What is your preferred daily driver distribution?

transistor , 10 months ago

I’m using debian.

wildbus8979 , 10 months ago

Seconded

mouse , 10 months ago

I live on the more unstable side, I like Debian Unstable/Sid. I also recommend Siduction as it’s based on Debian Unstable.

transistor , 10 months ago

I’ve been actually trying Debian Testing for past few weeks.

mfn , 10 months ago

Debian not recommends testing for everyday using. You definetely have to look at the site. Afaik it is basically a bad version of unstable that gets slow updates and it is only for testing purposes.

danielton , 10 months ago

Yes, this is correct. The way Testing works, it is very possible (indeed, likely) that you could be stuck with a security vulnerability for weeks. You should use either stable or unstable.

transistor , 10 months ago

Can unstable be used as a daily driver?

danielton , 10 months ago

Yes, as long as you pay attention to what packages are being added and removed when you perform an update. Once in a great while, there have been instances of buggy packages mass-removing other packages due to a bug.

That said, Debian-based distros like Ubuntu usually base their stable releases on unstable. Unstable doesn’t refer to software stability. Rather, it refers to the idea that the system-level packages could change throughout the development cycle.

Security updates come to unstable through normal package updates, which testing doesn’t get until everything makes it through a probationary period with no “serious” bugs filed and no dependency issues. And if any package that the package needing the security patch depends on also has a serious bug filed, the process could take even longer.

transistor , 10 months ago

Packages from debian unstable trickle down to testing in 8-10 days usually if all the other criteria are met. But I have also heard that important security updates go straight from unstable to stable and then come to testing at a later time. When is that later date I have no idea.

Krause , 10 months ago

Fedora Workstation

CAPSLOCKFTW , 10 months ago

Arch Linux

Reasons:

• Pacman
• the AUR
• community driven
• bleeding edge
• pragmatic stance regarding closed source software
• sane defaults
• minimalism, build your own without too much compiling
• the wiki

dandroid , 10 months ago

My steam deck uses arch btw, and the main reason I didn’t choose arch for my laptop was because I haven’t had good experience with pacman. But I’ll be honest that I haven’t given it much of a chance, so I’d like to learn more. What is it that you like about pacman?

LeFantome , 10 months ago

What bad experience have you had with pacman? My favourite thing about it is that it is pretty much the only package manager that has never failed me.

dandroid , 10 months ago

Well on the steam deck, updates will always fail until I reboot the device then try to update again. I also really don’t like the syntax. It isn’t intuitive, and I can’t memorize it because of that. For example, I’m not sure why -S means install. I remember install because that’s the one I have used the most, but I can’t remember what is equivalent to apt update or apt upgrade, and I’m not sure why they can’t just use those terms. Why do I need to memorize arbitrary letters with captialization?

CAPSLOCKFTW , 10 months ago

I have no expierence with the steam deck, so dunno what’s up with that. Never expierenced something like that on my PCs tho.

Yes, the flags can be unintuitive for beginners, S stands for sync, which will sync the package(s) specified thereafter with the remote repositories. If the packages aren"t installed it means installing them, if they are already installed it means updating them to the version that is the latest version in the remote repository. Full system update is done by pacman -Syu, where y tells pacman to synchronize the package lists first and u selects all packages that are older than the ones in these package lists for the S.

You can easily learn all that by using fish (or zsh with a sufficient config) instead of bash. Then, you can enter pacman - and hit TAB to get a list of allowed flags and a brief description. Choose one, hit TAB again and get a list of flags that go with the one you selected before, again with a description right out of the man-page. BTW, that works with a lot of command line programs and is imo almost necessary to get in touch with the shell.

Bogasse , 10 months ago

The wiki is what makes it really hard for me to move out. This masterpiece is where I learned 70% of what I know about linux systems 🤷

FQQD , 10 months ago

I used Feren OS for a long time, but now i prefer Cachy OS and Vanilla Arch on my laptop, both with KDE Plasma

LeFantome , 10 months ago

Do you mean vanilla Arch or Vanilla ( with Arch )?

