deleted by creator

Alpine.

I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.

So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.

I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!

Gentoo. It’s amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.

There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.

PopOS. Mostly because I’m really interested in their Rust based DE that’s to replace Gnome.

If we allow derivatives, I’d say SteamOS despite being Arch. It’s putting Linux in non-technical people’s literal hands and it’s not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It’s almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I’ve seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.

Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It’s been a really long time since we’ve last seen a fundamentally different distro that’s got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they’re still very package oriented. We’ve been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It’s incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they’re atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.

DietPi! It’s one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It’s ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.

Been using Xubuntu 23.10 recently, but I’m kind of a distro hopper. I need ROCm and some other special (proprietary, ehh) tools that require RHEL, SLE, or some Ubuntu flavor. I also like having a working out-of-the-box configuration. I’ve used openSUSE Tumbleweed and Arch Linux before, might try it again but it’s a little bit complicated to me.

OpenSUSE Leap, has been a solid 7 year run, with flawless updates. And no graphics issues because nVidia hosts their own repo for the gpu drivers.

deleted by creator

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It’s very up to date, yet it’s somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven’t had any problems finding software, yet it’s not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.

I’m trying out OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a few personal servers as I wait for Slowroll, I want to get back to trying to get Gentoo running, and I should check out Guix as a server in a VM.

Gentoo having a binary option should help since I seem to mess up the kernel part of the installation.

Can it still be a favourite if I haven’t touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.

NixOS for me. It’s a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there’s also an entire distro based on it.

Alpine

Bazzite. It’s based on Fedora uBlue so it’s technically Fedora, but being an immutable OS, it works quite differently enough that it counts as its own distro. For instance, you don’t use dnf or yum to install stuff, you’d use Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix. Updates are done using the rpm-ostree command, and it’s effectively a rolling release model, but atomic in nature so you get none of the instability that you’d get in a typical rolling release.