I’m wondering what the current favorite distros are besides the most popular ones like Arch, Debian and Fedora.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • BlanK0@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

    I am using void at the moment, pretty stable even tho it is rolling release

  • Vinegar@kbin.social
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      10 months ago

      Very intrigued by OpenSUSE as an alternative to Fedora. How do you think the two stack up against each other? Is it a noticeable leap switching between them?

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • RotatingParts@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • TrivialBetaState@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    10 months ago

    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

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.