Ask HN: Which distro do you use? (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which distro do you use? (2023)

29 pointslaserstrahl90 comments

What are your daily used distros?

Debian at home and at work.

Been using Debian since Potato. Stable on servers. Testing or unstable on laptops and desktops: quite often a testing base with selected packages from unstable.

Debian just works, and is popular enough that it often has packages for third-party software. And it supports a lot of different architectures, I used it on i386, amd64, powerpc and armhf.

> Debian just works, and is popular enough that it often has packages for third-party software.

A lot of the time debs made for ubuntu work perfectly fine on debian testing too, which is nice.

I use Arch Linux on my personal machines since I left macOS in 2015ish. I briefly tried Ubuntu before but I wanted some newer versions of some software and I thought Arch would be a good way to learn about Linux (whatever that means). Since it worked for me I never really bothered trying anything else.

At work I basically have to choose between Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS. Everyone else seems so use Debian or Ubuntu. I gave Ubuntu another try but snap was acting up so now I'm using Debian.

I don't really have any strong opinions on various distros. I'm just happy I don't have to deal with WSL anymore which I had to for my previous job. :D

Arch is so good. I really enjoyed running it for a couple years, but then that grub issue last year made me look at other distros, eventually ending up on Fedora.

I'm coming home. Fedora just does wonky stuff on my computers. I haven't enjoyed it at all.

Debian on my homelab, Arch on my main. I'm done distrohopping.

I also spent quite a few years away from arch. Arch is also my home

Completely forgot about the grub issue. At some point I gave systemd-boot a try and never went back.

Pop!_OS. I really really wanted to use Fedora, because I once contributed to it and still have lots of friends in that community, but it wasn't doing well in terms of video drivers, codecs, and (especially) sleep/wakeup. Pop!_OS just handled all of those things right out of the box. Bit slow waking up, runs the fans more than it seems it should, switching between touchpad and touchscreen sometimes takes a few moments, but those are all things I can live with. This is on a super-common Lenovo laptop (Yoga 6 a.k.a. 13ALC6) BTW.

Gentoo + EXWM is my daily driver. I'm trying to develop a comprehensive Emacs-based desktop environment on it.

My servers run Proxmox with a mix of Debian, Gentoo, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD.

I have one gaming laptop with Ubuntu on it, and it's the bane of my existence. Ubuntu sucks and just keeps getting worse as time goes on. Every decision they make is a bad one, and Ubuntu is now an disorganized and unmanageable heap of trash.

Pop!_OS (https://pop.system76.com/) at home.

RHEL (https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...) at work.

Pop!_OS at home. It works well and is nice to look at.

Thanks, I might go with Pop!_OS since I heard a lot of good things about it.

Pop for my desktop too. I also have Ubuntu on a server, and Raspian on a Pi.

I run Debinan Sid/Unstable, both as my home desktop (with XFCE as a DE) and as my headless WSLv2 OS on my work machine. I've had it on the desktop for something like, 4 years now? Before that, I ran Manjaro on the desktop since something like 2017, and Xubuntu on the work laptop (as its own partition).

I've only ever had one problem with Debian Sid, which was this year I believe when a `libssl` update broke a lot of things (git, ssh, etc). Other than that, anecdotal smooth sailing.

I was using Ubuntu until about 2021 or so when I started to become frustrated with it and switched to Arch. Not only did it solve my complaints, but I think using Arch has made me more knowledgeable about my systems as a whole. It's now what I use on my desktop, laptop, and even my home server. I do still use other distros for other things, like Ubuntu for my web server or Raspbian for RPi devices.

Debian, stable on servers, unstable on workstations and laptops. Using the cloud variant on containers running on Raspberry Pi 4s running Proxmox (well, 'Pimox' but that is just Proxmox tailored to the RPi) since the default version fails to boot.

Using Mate where desktop environments are 'needed' for those not used to 'Linux', Xmonad otherwise.

Having used Linux from 1993 (SLS -> Slackware -> Redhat -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Debian) I have come to appreciate the longevity of a Debian installation, especially the way in-place upgrades tend to work mostly reliably. Debian stable may be somewhat stodgy but for those occasions where newer versions of packages are required there is always the possibility of pulling in some from unstable or testing. Even though this is 'officially' discouraged I have yet to encounter stability problems with such installations.

I've run Fedora for many years; I think my first install was Fedora 22. Pro: my distro looks good, is easy to manage and never feels dated. Con: stuff breaks. I'm still annoyed about the time Fedora reconfigured the DNS resolution service of systems and I lost Internet for a few days until I could figure out what the hell is going on.

