What brought your current Linux distro?

General Discussions
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Solid approach. Fundamentally that is always what I aim for, figure our what I need to save/document so if I need to I can just build it again. :+1:

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42

I always forget to do the documentation partā€¦ I really should start keeping track of system-specific changes/fixes that I make.

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43

I do have installation documentation for all my used distributions where I can add modifications or installation instructions. It helps me installing from scratch.

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44

Thatā€™s a good approach. I multi-boot, so I have copies on multiple systems, and I also have multiple machines. On top of that, I create occasional snapshots of each different distribution; that definitely covers my configuration files and Iā€™ve been doing this since my days as a UNIX developer/maintainer. I had multiple workstations there; the workstations were not automatically backed up, but the servers were, so I had those backups plus the tools I created to quickly test a workstation. One of my workstations was a stable one that I connected to a server, another one was also connected to a server but Iā€™d often reload the latest nightly build, so I had to create a mechanism to decide what I was putting in new and what I was saving and inserting immediately after the creation of a new build, so creating tools for backup and recovery are well tested and familiar to me; many of them have scaled from a UNIX system to quite a few Linux systems over the past twenty five years or so.

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45

This is really cool! I like that you have multiple different workstations.

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46

Started with Red Hat 5 in the late 90ā€™s, and have tried out nearly 60 distros over the years, but finally settled on Mint in 2015 and have been using it as my main distro ever since. Prior to that Iā€™d been using Ubuntu for a decade, but didnā€™t like the corporate direction they seemed to be taking. I still test new distros out, but none have knocked Mint off the top spot for me.

Here are ten things I love about Mint:

  1. Timeshift
  2. making a bootable USB by right-clicking on the iso
  3. ability to upgrade to 22.3 through the update manager
  4. stability
  5. ease of use and configuration
  6. excellent nvidia driver support
  7. clean presentation
  8. installation is fast and easy
  9. great community support
  10. Steam games run great
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47

ive wanted to use linux after getting my old laptop with 2gb of ram it was bad,and i seen people talking about cachyos and arch and i gone with cachyos i distrohopped,i now realise ive been using only arch based distros except debian

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48

Welcome to the community @Greatyman, nice to meet you! :+1:

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49

@hydn Excellent Question. I never looked at my last switch from that angle.

I had vanilla arch with sway as the TWM on my home computer, and manjaro with I3 on my work computer. The vanilla arch was pretty stable, but I was lagging in keeping up to date with the arch updates, sometimes two months behind.

The actual trigger though, was a bug with manjaro on my work laptop, which is a Dell computer. The fix was to upgrade the kernel, but manjaro was not making that easy. And so I decided to look for an alternative that I could install on my work laptop, and also on my home computer.

I chose Fedora Sway, and it has now been about a year and a half I think, on this OS.

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50

Great question:

I used to distro-hop quite a bit. This was my way of learning what was new in Linux and I liked seeing which distroā€™s where deploying the new in Linux.

While I donā€™t have experience with every Linux distro, I quickly learned that the new in Linux was showing up in Arch first.

I learned about btrfs & ZRAM from Garuda Linux. I love their use of pacsnap & grub-btrfs as well. I have used other Arch-based distroā€™s, but I really like most of the default configuration in Garuda, so itā€™s my daily driver.

I also love the design of immutable distroā€™s for security reasons. I love the idea behind NixOS, but I donā€™t care for the implementation.

In the end, I love the philosophy of ā€œFor the community, by the communityā€ of open-source software. With that being said, commercially (strongly) influenced distroā€™s have, um, made decisions that I donā€™t care for, so I run Debian on the servers in my homelab and Arch-based distroā€™s on my desktops/laptops.

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51

This was exactly what attracted me to Arch. I was at the part of my Linux journey where I wanted to test the latest days after it came out, not in the next six months.

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52

New is exactly why I donā€™t use and will never use Arch, and want stability and reliability, not new. That is what make Linux great, it fits the needs of different people by giving everyone choice.

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53

Garuda & EndeavourOS have, by far, been the most stable & reliable distroā€™s Iā€™ve ever used.

As strange as it may sound, I have more issues with Debian on the servers in my homelab than I do with Garuda or EndeavourOS.

With that being said, the issues I have experienced with Debian have been few and far between.

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54

I can see what youā€™re saying, but Iā€™m a desktop user which while all the Distros support servers they are a different animal than desktops. Again choice is the key, something both Apple and Micro$oft both lack.

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55

Iā€™m glad you said it that way: different people want different things. @Jymm one thing I can tell you is that some Arch-based systems are super easy to manage, even if you know nothing about their packaging; Endeavour OS is one such example. While you CAN use yay or pacman to manage them, their Welcome Center also has selections that you can click to manage them GUI style, so you donā€™t have to get your hands dirty and understand it unless you WANT to do so. For me thatā€™s great because I can tweak with it all that I want but when Iā€™m busy and have too much to do I can press buttons or simply wait until I have the time to experiment; itā€™s pretty good about allowing choices even in the way that it is managed.

@mr_mcbride discusses this and has had stability and success with his Arch based distributions, even though, like me, he probably has years more experience with Debian-based systems (is that correct @mr_mcbride ? )

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56

While Iā€™ve used Linux Mint Debian edition & MX linux for short periods of time, that was years ago.

I moved all of the servers in my homelab to Debian from CentOS 7. That was when, back in 2024? Iā€™ve been using Debian as my server platform of choice since then. I believe I started with Debian version 11, then upgraded to version 12, and just upgraded to version 13 about a month or so ago.

However, Iā€™ve been using Garuda since about 2018 and EndeavourOS since about 2019 or so.

While I am very comfortable with Linux, I am be no means an expert. The privacy & security side of me wonā€™t allow me to go back to the forbidden fruit or m$. Once you taste the freedom of open-source, its hard to consider anything else.

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57

I think your division of systems and where you use them is very good. In the PAST CentOS was a good server because it was based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When that whole situation changed, that altered the ā€œfree serverā€ choices.

Alternatively, Debian has also been a very good server choice. Another ā€œsurprise choiceā€ for a server candidate would be Slackware, though for you, no reasson to change.

As for your Arch-based choices, those are awesome. I donā€™t have experience with Garuda, other than reading positive things about it; Endeavour OS Iā€™ve been enjoying for several years after decades of barely trying or using Arch-based software and itā€™s been a real pleasure.

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