FQQD , 10 months ago

Just Arch linux as in I got it from the official Arch website

dark_stang , 10 months ago

Pop_os for my laptop and desktop. I use these machines for dev work and gaming. I want to spend as little time as possible doing maintenance. Debian for all servers and containers. Very stable, maintenance doesn’t take much effort.

If I was running a pure gaming system I’d probably go with Arch.

JustineSmithies , 10 months ago

Void Linux user here with Qtile - Wayland as my WM.

Jontique , 10 months ago

Nobara on my desktop, Pop_os! on my laptop. As soon as the new COSMIC DE is ready I will switch to Pop on my desktop as well.

Finkler , 10 months ago

Debian only household here …

amycatgirl , 10 months ago

Fedora Workstation. It’s fast and stable.

Everything I use is available either as a Flatpak or a RPM.

allywilson , 10 months ago

Here’s an incomplete list of my daily drivers since…well, I’m old.

• QNX Neutrino
• Mandrake 7.2
• RedHat 7.1
• Went back to Windoze for quite a while
• Gentoo
• Ubuntu (quite a leap there)
• OS X
• Linux Mint
• Debian
• LMDE
• Fedora
• KDE Neon
• macOS
• Fedora Asahi

I’m sure I’ve missed the odd one or two (and I regularly jumped back and forth with Debian/Ubuntu/Mint for years and years).

I used to distro hop a lot, so if I only used it for less than a month, I haven’t bothered to list it.

LeFantome , 10 months ago

Love that list. I am also old. I used SLS, Slackware, and stuff with the .99.x release numbers I switched to Red Hat around 4.1 I think and went to Mandrake from there. And then…

You never used Arch? Not even for Asahi?

allywilson , 10 months ago

I built Arch (twice I think) but only ever in a VM to have a look around, never made it my daily driver. Used Manjaro for a couple of weeks, but I wouldn’t say it was a daily driver either.

PseudoSpock , 10 months ago

• Speak & Spell
• 150 things in 1 from Radio Shack
• Simon
• CP/M
• DOS 2.1 - 6.22 ?? (DoubleDOS)
• Dos + Desqview X (I spell that right?)
• Slackware (Linux 0.99pl13) (home)
• Windows 95 & Linux
• DEC OSF-1
• OS/2 Warp (work) / Slackware Linux (home)
• Windows 98, 98se & Mandrake Linux
• Domain Aegis (Apollo workstations) (w) & Mandrake and maybe Redhat Linux (h)
• HP-UX (w) & Mandrake Linux (h)
• SunOS & Solaris & HP-UX & Aegis & AIX & os/390 (zSeries) & IRIX (w) & Redhat or Mandrake Linux (w & h)
• PClinuxOS
• Gentoo
• Linux mint / Ubuntu

eruchitanda , 10 months ago

btwOS.

I can’t tell you if it’s your cup of coffee. You should decide it by yourself.

eruchitanda , 10 months ago

• Pacman(!)

• Minimalistic approach

• ArchWiki

• AUR

• Rolling-release model

• Bleeding-edge softwares

• Community that would call me out if I didn’t read the wiki (yes, IMO it’s a positive)

traches , 10 months ago

Every time I try something different I always come back to arch + swaywm

j4k3 , 10 months ago

The biggest selling point for Fedora IMO is the way it handles UEFI and Secure Boot. I haven’t found anything comparable. Securing the proprietary garbage running on your main board is critical regardless of your OS.

UnsyllabledQuickies , 10 months ago

Can you elaborate or point me to some resources? I’d like to hear more about this because I’ve wondered for a while what to do about Secure Boot on my machine.

trclst , 10 months ago

Debian support it too. The kernel is secure boot ready and it’s very easy to sign nvidia kernel module with the default shipped key via mok.

Diplomjodler , 10 months ago

Mint. It just works.

pgetsos , 10 months ago

I have been running OpenSUSE Leap on my home server for 3 years, and I moved from Fedora after many years to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on both my work and home (gaming) PC. I am super happy!