Poll: What is your primary *nix distro on your home machine? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What is your primary *nix distro on your home machine?

47 pointscodedivine100 comments

Just trying to get a feel of the *nix that people are using now.

I use the following in my home setup: 16 ubuntu machines, 3 OpenBSD machines, 1 freebsd, 8 centos (one headnode, 7 diskless compute nodes) 2 osx, 1 windows (oops-two; wife's laptop). Several of these are old recycled boxes, but every one of these has a job.

In retrospect, I wish I had done 8 of the ubuntu servers as freebsd.

Uhh, do you live in a server farm :) ?

You might call it that. Not very pretty, but workhorses are 64 bit athalons, some dual core, low cost.

I used to live like you, but with the onset of virtualization dramatically reduced my power consumption and green footprint with Xen and VMWare.

Well, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=887779

It must be hot in there!!

That long list of machines leads me towards two questions:

1. What are you using them all for?

2. Vertical or horizontal?

1. My startup project 2. Not sure what you mean. No database involved, logic boxes each have different function, cluster is strictly compute.

"Horizontal" means a bunch of servers on a shelf. "Vertical" means a bunch of servers in a rack. :-)

Restaurant racks, cheap cases, multiple levels. No actual server rack. One pair of servers in fact has no case at all, sits on hollow core door.

Are they all physical machines? Or VM's? Surely you could virtualise all of these on 1-3 physical hosts?

Well vm won't work as they are all 100% or 200% cpu when working.

I'm curious as well, but about your suggestion: what fun would that be?

Sounds like a beautiful setup. What is your electricity bill like? ;)

Not really all that bad. Policy is to not buy the leading-edge stuff, so they don't consume as much power as say, an opteron would.

I run FreeBSD on my home fileserver (primarly for its stable ZFS support, but also for its unparalleled documentation and ports system).

For all production servers I run Debian because they're the easiest to keep updated and to re-deploy at short notice.

Cygwin

(None/Windows isn't really accurate for me - I have a POSIX-compliant emulation layer on top of Windows)

I used OS X for about 7 years, but finally decided to give up on the Apple Tax. I bought the first refurbished laptop that met my specs (cheap, lots of ram) and installed Mandriva (as I'd read that it would enable me to use my Windows Mobile phone as my network connection).

I hadn't used Mandriva for many years (although I'd used Fedora, CentOS, Suse, Ubuntu in those years). I've been very impressed by Mandriva laptop in the last 3 months or so.

And to buy an Apple laptop with the same screen size and ram would have cost as much as 6 of these el cheapo laptops.

I can't think of anything I've missed from my powerbook in the last few months. And I could always install OS X inside a VM if I really needed it.

Can't see myself ever going back to Apple now (although I've still got 4 macs around the house, it's just that I don't use them any more).

No Gentoo option????? I wouldn't feel slighted except Mandriva(?!) is mentioned.

I use OS X on the Mac Pro and Macbook Pro and deploy on Ubuntu servers here and remote.

I ran Gentoo from 2003 to 2007 -- I credit it with opening my eyes to how simple and elegant *nix is. When I got tired of monthly upgrades taking six to twelve hours on each of my four systems (including twenty to forty minutes at the console for each, running various commands and fixing things that inevitably broke), I switched to Debian Sid. When it (unsurprisingly) proved too unstable, I moved to Ubuntu, and have remained with it ever since. I don't always get to play with the latest shiny toys, but I'm amply compensated by weekly upgrades that take no more than sixty seconds. I'm glad that I gained a more thorough understanding of my system's workings through Gentoo, but I find Ubuntu lets me focus my attention on tasks more interesting than system administration.

Arch

I've been using Linux for longer than I care to remember (and 386BSD before that) and after a few years on Ubuntu I was amazed at how much of a breath of fresh air Arch is.

Ubuntu always worked well compared to other distros, I could do stuff and it'd just work or there'd be plenty of help and support. I put Arch on an old P3 850 with 256mb of RAM and it just flies. I can be logged into my desktop from cold boot in the time it takes for my dual core Vista laptop to go from login to desktop. That (and discovering awesome wm) are the reasons that Arch gets my vote. Yes there's a learning curve as with any new distro or program but it's definitely worthwhile.

Another vote for Arch.

I've only been using Linux for half a year, maybe, and in that time I've tried Ubuntu, Gentoo, and Arch. Gentoo will always hold a place in my heart for teaching me more in three days than I learned in three months on Ubuntu, but maintaining it was just more work than I wanted to put in for my primary use machine. It also has the best community I've found--any question I had was already answered, in depth, on the forums. Ubuntu and Arch seem to have too many people guessing at answers instead of knowing them, from what I've experienced.

