I’m wondering what the current favorite distros are besides the most popular ones like Arch, Debian and Fedora.

  • SteleTrovilo@beehaw.org
    48·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
      15·
      10 months ago

      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

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    471·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
    33·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        10 months ago

        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.

  • kalpol@lemmy.world
    30·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
      4·
      10 months ago

      OpenSUSE for me too.

      I also switched family & friends to Thimbleweed (since a bit too snappy Ubuntu) & it’s been great.

        • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
          2·
          10 months ago

          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.

  • dinckel@lemmy.world
    28·
    10 months ago

    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.

        • Atemu@lemmy.ml
          6·
          10 months ago

          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.

      • dinckel@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 months ago

        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

    • sping@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • Linuturk@lemmy.world
    25·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • synthsalad@mycelial.nexusEnglish
    231·
    10 months ago

    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!

    • 1984
      3·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • Cwilliams@beehaw.org
      2·
      10 months ago

      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

  • Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip
    21·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      8·
      10 months ago

      +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.