Very much looking forward to Bionic Beaver and Mesa 18!
Am still looking for a good distro as bootable usb thumb with persistence. Alpine is very convenient if you just want a quick shell. Tails for situations requiring more privacy. But apart from running mkusb and creating my own ubuntu live stick. Is there anything really specifically tailored to this use case?
The live-boot CDs have always worked well for me (when I need them, for me that's rarely) I can only imagine a USB that you can boot from would be good as well?
I believe the problem is with Nvidia. You'd get the best experience with Ubuntu since it is the most used by average customers, so well tested.
On servers I most often use debian, rigorously with unattended-upgrades enabled, for its stability and attention to security.
As a base image for containers I prefer Alpine for its slenderness and security, escalating to debian or ubuntu as a last resort when needed for exhotic packages and such.
Finally, when I setup a linux box for inexperienced users, I usually use manjaro for its ease of use and attention to the inexperienced-user-experience.
Some of these proprietary programs have dependencies that are out of date, so it's much easier to use flatpak to install these programs rather than messing with your system' packages.
I use Arch since ~8 years at work and on my laptop.
1. Ubuntu based, since I know where everything is. I don't mean to knock other great distros like Arch, etc.. but I'd rather do my stuff than try to figure out another package manager or another file system layout.
2. Customizable. I make my environment look a bit like windows, with the task bar and all. Not because I love windows, but because I have two laptops, one windows and one linux, and I need a bit of a seamless transition. I am sure if my other laptop was a fruit, I'd want my linux machine to resemble a fruit.
3. I need my desktop right click context menu, with a command line option.
For the longest time I used Xubuntu. I still think Xfce is the best out there, but its glacial rate of movement made me look in other places. It is falling behind in some things such as multi-monitor support with docking stations.
I now use Ubuntu 17.10 with Gnome shell. I was able to make it look almost like my Xfce setup. I had to turn off Wayland, since it was causing gnome to crash randomly on wake from sleep and close all my apps. It is also far less customizable than xfce, and some things are unexpectedly buggier (the terminal window loses cut and paste abilities randomly, and I cannot replace the console shortcut in the desktop context menu with Terminator).
I may yet go back to Xubuntu. Not sure.
Docking support is great, but sound output needs to be swapped manually sometimes.
Declarative configuration, atomic upgrades, system rollbacks, a functional configuration language, excellent Haskell support, etc.
I used Debian and Ubuntu for many years, but now I wouldn't switch to any distribution that isn't inspired by NixOS.
I'm not usually opinionated, but as I see it, NixOS (along with Nix itself) is clearly a huge step forward.
They'd need to dumb down whatever it is they're talking about significantly before I would use it, can't make heads nor tails of it.
I use GuixSD, just because it's init system is in Scheme(guile) and the declarative syntax of system config and pkg definitions seem more straight forward to me and I prefer free software. You can easily run a GuixSD system with a mainline kernel if you want proprietary firmware blobs but so far I haven't had any issues with the default Libre kernel. There's a GuixSD presentation here http://dustycloud.org/misc/talks/guix/chicagolug_2015/guix_t...
Here are some main points from the website:
NixOS has a completely declarative approach to configuration management: you write a specification of the desired configuration of your system in NixOS’s modular language, and NixOS takes care of making it happen.
NixOS has atomic upgrades and rollbacks. It’s always safe to try an upgrade or configuration change: if things go wrong, you can always roll back to the previous configuration.
That makes sense, doesn't it? Is it that you want a more detailed explanation of how it achieves this, and how it differs from other distributions?
Did you see this page? https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html
I've no experience with functional programming so have no idea really how it's doing the things it's doing. Plus I can imagine writing out your config file would take a long time.
What does declarative mean? What does atomic mean?
Ubuntu 17.04 for Machine learning/Cuda because anything else takes more time to work.
Alpine-Linux for Dockerfiles because it's the bare minimum.
Arch Linux for learning Linux, because you're responsible for installing what you'd like to have a stable machine.
http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2018/01/17/ubuntu-17-04-zesty-zapus...
The 2-year update cadence feels about right as well.
Ubuntu Unity on desktop. No particular reason for Unity, but I've become comfortable with it over the years and have no complaints or reason to switch.
Lubuntu on a secondary old laptop, because it's fast and lightweight.
ChaletOS on my father's old laptop, because it closely resembles Windows Vista/7 which he was used to, but unlike Windows, can continue to get latest software and updates. Can run all DOS and Windows programs using DosBox and Wine. ChaletOS is an Ubuntu variant - not sure if it's modified Xubuntu or deploys its own XFCE customizations over Ubuntu.
LineageOS - Nougat for 'obsolete' phones, though I might switch to postmarketOS if they get calls working!
Really exposed me to the sausage factory that is upstream userspace btw...
Desktop/Homeserver/VPS: VoidLinux + DWM(only on desktop ;)) - Simple (runit as init system, no default logging daemon [I'm using socklog on servers], LibreSSL), cutting edge and not bloated
Work: Ubuntu Mate LTS + ArchLinux in chroot - Ubuntu Mate - same reasons as with elementary on my laptop :) ArchLinux in chroot - cutting edge, AUR with everything and because it's a chroot I can easily snapshot/share/move my development environment, lot of information/solutions out there
I also use:
Alpine - containers with weird things[LXC] on home server - small(almost nothing inside ;)), LibreSSL
Slitaz - old Pentium-M laptop without DMA(I don't know what happened - I got it for $0 so no questions asked), old P4 machine - perfect fit(and toy...) for those machines
LineageOS - no google inside, only f-droid
Why? Because it worked when I installed it.
I never got into the whole install the hottest distro each season phase, so I've never actually tried anything else (other than my work servers which are running Cent-OS, but I didn't have to bother with the hassle of installing and configuring those)
It's sort of minimal. It's a derivative of Ubuntu which means it's not Red Hat.
It uses Moksha for a desktop, which is a continuation of Enlightenment 17. You can read about Moksha here: http://www.bodhilinux.com/2015/04/28/introducing-the-moksha-...
I use it because it's not annoying; it mostly works; I didn't have to fuck about to get it working; it's sort of minimal; it uses sensible defaults; I like the philosophy; I had a bad experience with Fedora and so I avoid anything red hat.
My phone is still android though! What are people's experience of LineageOS? Am I in for a nasty surprise if I try to switch without completely knowing what I'm doing?
Gentoo OpenRC: On amd64 laptops for learning how to build software.
I've installed and configured 80% of distros on Distrowatch.com. Its all the same pretty much. Linux from Scratch was a good experience as well. Recommended for anyone interested in the deeper reasons of a distro.
Need to install Archlinux, because I need it at work. Want to install Gentoo, because it should be useful experience.
Its like with languages on earth. Many things might be easier if there were only one. But probably also something would get lost.
For most things not in the active apt repo, there's backports and/or a vendor apt repo.
Arch Linux - installed it as a rite of passage, works okay on my laptop, can't be arsed to install something else.
Ubuntu because it is a full featured workhorse and everything works on it first time.
I used to use arch, but you have to be selective and careful with updates otherwise you find you can't boot into x. Takes time to go and fix.
I personally use Arch on desktop/dev and Ubuntu LTS on servers.
rhel as server: long lasting projects/software because of long term support
ubuntu/debian as server: for smaller project