wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned, so I’m keeping windows for it specifically.) this’ll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn’t love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.
and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you’ve tried but didn’t like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I’ve seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.
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If you like or need the latest software, use a rolling distro. I use Manjaro (boo, hiss) and really like it. But if you don’t want the Arch users to beat you up and pants you, I hear Endeavour OS is pretty good.
Try Debian + KDE. It’s a good combo imo - both stability and modernity.
Seconded. I use Debian with KDE btw ;-)
Mint 21.3 as my main Desktop OS - almost zero complaints after over a year. Everything just works.
Ubuntu using Linux-Surface on my old Surface Pro. Breathed new life into a device I had abandoned (after all 8gb of ram isn’t enough for Windows malware these days). Gnome works really nice on a touchscreen two-in-one. Kudos to the Linux-Surface folks. They took one of the few positive developments from Microsoft (Surface hardware) and made it possible to remove the worst part (windows). Not that I’ll ever buy a Surface again. It also allowed me to retire my iPad.
Fedora Linux on a cheap Dell laptop as my media client. Fedora is nice and runs well, haven’t done too much with it other than Firefox and Calibre. Nice to see a different ‘branch’ in action.
I’m pretty basic and generally lazy so I don’t delve into some of the smaller distros or distro hop. Maybe later I’ll do it with VMs, but eh not sure it’s my kind of hobby. Too many other things to do.
Best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Seconding this experience with Mint 21.3, although on a laptop here. I just wanted something that works without much fucking about, and it delivers.
Yes! Linux Mint is such a great project - it made me excited to get on my desktop again.
I have a Surface Notebook 2 and for the life of me can’t get Ubuntu (or Xubuntu in my case) to work with it. No matter which installation style I use, either it crashes during the installation or never boots into the bootloader. Eventually I installed some custom Arch, but I hate it.
If it’s any comfort, it took me a few tries to get it to work. It was over a year ago so the details are a bit rusty. I started out trying to install Debian, and it also crashed during installation, so I went back and tried some of the bug fixes. (One was something to do with the MOK). Debian didn’t work after that but Ubuntu did. It was a strange experience, and there’s nothing that would motivate me to switch after I finally got it to work.
Perhaps you can give it another shot sometime and it’ll work. If you hate the custom arch that’s on it, and you don’t use it, you might as well try.
Yeah I’ll try eventually, but I got another Laptop running Xubuntu just fine, so I just don’t really use the Surface at all. It’s more of a last resort for the time being, and for that, any OS will do.
Currently running Garuda for gaming and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for everything else. Very much look forward to combining them in my own Arch/Void install when I get my new laptop.
Dumb question, why don’t you use Garuda for everything?
As somebody who rarely PC games at the moment, I feel it’s pretty bloated for what it is. But my Nvidia GPU worked out of the box so
What distro I’m using isn’t that helpful of a question because it’s largely a matter of taste and technical needs. I use Arch in large part because I do some rather exotic things that would be harder to set up on most mainstream distros whereas Arch just gives me a completely blank slate to work with and configure my system the exact way I want it to work. My desktop also has some server duties, it runs VMs, it has multiple GPUs and also drives my TV room independently of my main workstation area.
I usually recommend whichever distro gets you the closest to having everything the way you like out of the box as a starting point just because it’s less frustrating when most things works out of the box. The Arch experience is nothing works out of the box because it doesn’t even come with a box. Arch isn’t necessarily a bad choice even for beginners, but the learning curve is much steeper as a result and some people do like to just learn everything whereas some others prefer to start with the shallow part of the pool rather than diving it headfirst. It’s not like you have to commit to any distribution forever, you can start with something simple to use, learn your way around Linux and then you can upgrade to another distribution as your needs and wants evolves.
Debian is mine and has been for decades + I’m a little bit happy to see it’s still well represented / well thought of in the community. Everything works, and you can choose new + exciting with headaches sometimes, or old + stable with no headaches but old.
Only real issue is the package management hasn’t kept pace with node / python / go / everything else wanting to do its own little mini package management, and so very occasionally that side is a little bit of a mess
NixOS I would like to try at some point as the core philosophy seems a little more suited to the modern (Docker / pip / etc) era, but I never messed with it
I recently switched to Debian and use nix to install / provide the likes of node / python / go for development.
Wait, how does that work? Can you do Nix package management on a Debian system or something?
I’m on Debian Stable (with a few backported packages) for both work and gaming. It’s not the most beginner-friendly distro, but I’m no beginner, and I love how low-maintenance it is. It just keeps on working.
I would like to try Qubes OS eventually. I don’t think it will be ready for gaming any time soon, but for privacy and security-minded isolation of components, I expect it’s tough to beat.
I think Fedora is the current best distro. I’ve used everything under the sun over time, and if you use linux for 20+ years, you’ll find you need to distro hop because every distro will get bad (and ideally good again).
I really like Fedora, but the release cycle is too fast for my tastes. Also I find Gnome distracting these days.
That’s why after 20+ years I use Mint or LMDE. I don’t have the time or interest to tinker the way I used to unless I’m getting paid for it. Mint was the thing that got me to leave Fedora.
Yeah, I use Gnome, and I kind of hate it and feel like a bunch of religious ideologues are constantly trying to break my window manager on update so I find Jesus, but I’m used to it, so it’s what I use…
Linux mint it just works.
I’m currently on Neon on the desktop (and macOS on the mac). On the servers it nearly all debian and a couple of BSDs
Over the last almost 25 years i’ve almost exclusively ran KDE when not being stuck with windows (for various reasons). Ive heard good things about Arch, but I’m getting far too old to be bothered with a semi-complex install (yes I have run Gentoo for several years, so I think it is an age thing).
I’m currently using Kubuntu, although I’m planning on switching to Debian or maybe NixOS at some point. Kubuntu works, but I don’t like snaps, and even though I’ve removed them I’d rather just not ever have to deal with them.
I first started with Mint, but didn’t like gnome/cinnamon which is why I switched to Kubuntu, but other than that it was fine.
Gentoo, after a 15 year break where I used Ubuntu / Arch. Might try NixOS or something similar.
KDE for desktop env.
My first choice is Pop!_OS because my graphics cards are NVidia, but you said that you don’t like their DE. My second choice is LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). It is boring and stable and gets out of your way.
I have a few machines, which run:
- Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it’s fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it’s 2004.
- openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
- Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
- FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I’d give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
- Gentoo (WIP) - I’m just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
- crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.
Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.
Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.
The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.
Started with Mint, next tried Ubuntu and I just stuck with it for now. It’s a polished experience although sometimes snaps issues show up, so I’ve been considering switching to either PopOS 24.04 when it comes out or trying out Nix.