I just ran away from Fedora. I was running Fedora server, and my files were depopulating on my podman containers. Xml files still existed, but were BLANK. Strange behavior.

And then I was running kinoite on my main gaming rig, and the wifi driver just stopped working. No amount of tinkering fixed it.

I've gotten debian on my server, though that's ongoing. Once the server is up, I think I'm going back to Arch on my main. They may have ticked me off with that grub thing last year, but prior to that it was smooth as silk.

Ubuntu Mate LTS editions, and ChromeOS if you count that - which I do.

Mate "just works" on my old Lenovo T430, I use Ubuntu on my servers, and both are solid.

Most of the time I'm on ChromeOS on a Pixelbook Go, with Thunderird, Terminator, VSCode and Joplin running on the Debian side, but there is the odd thing that is not happy on that setup.

I use NixOS, Arch as a backup and Ubuntu is usually what I am assigned at work. If I had it my way, it'd be NixOS everywhere.

On my non-NixOS builds (including MacOS) I still use Nix the package manager and I use Home-Manager to manage my dotfiles.

Mint, for the last few years. I honestly don't remember why I chose Mint after using Ubuntu previously. In any case, I'm not shopping for a change. It does exactly what I need.

Mint was my first distro and still the one I would recommend to newbies.

Debian testing on my workstation. An install that has been there for around 5 years, and which only broke down like 3-4 times, always related to nvidia shenanigans.

Having hopped around for years, I finally came back to Linux Mint with Cinnamon. My setup had become so opaque to anyone but me that I was concerned about my wife not being able to actually get into my stuff if something happened to me. Plus, I share this machine with my daughter and use it for teaching her, and the extra polish makes it more accessible to her.

My servers all run Debian. Keeps things consistent, stable, and boring.

Fedora Workstation 38.

I switched from Arch (which I like a lot) to Fedora to become less vulnerable to attackers and might move to ChromeOS or Qubes to become even less vulnerable.

"Vulnerable" is my amateur estimation of the security landscape.

The key quality I want in my OS is as much security ("attack resistance"?) as practical while retaining sufficient customizability to accommodate my disabilities. I've mostly given up on MacOS because unless I turn off its System Identity Protection, MacOS cannot be customized in ways beneficial to me that most of the other choices (including Windows) can be.

PopOS! has worked OOB on a Razer laptop and I'm thrilled with it. Buggy at times, feature-barren at times (filebrowser is a joke) but otherwise it's good.

I switched from kde-neon to EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma, and I love it. Arch-based distros that handle things for me, and let me type "yay" and be fine? Bless. Linux is in a beautiful place, UI/UX is quickly overtaking Windows.

Exactly the same for me :-) Because of the package management I have only been using Arch based distros since 2020. I used Manjaro with xfce for quite some time, but now I have installed EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma on my work and personal laptops. Everything works fine, even the bluetooth connection to my Bose noise cancelling headphones works very reliably. I just needed to deactivate some animations, especially the default one for switching between desktops because I do that about 100 times each day and would get sea sick if I kept that.

Bunsenlabs [0], which is based on Debian stable, with a nicely configured Openbox window manager on top.

Debian stable as a base because it's reliable, rock solid, and has long term support.

Openbox because it's lightweight whereas fully featured.

Highly recommended if you want productivity and hate bloat.

[0]: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

Fedora on home desktop, Fedora on work Thinkpad. I’ve also got an M1 MacBook Air that I’m probably going to replace with a Framework laptop soon and run Fedora on that too. It’s just rock solid and any issues I do encounter I can easily fix myself. OSX on the other hand is an inconsistent mess that seems to get buggier with each release as of late.

Gentoo. I'm using it to write this comment! It's been my daily driver since 2009 - sans a brief period of stupidity two years ago when for some reason thought that using FreeBSD could be a good idea only to learn the hard way pkg/pkgsrc doesn't comes near to Portage about letting to fine tune your installation.

What do you like about Gentoo? I ran it a long time ago, like around 2005, but got bored of compiling everything and fiddling with settings.

having the coolest package manager i think is the major draw

FreeBSD on any headless machine (my servers, my IoT nodes, my build machines, etc) and Debian on my laptop.

I use Arch, but I have a mix of VMs, Intel hardware, and Raspberry Pis and have been running into issues with Archlinux ARM due to stale packages and gaps in the kernel config.

I’ve been trying to decide if it’s worth trying to fork my own updates to deal with it, or switch to Ubuntu or something else.

