Put any distro in front of me and provided I don't need to master it, I'm good. Ubuntu is fine. Debian is fine. RedHat is fine. Fedora is fine. I even have a tiny low-end system that is using Bohdi. Whatever. We're all using mostly the same kernel anyway.
90% of what I do is in a container anyway so it almost doesn't matter; half the time that means Alpine, but not really. That includes both consuming products from upstream as well as software development. I also practically live in the terminal, so I couldn't care less what GUI subsystem is in play, even while I'm using it.
Mint Cinnamon. Fight me.
Distro wars, like the old vi vs emacs wars (showing my age, I know) is not entirely serious. I never understood sportsball fandom, but it's kind of like that. Debian is my home team; if you use Fedora, you're from out-of-town.
Openbsd
I've been a Windows... Let's say a power-user, no expert but I could install it, find a way to troubleshoot most problems. Then at high school a friend lent me a bit outdated Knoppix CD. I never managed to make ppp work on that so no internet, but I loved the old KDE. Somewhat later, when we had a normal DSL line with a proper router, I got Fedora. Then Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian for a while...
Finally I found Gentoo. And there I am, some 10 years later, still on that. After a bit of a bumpy road of the first install (no automation, but the handbook is very helpful if you know the basic Linux and HW terms) it was almost flawless. I remember two problems, and both of them were my own fault. The first one was some testing kernel version that had a bug where small files on ext3 filesystem would get randomly corrupted. The second was when I was trying to remove some hidden files, mangled the command and ran basically rm -rf /* (seriously, don't do that, it will delete everything on your system). I reinstalled the system (I had data on a different drive that either wasn't mounted atm or it didn't reach them before I Ctrl-c'd that command.) and all was well.
Finally I did last clean install when I bought new (used) Ryzen build to replace my old i5-2500k, I would've had to recompile world anyway and I had pretty much dependency hell of my own making at that point (I was testing tons of unstable stuff, new Plasma 5 from testing repo and so on).
Now I'm running mostly stable system with only bunch of packages unmasked from testing and there are no problems with that. I never had that with any other distro. No matter if Deb based, rpm based, sooner or later I inevitably ran into some variant of "I need a package that's not in basic repo, and the package I found requires a version of some library that's not available as well" or something like that. In Gentoo, the packages either compile against the version you have installed, or if not possible, you can have more versions installed at the same time in different slots. Also if you need something that's not available in repo, you can just write a text file that downloads and compiles the version you need and it integrates in the package manager automatically, no need to create whole Deb/rpm package.
Ooookay, this will get controversial.
Proud Manjaro/Debian user!
- Ubuntu and derivatives suck because of Canonical and their practices
- Fedora sucks because of Red Hat
- OpenSUSE sucks because RPM (why?!) and still SUSE (but they're the best of the three)
- Rest is exotic and obscure
So we end up with Arch and Debian. Debian 12 is good enough as is, and runs on a work laptop where I don't care about anything but stability. Arch is respectable and great, but requires excessive maintenance to work properly. Among its derivatives, Endeavour is just a nicer archinstall (so, why?), Garuda is cool but unstable and too gamer'y, Manjaro is a bit problematic at times but generally the safest bet when it comes to Arch. So, when it comes to my main PC doubling as a gaming rig, this is a no-brainer.
Fedora Workstation 40.
On windows until last year, after trying 11 on my T440s which made it unbearably slow so had to start over but instead of going back to 10 tried a bunch of distros.
Fedora stuck, mainly because of gnome vanilla (I really like the paradigm, don't care about deep personalisation) and how everything just worked great.
Fight me?
mint.
Nobara! switched 2 days ago, deleted my Windows partition 3 hours ago because it's smooth sailing and quite the different experience compared to bashing my head against debian jessie ages ago.
Edit: the final nail in the coffin were the fking backported ads in the start menu. seriously, wtf.
I run distro, btw
Been running Bazzite for a month and having a great experience with it! My nvidea cards work with no hassle, and with the extended proton I have had issues with only 1 game so far, and even that was fixed by just switching to a different version. Only downside so far is that Wayland doesn't work as well as X11 on my DE, but with the rest working great, I have no complaints :)
Debian Testing.
Learning about the xz backdoor was a fun week.
Reactions:
Ubuntu: 😮why?
Manjaro: haven’t you managed to kill it yet?
Mint: ex windows guy?
Debian: 😃nice, how did you got to that decision?
Endeavour: 😃nice, how did you got to that decision?
Arch: 😃nice, how did you got to that decision?
Nix: 😃nice, how did you got to that decision?
OpenSUSE: 😃nice, how did you got to that decision?
…
I had to ditch my girlfriend because she became an arch elitist. Debian ftw.
I've gone with PopOs. Ubuntu based so well supported. They've been around for a while now so they won't disappear over night. Gaming just works.
I was on Nobara for a while and really liked it. but while glorious eggroll is the goat, I don't want to put my DE in the hands of a single person.
Since swapping the I've experienced one game crashing freeze (which I hope was a one off), and when screen sharing BG3 over discord it slows the game down to a crawl. But I blame discord for this one, as its fine when streaming from OBS.
So true. But this is (usually) more like sibling rivalry instead of actual disrespect. It is kinda fun if you're in the mood to poke at your peers.
Debian, add Mint, Backbox, Opencpn, Navigatrix, Marinux, Mozilla, Kismet and several other depots. It's a monster at the end and I have to pay attention when updating and booting, but it gets all the jobs done for me all of the times.
Bazzite bro here
Red Star OS, commrad!
I'm on Tumbleweed right now. Used to be on Arch flavors, Garuda then Cachy OS.
Tumbleweed is almost as fast for gaming performance, I just don't have it in me to do all the tinkering anymore. Just want something up to date that works.
Arch was... great and pretty reliable, just got tired of the tinkering.
It lasted for a precious second.
last time I was messing around with Linux on a second machine I think I installed Mint. it was fine 🤷🏻♂️
Alpine, mainly. It's not bad on desktop.
Manjaro and Debian
Linux is Linux.
We should send all those people, pages and guides suggesting distros to hell.
And then instead we suggest update-schemes (fixed, rolling, slow-roll), package managers and Desktop environments. People with enough brain cells to start a computer are then absolutely able to chose a distro fitting them based on that. Everything else coming with a distro is just themeing/branding anyway...
(and just for the use statistic: Archlinux, Opensuse (Leap and Kalpa), Debian here...)
Dual booting W11 and Linux Mint. I like linux, but can't get adobe premiere to work satisfactorily there. There are also some softwares like a viewer for 3DS games on my modded 3DS that I can't really use either
Home server: Proxmox (Debian). Redundant DNS: Raspbian (Debian). Parent's server: Debian (Debian).
Gonna be honest, I mostly live off my phone and a retroid pocket.
Arch.
Nobara :)
"She is adopted" - Arch user
