t carry forward my old root drive. Arch is much less work than is advertised once it’s up and running. No dist upgrades or reinstalls when a new release comes out. Just keep it updated and pay attention to the website in case something requires manual intervention to update.
This is similar to my situation. It’s out of laziness at this point because my two installs just keep working.
If it ain’t broke…
I use Pop!_OS on my desktop PC because i’m tired of microsoft deciding everything of my digital life and also because I just find myself really comfortable with GNOME and the POP!_Shell
Fedora work station, it just works.
We’re an all-linux household.
- Endeavoros on my gaming desktop
- Garuda on my Framework laptop
- Kubuntu on my partner’s Framework laptop
- Endeavoros on my server. Plus a handful of Pis and appliances.
Windows 11 as my daily driver/gaming machine, Debian for my proxmox cluster/vms.
NixOS, because all of the config in my system is declared in a few files on GitHub and it has a huge package repo.
Also it has all of the other advantages of a Linux distro, like privacy, speed and customisability.
Had Ubuntu for a decade then got bored and turned my hp Spectre laptop into a Hackintosh and got hooked. So it’s macOS now.
Is it difficult to install and maintain that? I’ve been wanting to try it
That depends on your hardware. It was very fiddly to get it going because the WiFi module in the Spectre wasn’t supported at first. But then someone released a driver for it. I also had to read a lot into the documentation and discussions to get my config together. But once that was done, it ran almost like a normal Macbook Pro and I barely had to touch the OpenCore config.
(OpenCore is a bootloader that changes things in memory so your laptop appears like an Apple device to macOS. You then use the normal macOS, can download macOS updates, etc.)
Here’s my config for the hp Spectre x360 13-4104ng for reference.
Fedora KDE on the framwork laptop. Not the only one here it seems. My pc still runs Windows 10 but I’ll change that once I have the time.
Fedora is cool because it is about as user friendly to beginners as Ubuntu, without Canonicals shenanigans. It’s a freedom respecting community project and always pretty up to date. I like the quick release cycle. It seems like a good balance between a rolling release and slow fixed releases. Upgrading to the next version takes no effort. And KDE is just cool for it’s customizability.
I used Ubuntu years ago and left after trying 11.04 (has it been that long?) because the new Unity desktop environment was awful and buggy and the release generally didn’t work even after I switched desktop environments. Rightly or wrongly, I came to associate Canonical with buggy bloatware.
I like how reliable Debian is for my servers but the package versions are too old for a desktop. Even then, a few days ago, I had to install rust with curl | sh because Debian’s package was just too old to build what I needed it to.
I distro-hopped a lot trying to replace what I used to like about Ubuntu on the desktop. Fedora has survived many reinstalls now. Like you say, it’s on the cutting-edge but it also doesn’t cause major issues most of the time. They’re also pretty predictable and don’t try anything insane.
Finally the first menion of Fedora. I love Fedora. I’ve tried so many different variants and keep coming back.