Right now i'm using what was manjaro, but has become more Arch after all the changes I've made. It was installed 4 years ago. I've been looking at getting a Freebsd install setup for laptop use, but haven't gotten it working enough to make the switch.

GalliumOS, running on two machines I keep in sync. Debian/Ubuntu based distro, but customized for Chromebooks. Tried to get arch running on a Chromebook, but couldn't get it working before I needed a functional machine ;)

I migrated to Alpine for my laptop this year after an extended attempt of NixOS. For development, I’ve found I’m more productive in that I don’t go down the rabbit hole of finding the “Nix way” of using a language/tool. The speed of apk is refreshing for my older machine, and APKBUILDs are intuitive after my past experience with Arch PKGBUILD.

Drew DeVault has a decent write up on Alpine that’s worth a read. https://drewdevault.com/2021/05/06/Praise-for-Alpine-Linux.h...

Arch on 2 laptops, 2 VPSes and a minitower desktop (used as a home server).

So far everything good. On the servers, everything runs under docker, I just installed docker, nomad, consul and tailscale, which I'd have to add custom repositories for ubuntu anyway for basically the same end (except now I also have newer kernel).

Tried Debian and Ubuntu in the past, old packages (especially GUI applications, but other stuff too) often broke, and it sucked to just find that there's a fix but not in the repos - and so I had to add custom repositories for every other thing anyway.

Ubuntu LTR for work. Soon reformatting home machine to same from Win10.

Is ltr the same as lts?

Fedora Kinoite, an immutable desktop operating system built on Fedora with the KDE desktop environment. Most applications are flatpaks and I use toolbox for development.

I used to use Silverblue until a motherboard swap caused the Nvidia driver to stop working. Since the OS is immutable, there was no way for me to even attempt to diagnose or fix the problem. :(

I think the most luck I've had with a distribution was Arch, but I did really enjoy getting Alpine to run from a USB stick.

Debian at home, Debian at work.

Debian, because I hate myself (but not as much as when I used Ubuntu.)

I also have some virtual machines running OpenBSD and some real machines running FreeBSD.

Void linux: very simple and easy to use, fast boot, runit instead of systemd, user packages (via xbps-src)... it's simply a joy to use.

Debian GNU/Linux (a mix of stable and oldstable) on all my personal servers, the work desktop and laptop, and servers at work (I am responsible for that part of the compute env at $dayjob).

Arch Linux on my personal desktop(s) and laptop.

openSUSE Tumbleweed on my wife's desktop, which I co-admin.

OpenWrt on my personal network devices.

LineageOS on my personal phone.

LibreELEC on the Raspberry Pi 4 used as a media center at home.

currently fedora 38.

i've started on debian, then ubuntu for a long time, then when it became unsufferable i went back to debian, then when i couldn't stand the old packages i finally gave up and switched to fedora.

It's been a lovely experience so far. Everything works (including the mic on the bluetooth headsets, that never worked on debian/ubuntu), the system i very stable, i have nice guis for advanced security features (my laptop runs with SELinux enabled and firewalld on) and i get fresh software regularly.

And XFCE as a desktop environment is not a second class citizen, so i can keep using a sane minded desktop environment.

on my servers... two machines runs RHEL flavors: my main home server is running RHEL8 via the developer subscription. It's been rock solid for the last ~3 years. The backup server is running Rocky Linux 9, no issues so far. A remote server (small dedicated server) is running debian, because that was one of the few options available.

edit: add servers.

My daily used distros are Fedora on my home laptop (x270) and Pop!_OS on my work laptop (t14). Also a hp microserver and an x230, both with Proxmox (Debian) and one gaming PC with Windows (I would love to migrate this to a Linux machine also but my Oculus Rift prevents this as they stopped supporting Linux early on).

I use KDE neon user edition, which is basically the latest Ubuntu LTS base + rolling release KDE packages on top. That way I get a rock solid LTS core with the added benefit of always getting the freshest KDE Plasma updates, which is definitively my favourite DE.

Details about my installation: It has proven to be quite resilient. The installation's life started as Kubuntu 18.04 in late 2018, then upgraded to 20.04, then, using some nifty tricks from a Gist I found, I migrated my Kubuntu install to KDE neon a couple of years ago, which I then eventually upgraded to the 22.04 rebase when that came out. I've had a package conflict here and there and the occasional issue due to this migration path, but always been able to rectify it fairly easily. The installation has also survived a full system upgrade, first migrating from HDD to SDD for the system disk, and during 'rona, a full upgrade of motherboard, processor and RAM, all with no issues. Just booted without any complaints. That was nearly never the case when I was a Windows user, if I changed anything, it would throw a hissy fit. Needless to say, I'm happy with the status quo :)

I only use Linux from the CLI these days. Usually in containers and WSL. So any kind of Debian or Ubuntu is fine.