I've been consistently impressed with the Arch philosophy and implementation. Pacman's a dream to work with and the AUR/ABS is a beautiful system.

I love Arch. They've done a great job straddling the line between minimalistic and easy to use. It reminds me (in a good way) of how Linux distros tended to work many years ago.

At home, I run Arch Linux. Using it right now, in fact.

Arch here too, I run it on my home and work computers.

Arch

Same here, i use Arch fulltime on my laptop

Arch Linux here as well. On my netbook, laptop, and htpc,

OSX on the laptop but Arch everywhere else, although I'd prefer freebsd if I could find a suitable hosting provider.

This is turning out to be interesting. Ubuntu and OSX are top choices and everything else seems really distant. From the top clicks on distrowatch.com, I had assumed OpenSUSE,fedora, debian and mint will be closer too.

Fedora 11 for me on my Laptop, Snow Leopard + Windows 7 on Desktop

out of curiosity, why Fedora?

I use Fedora for several reasons:

* Close to upstream, for early access to packaged software,

* Security is a primary concern: SELinux by default, Firewall by default, PolicyKit, Exec-Shield, Compile Time Buffer Checks, ELF Data Hardening, Restricted Kernel Memory Access, Stack Smash Protection, Buffer Overflow Detection, Variable Reordering, etc.

* Complete transparency of the distribution (including open sourcing all software they create for their internal processes),

* I prefer PackageKit/yum/rpm,

* They contribute heavily to upstream, as part of their process,

* They drive the development of a lot of the software other distributions use (NetworkManager, D-Bus, PolicyKit, PackageKit, ConsoleKit, HAL, SELinux policy, PulseAudio, etc.).

Those are some things that come to mind.

I mainly use Fedora because their community is targeted at contributors rather than users. I switched to Fedora so I could contribute to their infrastructure team and get to play with all their webapps. In Fedora you can become anything you want. You can play with all of the servers, the build servers, updates, wiki, blogs, planet etc. given you've proven yourself.

I've recently begun contributing packages as well. The processes are a lot more complex than Arch for example, but it's all very documented and sane once you get over the steep learning curve. Packages get through a lot more filters before they get accepted and there's also the "send all patches upstream" mantra which makes Fedora special because we are contributing to other distros as well this way :)

Primarily a Windows user, but I use Gentoo on occasion. It doesn't get a lot of face time since I'm not doing the work that I originally installed it for anymore.

Other: Archlinux

Same here.

Once used Ubuntu for desktop (I loved it, but my old laptop eventually died).

Right now, OSX for desktop (I just use a laptop that I always keep with me, no multiple computers, just a single one!). And Debian for headless machines / web servers and so on. I really love it.

(I also have to deal with "degradated" Windows installations at home, so every computer keeps its factory OS with a good security policy, much easier to re-install from zero)

Moblin, actually.

I'm really enjoying the Moblin 2.1 interface. It's a pretty radical rethink of how you use your computer. Most importantly, it feels fast and easy to use even with the tiny trackpad and small screen of a netbook.

However, it's still not baked enough for general use. I'll probably switch back to Ubuntu Netbook Remix after Koala comes out.

Archlinux. It has literally proved to be an end to my distro hopping. I've had crazy experiences with Ubuntu. And IMHO, the only 2 distros that are fun to work with, are Arch and Gentoo. I just dont have the patience to compile each and every package, so Arch it is. :)

Fedora on my media machine, Fedora on my laptop. My next laptop OS is very likely to be OSX though.

The main server at home is debian. i have one desktop box and the tiny vaio running ubuntu. recently being hacking obj-c for the iphone so osx has become my main desktop. have been considering switching to opensolaris for my server.

OpenSolaris is not really ready for a server, plus about one in four builds breaks something useful. If the features you need are in Solaris 10, it's probably worth the time to learn the grumpy old UNIX rather than be distracted by the new shiny.

gentoo

Gentoo as well, on 3 separate machines.

Shared portage tree over NFS, distcc cluster, etc.

ditto

I use slitaz mainly, works great and fast... Smallest distro I know that is still very usefull (better then dsl imho).

I also have an ubuntu laptop, still running 8.10 but I'll be upgrading soon. And my main machine is a macbook running X.6.

I've been using Arch for quite a few years now after trying Redhat(befor Fedora), Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, etc. I like Arch's minimalistic philosophy, but then, I also use Fluxbox as my window manager. ;-)

Kubuntu for main development, on my laptop; Vista on the main PC thing; Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini for when I have to do Mac dev or testing.

