What is the default shell of your main distro?

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I find this shocking, so many Linux users don’t know what shell they use!

What is the default shell of your main distro?

In our Questions and Answers section this week we talked about various shells and why bash is often the default in Linux distributions. There are plenty of other command line shells and some distributions use alternative shells as the default. On your main distribution, what is the default shell?

These results are from: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20260817#poll
bash: 412 (23%)
csh: 2 (0%)
dash: 10 (1%)
fish: 33 (2%)
ksh: 8 (0%)
sh: 9 (0%)
tcsh: 2 (0%)
zsh: 30 (2%)
Other: 63 (3%)
I do not have a main distro: 3 (0%)
I do not know: 1257 (69%)

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Weekly Forum Summary
Weekly Forum Summary
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That is not very surprising to me at all. While I have personally at least tried all of the shells mentioned and a few others, most people use whatever is the default in the system they are using. When you get to shells like either fish or zsh, most of the time those are people who are looking for specific features. I’ve not used tcsh in a really long time, but that is the only C shell base worth using for strictly interactive use. I cannot recommend anything based on csh for any kind of coding; the syntax does not lend itself to useful scripts. At one time the zsh shell appeared to be the most powerful but that didn’t make it any more popular.

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I myself was using bash, as I had no reason to move to anything else other than the default shell that came with the distro. I recently moved over to zsh, just to see if there was a different experience, plus I read a few posts about it. Honestly, I haven’t seen much of a difference as yet. On a Garuda distro, I played with fish. Garuda had it nicely formatted so it was easy to work with.

So unless a person is spending serious time in the terminal, I have to agree with @Brian_Masinick, most people won’t know what you never have to use. It would be nice to run a poll to see what the gentelmen and ladies here use.

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Weekly Forum Summary
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I agree with this—I tried out zsh for a short while because I heard from some people I should switch. However, for my use, I didn’t notice any difference from bash so I’m back on that again. I would imagine that a different shell might offer features for power users but I’m definitely not in that category.

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I guess is surprised my because I am such a casual user and generally don’t use the terminal but prefer a GUI to do everything, and I knew bash was default for Ubuntu MATE. If I have to use the terminal I have a cheat sheet to copy and paste. Poor memory and even worst typist.

The default shell for Ubuntu MATE is bash, which is commonly used as the user login shell. However, the system shell is often linked to dash.

I didn’t know what dash was, so had to look that up:

Bash is a more feature-rich shell compared to Dash, which is a lightweight and faster shell. In some Linux distributions, Dash is used as the default shell for scripts that specify /bin/sh, while Bash remains the default interactive shell.

I don’t write scripts.

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I use zsh but looking to change waiting for whetuu sooner because omz kinda slow startup speed

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generally not keep /bin/sh bash linked

doesn’t matter some bootstrap apps such as steam does

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Don’t game either. I didn’t write that about dash and bash, it was from a tech site. As I said, I don’t use the terminal if there is a GUI, and it is seldom there is not a GUI for what I need.

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Kali allows you a choice during install, Zsh or Bash. Zsh is the default. It’s grown on me. I prefer it by a mile now.

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Are there specific features you use that make you prefer zsh over bash?

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Mostly the stuff I use constantly: the tab completion is way smarter, it’ll cycle through options and even complete flags and paths.

The history search, where ytou start typing a command and hit up to filter to just matching entries

Some highlight here:

Plugins via oh-my-zsh:

Bash can do some of this with tweaking but zsh gives it to you out of the box or close to it.

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I see, thanks! I must concede that the autocomplete was absolutely fantastic during the brief time I tried zsh with Oh My Zsh.

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I was able to get oh-my-sh installed, but I was not very satisfied with it on my antiX 23.2 system (that’s a Bookworm-based setup, still supported for another couple of years). While some things work, it spits out a few messages pretty consistently:

Blockquote➜ .oh-my-zsh git:(master)
zle-line-init:echoti:1: no such terminfo capability: smkx
➜ .oh-my-zsh git:(master) cd
zle-line-finish:echoti:1: no such terminfo capability: rmkx
➜ ~ git:(master)
zle-line-init:echoti:1: no such terminfo capability: smkx
➜ ~ pwd
zle-line-finish:echoti:1: no such terminfo capability: rmkx
/home/masinick
➜ ~
zle-line-init:echoti:1: no such terminfo capability: smkx

I don’t see an immediate way to install smkx or rmkx; without research I have no idea what they are or where to get them.

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The history search is what i was looking for. I don’t know if I have used it yet. But I see that coming in handy.

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I’m using Bash together with Starship in Kitty, and I never want to be without it. :slight_smile:

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Sounds like you are quite happy with this configuration. We each have specific things we do and various preferences about the way things operate and the way they look. I’m glad you have something that works the way you want!

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Sure, I am happy with it. :wink: :+1:

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I’m fine with Bash, I tried Fish and didn’t feel the need to change

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Likewise. I did experiment with Fish recently and did not find any compelling features. I’ve done similar things with zsh.

A long time ago Bash did not have all of the features that it has now. Maybe some of the other shells are more efficient on one end, with fewer features, or more feature rich, on the other end, but with the combination of time, experience, and overall compatibility with the sh family of shells, I have absolutely no compelling reason personally to use other shells, though I am always interested in the interests of others; we most certainly do NOT have to use the same identical tools; to me, that is a fantastic reason for using Linux: there are choices and diversity in many areas, so to me that is a huge plus, and therefore we can enjoy all kinds of diverse and different features while still using a similar core platform.

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