I’d like to settle on a distro, but none of them seem to click for me. I want stability more than anything, but I also value having the latest updates (I know, kind of incompatible).

I have tested Pop!_Os, Arch Linux, Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu. Arch and Pop being the two that I enjoyed the most and seemed the most stable all along… I am somewhat interested in testing NixOS although the learning curve seems a bit steep and it’s holding me back a bit.

What are you using as your daily drive? Would you recommend it to another user? Why? Why not?

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    1 year ago

    Don’t yell but Fedora/Ubuntu was my first exposure to Linux so I’m prejudiced toward them. I didn’t have a lot of exposure to 'nix in the 90s since the family only had Windows.

  • Kerb@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    i settled on fedora kde a few years ago(altho i recently switched to fedora silverblue kde)
    imo a nice middleground.

    if you are intrested in immutable distros, i can recommend silverblue (not as drastic of a change compared to nixos)

    if you are intrested in nixos package management, you might want to try out the nix package manager on your current distro.

    an intresting way to get the fresh but stable system you want is to,
    install some rock solid distro like debian,
    and then use the nix package manager and/or flatpacks to get the fresh software you want.

  • Hibby@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    For desktop Linux, I use Arch. It’s a community driven base distribution, so the needs of the community are what drives development and there are no financial decisions of a company that get priority, which is refreshing. It also has access to the latest and greatest that Linux has to offer.

    They have a philosophy of expecting basic effort from users and to have a tinkering mindset. Historically, Arch devs and users have a reputation of being grumpy greybeards, but many of the rough edges have been rounded off in the last few years. If you are willing to do a bit of reading or watching some YouTube videos, it’s not really that hard.

    You can really build a lean and powerful machine that has just the software you want on the system with Arch. All it takes is a little effort and willingness to ask for help from the community after you have tried and failed to solve problems yourself. It’s really not the badge of elitism to use Arch in 2023. It’s never been easier to use and doesn’t blow up on you nearly as often as the reputation implies. Just use good hygiene and make snapshots so if you blow it up, it’s only a 5 minute recovery.

  • crystal@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    I use NixOS on my main PC.

    If you want to use NixOS, you have to be willing to read.

    Two things are especially difficult:

    Coding: You will have to learn the Nix-specific way for everything you do. How does Nodejs work in NixOS? How does GCC work in NixOS? How does my IDE work in NixOS?

    Using unofficial packages: The nix repos are very large and you’ll most likely find everything you need there (or on flatpak/flathub). But if something isn’t there, the easiest way tends to be packaging it as a nix package yourself. And that’s something many people probably don’t want to do.

    The coding thing is annoying enough that I may switch away from NixOS at some point.

    Other than that, NixOS is great.

  • thejevans@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    I use Debian for servers. I recently began migrating from Arch on my desktops to NixOS. The shift from the fantastic Arch wiki documentation to the NixOS documentation was a huge stumbling block, but I got through it. It took a lot of time to get NixOS to a nice state on my main laptop, but once I did, installing it to my 2013 macbook air and configuring it to be exactly like my main laptop took all of 15 minutes. That was a huge deal for me. The next hurdle is going to be installing it on my desktop with nvidia GPU, but I don’t expect it will take too long.

    I’ll probably start migrating servers to NixOS where I can, too.

    Here is my NixOS config repo, if that helps: https://github.com/thejevans/nix-config/

  • unknowing8343@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    You tried most of them. You found Arch enjoyable, so I’d stick to that for the Wiki, the community, and flexibility.

    NixOS looks interesting too, but nothing beats Arch in terms of having so much software at one-click distance with the almighty AUR.

  • fly_paper_love_maker@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m running NixOS on my laptop and I really like it though I haven’t been able to get Resilio going. It’s challenging sometimes but when I have things the way I want them I have a great sense of order. So it’s the most satisfying Linux I’ve tried.

        • Klaymore@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’ve been using Syncthing for a couple years and it works pretty well. Haven’t tried Resilio but the main difference afaik is that Syncthing doesn’t have an iOS client and Resilio isn’t open source.

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    Debian stable, the os for 50 year old nudists.

    It’s the stable branch of one of the oldest distributions around.

    • di5ciple@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      This man knows. My whole config is stored in github. Super easy to come back to a perfectly setup box or clone it on another machine.

  • Lemmchen@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    For the past six years it has been Kubuntu, but I think it’s time to finally abort Canonical and their idiosyncrasies and choose Debian as a KDE base, especially now that Debian 12 includes non-free firmware by default.