I've a C64 in the closet, too. Should bust that out, see if it still boots.

Gentoo on my laptop because I want the extreme flexibility there, but my official "home machine" is Debian testing/unstable because I wanted something more consistent that was easier to maintain.

Not sure why some people expressed surprise with debian being so far behind. I would use Ubuntu for home use as well even though we use Debian for all things Linux + Server.

I would have been surprised until a few months ago. I tried Ubuntu 3-4 years ago and uninstalled it the same day because GNOME was crashing, which I found ridiculous. I've tried it again because it has python2.6 packages and it's OK. However, I do still get the occasional kernel panic, and it's recently begun crashing on shutdown.

I've been using Ubuntu @ home and Debian for servers (and RHEL for day job), but I'm considering dumping Ubuntu. dontzap and stuff like that is crazysauce.

Adding a line to your xorg.conf sounds easier than switching distros.

Arch Linux - Rolling release, minimal, and great community

OSX as my primary. Everything else (AMIs, VMs) is Ubuntu

OpenSolaris

Slackware.

Excellent choice. I think that slackware is the best way to learn Linux/unix systems

I grew up on Slackware, but I'd argue that today FreeBSD (ie, a "real Unix") is a better option (mostly for its quality documentation and sane organisation).

I'm curious as to why you think slackware isn't organized

Not until they fix their default vim configuration. Arrows, pgup/pgdown, home/end should work out of box in both modes.

Or you could stop being childish and use the correct keys for navigation.

Arrows are correct because they present on my keyboard. I could wish you to stop being childish but I'd rather wish you die out along with your BSDs.

Did you know that the keys hjkl on the home row are left, up, down, and right respectively?

Slackware 12 here, on 3 machines.

You can vote on "other" now.

I voted for Ubuntu, but in reality it's Linux Mint. As well, I have a Windows 7 machine (that I love) and an XP machine.

What about Centos? Any opinions about it ?

In my experience I've seen it used in servers quite a bit, typically those running cpanel. Its very similar to RHEL but without the pay-support plans. I've helped to run a machine running it for 3-4 years now, with no real issues.

If you need any software that depends on relatively new libraries - forget about it. Centos is seriously behind with features. It could be useful for "standard server" though - stuff like http daemons, etc. will run just fine and will be quite stable.

Not for home usage though - I don't think you'd like to run on something with kernel v2.6.18-92.1.1.el5 ;) Yup - that's kernel from 2006 with ~100 custom patches applied. Forget about any new gfx drivers or wifi.

I use it in combination with perceus to run my cluster. very smooth install, but I don't update it very often. Best thing for that sort of application, in my opinion.

My main (headless) Linux boxes are Centos, I've been pretty happy with it.

Windows 7 unfortuantely, I'd be using Arch if they didn't put a crap Broadcom and ATI cards in my laptop.

Ubuntu since 1 year. I've kicked out gnome and kde. KDE is horribly slow and fvwm2 just rocks :)

Arch on my netbook, quad core workstation and my Lenovo X300. Simplicity at its best.

I use os x as a desktop, but use ubuntu in a vm as macports is ghetto.

Interesting to see that there are as many Ubuntu installs as OSX.

I'll definitely give Chrome OS a try when it comes out.

RHEL 5.4 64-bit with Centos in virtual via XEN.

Arch too, I thought it'd be in the list : )

Ubuntu

pld-linux: 3 machines

Windows: 1 (one above is dual system, windows last boot in spring)

Anyone here using Nexenta?

Actually yes. Our internal postgres database is hosted on it. It's rather nice. We use it for the zfs solaris stuff.

Added choice "other".

Exherbo

How's it treating you? Sounds like a good distro for learning a little about Linux.

And welcome to HN. :)

It's pleasant. Rough around the edges of course, but it's moving fast.

And thanks, was lurking for a bit and then finally realized it was past time I created an account.

OpenBSD

Crunchbang

I'm typing this from #! right now. It's nice if you are looking for a lighter Ubuntu-based desktop, though I still ended up pulling down 7 gigabytes of software once I went through all the packages I wanted. That's a number that borders on "inconceivably large."

Up-voted for including Mac OS X.

Of all these choices OS X is the only one that is legally 'Unix'. The Unix trademark is owned by The Open Group, and to use the term Unix you have to meet several criteria and pay a substantial fee. The FOSS *nixes do generally meet the requirements, but do not pay the fee.

ta-da!

it is POSIX compliant!

So is Windows with Windows Services for UNIX. It's available for Windows Server (2003 and 2008) and Vista/7 (Ultimate, and Enterprise).

I still wouldn't call it a *nix.

Slackware on them all.

OSX

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