I’m between distros and looking for a new daily driver for my laptop. What are people daily driving these days? Are there any new cool things to try?
I have been using linux mint recently. I have used nixos and arch in the past. Personally, linux mint uses flatpacks too much for my liking. Although, I might have a warped perspective after using arch. (the aur is crazy big)
OpenSuse tumbleweed + kde plasma for a peace of mind 👍
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
I am amongst you scholars and noblemen.
Indeed there are my dude!
Opensuse Tumbleweed. A rock solid rolling release.
I’m surprised by how many people are rocking opensuse in this thread. What made you go with opensuse?
I would say the benefit of OpenSUSE is that everything is preconfigured to work right out of the box, including btrfs snapshotting with snapper. Once you boot it’s time to download apps, and go. Very windows like for those who just want the system to work. Updates are one click.
In my case not at all. But that is by choice. I always start from a server install. For me i like rolling as i do not get major version updates. And with tumbleweed it is very solid at the same time. Snapper and btrfs are also great aditions.
The only downside is that they don’t support zfs properly, and the package selection is more limited. The community repos aren’t always maintained.
Until the kernel updates to something unsupported and you find out that they don’t keep old kernels in the rolling release. An amazing experience.
Never hat issues on my 10+ year old system. I did how ever with rocky linux 9.4. It is unsupported on my old dell r610s
I had it on two systems. Some peripherals stopped working after an update on one system and the attempt to downgrade it to the LTS (Leap?) failed miserably --> Ubuntu. On another one the graphics card stopped working and somehow forced it to the LTS with a custom kernel. That worked until trying to upgrade it by two minor releases (X.2 to X.4? Can’t remember if it was 13.Y 14.Y or 15.Y). There were so many conflicts and messing around with the source lists (or whatever they’re called)…
It was the most difficult system to update that I’ve ever had. YaST is great though. Best GUI for system configuration I’ve had so far.
A Chevy volt. Turns out gm figured out that a PHEV is a great idea 12 years ago
What kinda rpms you getting on that
- It probably uses apks.
Not sure, just realized this is a computer post lol
If you want mpg it’s anywhere from 75 to 130mpg per tank of gas.
Haha, welcome. rpm was just the first vaguely-car-sounding Linux term I could think of.
What is rpms in Linux? I just lurk on /all so I see a ton of Linux stuff that I don’t understand haha
RedHat Package Manager. It’s also the file extension for their packages, so you’ll see stuff like firefox_nightly.rpm
For laptops, I’ve been using EndeavourOS lately. All of the Arch goodness, but with an easy installer that handles the DE too. It’s as close to “just works” as you can get while still having pacman + AUR at the end.
I still love raw Arch, but I leave that for server installs.
Same, EOS is awesome and cured my distro-hopping.
Not saying anything bad about EndeavourOS, because it’s great, but:
All of the Arch goodness, but with an easy installer that handles the DE too.
Arch has a guided TUI installer included in it’s ISO that does this too.
It does, but it’s done me wrong a few times so I never recommend it. For all I know it’s fine these days, but old grudges are hard do shake.
archinstall let’s you choose a DE too
Fedora Workstation. Couldn’t be happier.
Same, it’s a “it just works” distro.
OpenSUSE TW for me. Used to be Arch but it’s just too much faff for me.
Same, I’ve used Linux since the late nineties and know my way around but I have other things to do. TW with Plasma/Wayland is great.
NixOS user here! Fedora is a very good contender as well
NixOS too. I really like having a “fresh” install every time I restart.
+1 on NixOS. On all devices except Android phones since 2014 for me.
Arch for many, many years. Absolutely zero reasons to switch. I used to distro hop alot back in the day but I don’t bother with that anymore. I need a system that works and Arch gives me exactly that.
Why distro hop from arch if you can make any distro out of it anyway lol I use arch btw
I like Debian with GNOME
i’m on manjaro kde, will switch soon to nixos if i understand how it all works :)
otherwise arch
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s been great having a rolling release distro that I don’t have to worry about breaking with updates
I’ve been running Fedora for years. I tried out Arch and OpenSUSE a bit this year just to see if I was missing anything, and went right back to Fedora afterward.
Not as fussy as Arch and better package availability than SUSE (for my needs at least). Also dnf is my favorite package manager despite being relatively slow.
EndeavourOS on desktop and laptop side of things.
I’ve never tried NixOS, but it looks really promising.
I usually use Fedora or OpenSUSE, which have good software availability (unfortunately not as good as the AUR). Fedora provides selinux by default, and has profiles for basically everything. SUSE uses AppArmor, but Arch doesn’t provide convenient configuration for either, and only supports x86_64 (which is why I switched away from it).
After using NixOS, I don’t think I could go back to a regular distro. At the very least, maybe debian with the nix package manager
As someone who uses it as well:
Yes it is. Especially if you use Gnome. Because you can set dconf settings right in your Config.
It takes a while to remember to configure your User Account not in the normal Settings App but instead in the Config, but once you do it’s amazing.
I reinstalled on my Laptop and i was back on my old Desktop with all my Programs, Extensions, Settings etc within 20 Minutes
When i change a Setting on my Laptop, i use Git to synch the Config to my Desktop and all the changes i made to my Laptop are also on my Desktop.
Also: no more accidentally breaking your system. I don’t have to type random Commands in my Terminal to try and fix something and then try ans revert them. I just add the Config. If it doesn’t work, i remove the Config again and it automatically reverts everything back as if nothing ever happened.
It is trily amazing
Now if only SELinux or Apparmor finally were supported.
@Neon maybe I’ll install it on my Kubantu
Just know: it takes time and effort to learn. The Documentation is often not that good and you’ll go digging in blogs, Forums and Github Issues.
All in all i’d say i’ve spent probably more Time learning Nixos than i’ve spent learning Linux. Which, admittedly wasn’t much as i started recently with fedora which has gotten really beginner-friendly, but still. I’d say i spent at least all in all 20 hours learning how to fix a fringe Problem in Nixos.
Most of that time was wasted on useless fringe stuff you’d probably never want to do, but there’s also some rather normal stuff in there: i remember that my SWAP wasn’t decrypring correctly from LUKS, which wasn’t really bad or anything, it just annoyed me that it didn’t work, and i spent about 40 Minutes debugging that.
For me it was totally worth it. I would do it again in a Heartbeat. However, if you have a full-time Job and a Family, maybe you should just get a Fedora Workstation Laptop. Or a Macbook even.
@Neon luckily I have no life so yay I guess but it seems intriguing so maybe I’ll try it out later as school slows down so I have the time