NixOS for 3 years but unfortunately switched to Mac now for the M1 and love the speed.

I can’t wait for great SoC Linux laptops.

I do Debian for my personal workstation.

For Cloud, Debian containers, with Ubuntu and Amazon Linux VMs as we run in AWS.

NixOS with Distrobox, JuNest, and VMs.

Arch Linux since early 2010s for both home and work (however recently had to switch to M1 Macbook for work - which is simply perfect)

I was using WSL until I spilled a beverage on my Windows laptop and killed the graphics card (it actually still works fine for work purposes with the internal fallback I guess). Been using a System76 Ubuntu box I already had for the past 2-3 weeks.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Regolith Desktop on top, which is a great pre-configured i3 desktop environment. Not sure if there is something similar for sway yet, but stuck on X11 anyway thanks to Nvidia.

Ubuntu in WSL for Windows 11 right now. I'm also considering a native Linux partition, and I need something that can handle GPGPU applications for a combo Nvidia/Intel discrete GPUs setup.

In 2011 I moved to Fedora (v16 at the time) and have been using it since then. This year I stopped using GNOME and moved to KDE, seeing if I'll make the switch permanent.

I'm using Arch as the base distro, but spend increasing time inside (mostly Ubuntu) Docker containers, and using remote VSCode (whole window remote, via ssh) to a more powerful machine.

Debian on servers. Boring and predictable.

Arch on desktops. Recent versions of packages is usually more important for me on a desktop.

Has served me well for a long time at this point - in excess of a decade.

UBlue - Bluefin DX edition. It is chef’s kiss perfect.

NixOS, I'd like Guix System since I live in Emacs, but so far Guix zfs support and few minor things are a bit too long for my taste so I'll keep NixOS...

Debian at home. Ubuntu at work(hoping to switch to Debian soon). Both of them are headless (so not as Desktop Environment but ssh to for development work).

openSUSE Tumbleweed for my wife and I, openSUSE Leap on servers. Will probably migrate to Alpine at some point, but openSUSE treats me pretty well.

Qubes OS, which runs Debian and Fedora in VMs.

Linux Mint on my old Dell E6350 (workhorse home machine that never leaves the desk).

Pop!_OS on my regular grab-and-go laptop.

Fedora since v1. Although their recent fiasco taking about adding telemetry had me reconsidering.

Alpine as my main / Playing with Void / NetBSD for some side projects

Plan on playing with Nix at some point.

Debian 12 at home. RHEL at work.

Ubuntu for work

Manjaro for personal

(Oh and some Raspbian but I hardly have had any time for that this year ^_^; )

FreeBSD, servers and desktop.

Arch btw

Ubuntu.

macOS with Homebrew on my laptop

Debian on my servers and dev box

FreeBSD on servers at work

QMK with chibios on my keyboards

Debian with Guix for packages I want the latest releases of.

Still running an Arch install from over 12 years ago.

Debain 12 Bookworm. Both on desktop and server.

Ubuntu latest lts 22.04, jwm desktop manager.

to the arch users: Is there a encrypted, hardenend install you can recommend besides the default one in the archwiki? ty.

It's maybe not exactly what you asked for, but I use EndeavourOS, which basically provides a calamari installer experience for Arch, and installs yay by default. It's not really "hardened" anymore than having firewalld on by default, but it definitely makes it easier to setup Arch on an encrypted volume.

Also, if you wanted hardened, best to stick with OpenBSD or it's ilk. Linux tends not to be hardened easily, and usually severely limits functionality when you do start hardening it (i.e. BlackArch or Parrot).

I appreciate your answer. FreeBSD is also on my list being interesting. But I never installed it by now.

What’s the threat model you’re hardening against? For most use cases, a stock Archlinux from the wiki with LUKS/LVM is gonna be pretty solid.

Just general security. I wanna see whats doable these days.

Look into exploring SELinux and similar systems.

Other than staying up to date on packages, this comes down largely to service config that’s independent of the OS.

Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch.

Fedora since Fedora Core 1

arch if i need nvidia drivers, alpine otherwise.

Arch

Windows 11.

I think it was supposed to be Windows 12 where Microsoft finally went whole hog into integrating Linux by swapping NTOSKRNL for the Linux kernel so I assume this to be an off-by-one error.

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