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.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
79 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
1258 readers
104 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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
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.
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!
Came here to say the same thing
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
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.
+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.
Another vote for openSUSE Tumbleweed
OpenSuse tumbleweed
PopOS. Mostly because I’m really interested in their Rust based DE that’s to replace Gnome.
Yep, for me the most exciting moment in 2024 will be Cosmic being released and partly also the release of KDE 6, even though that probably won't be a big deal. Just nice to use qt 6 I guess. It doesn't have any new features really.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed without a doubt!
If we allow derivatives, I'd say SteamOS despite being Arch. It's putting Linux in non-technical people's literal hands and it's not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It's almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It's been a really long time since we've last seen a fundamentally different distro that's got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they're still very package oriented. We've been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It's incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they're atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.
I've seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Read in an New Zealand accent this is classic Sales.
I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a few personal servers as I wait for Slowroll, I want to get back to trying to get Gentoo running, and I should check out Guix as a server in a VM.
Gentoo having a binary option should help since I seem to mess up the kernel part of the installation.
I use the bin kernel. I don't change anything that is kernel level, so the default is fine. It cuts down on updates and install by a lot, but more important is that it's stable. I personally love gentoo, it's my favorite and I've tried basically everything.
DietPi! It's one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It's ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn't have what you're looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.
I'm enjoying OpenSuse Tumbleweed loving rolling release and stability
QubesOS. When you need security and don't need to play games, this is objectively the best distro.
I thought you meant using any distro other than Qubes was "playing games." Then I remembered actual computer games exist.
Can't believe no-one mentioned voidlinux yet. It's very tasty.
Bazzite. It's based on Fedora uBlue so it's technically Fedora, but being an immutable OS, it works quite differently enough that it counts as its own distro. For instance, you don't use dnf or yum to install stuff, you'd use Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix. Updates are done using the rpm-ostree command, and it's effectively a rolling release model, but atomic in nature so you get none of the instability that you'd get in a typical rolling release.
Custom North Korean linux. Preinstalled missile tracking software.
Alpine
Linux Mint
I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .
The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that's very intense, let's say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials
Some of my favourites are Void Linux, Artix and Opensuse Tumbleweed
Void was my first non-systemd distro, and it was super snappy as well. Some packages may not available but overall I had a really great experience with it. It also offers a version with the musl C library. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Opensuse tumbleweed is an overall a great distro, it's one of my favourites. Also I noticed that many people have recommended it and that's for a good reason. It's installer isn't that user friendly but I would prefer it over Fedora's installer any day. ( I haven't tried the last 3 iterations of Fedora, so it might have changed now )
Artix is well... arch with different init systems. Nothing too crazy. Its what I have been daily driving for the past year or so.
I get that there are a lot of novel are cool distros out there, but I just stick with Debian (or one of the other well known distros that have been around for decades).
I do it because from a security standpoint, they have my trust. Maybe in 10-20 years with a good reputation and history, but it's not there.
elementary!
I really enjoy ZorinOS! I've been using ZorinOS 16.3 and am awaiting the upgrade to 17 through their tool. It's been great for a PC that has an Nvidia GTX1060 that I have hooked up to my TV as a twitch/YouTube/Netflix box. I chose Zorin because they claimed to get the Nvidia drivers installed correctly "out of the box", and they delivered!
Mint.
OpenSUSE Leap, has been a solid 7 year run, with flawless updates. And no graphics issues because nVidia hosts their own repo for the gpu drivers.
MX Linux only because I have it on some very old 32 bit laptops and it supports 32 bit. I don't really know why I keep those laptops around but they are functional.
On the laptop I got less than a week ago for college, I've been having fun using Mx with KDE. It's been pretty good so far on my galaxy book.
NixOS, would like to try Guix
I'm currently using Arch (btw), but I have been hearing the distant call of NixOS lately...
Another NixOS user.
MX Linux. It's exactly how I'd set up Debian if I wasn't too lazy. Although, I've gone back to Debian after Bookwarm was released. I love it but miss MX
:Nervously raised hand: SteamOS 3.5...?
I am using void at the moment, pretty stable even tho it is rolling release
LMDE, MX, Ubuntu etc are based on Debian. Mint is based on Ubuntu, so Debian. Chimera/Endeavour are based on Arch, etc.
In the linux world, you have a linux kernel, systemd or init, a bunch of gnu utils, a window system like X or Wayland, whatever DE you want (Xfce, gnome, kde, name it) and a packaging system (apt, yum, pacman), but for me, it's all the same.
If you want something different, try a BSD distro then? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, GhostBSD, etc
LMDE cuz sometimes i just need dead simple.
not sure if it really counts but I like Universal Blue, specifically using their silverblue-framework image because it already has all the drivers and stuff set up for my Framework laptop
view more: next ›