If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?
Been using Linux for over a decade, and last few years Ubuntu (on desktops/laptops), plus Debian on servers, but been looking to switch to something less “Canonical”-y for a long time (since the Amazon search fiasco, pretty much).
Appreciate recommendations or just an interesting discussion about people’s experiences, there are no wrong answers.
Edit: Thanks for the lots of interesting answers and discussions. I will try a few of the suggestions in a VM.
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I’ve been fully daily driving Linux for about 15 years now, and for me it’s almost all Arch now.
I started out distro-hopping between Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Slack, etc, but once I found Arch (and spent two weeks getting it installed, booted, and customized exactly to my liking) I was finally at home.
I know the meme. I’m not here to claim superiority, or diminish the value of other perfectly good distros. I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.
What I love about Arch is the lack of bloat. You get precisely what you ask for, no more, no less. You can legitimately run htop and recognize literally every program, and know if something’s wrong immediately.
Every one of my Arch boxes is a perfect little snowflake, suited to exactly the task(s) I built it for. And if there was anything I had to learn or configure along the way? That’s just the journey, man.
I have been eyeballing NixOS though…
As much of the meme of an arch user will tell you they are using arch.
NixOS is SO much more accurate to the meme.
Debian
I’ve tried many distros over a 20 year period. I’m happy with CachyOS.
Debian.
Debian on everything (well except the router is on OpenWrt).
First installed Debian more than 25 years ago. Tried some other stuff, Debian is still best for me.
Debian and alpine. Coming up on 27 years of linux for me.
For almost 30 years Debian somehow.
Debian mostly. I appreciate the democratic, non corporate governance, the classic Free Software ethos, the stability, and their not going blindly along with upstream defaults (e.g. telemetry).
My server runs OpenBSD because I find it more tightly designed, and simpler. Laptop Fedora because the hardware wasn’t originally well supported by Debian stable.
Debian stable, it works fine for a workstation and for the few games I play
Linux hobbyist for 20+ years, pro for 6+. Fedora for workstations, proxmox for hypervisors, and rocky for servers is my usual personal recommendation. Beyond that, secureblue (a hardened downstream of fedora atomic) with heads firmware is a fantastic daily driver if you’re into that kind of thing.
Started with debian sarge way back in the day, currently using secureblue and qubes with fedora vms for most work, with a debian htpc on the side. For servers, I’m mostly debian-based on hardware (a bunch of proxmox machines at various sites and debian-based raspberry pis everywhere), with mostly redhat-based vms. Some alpine and freebsd baremetal and virtual machines sprinkled in here and there for flavor where they fit right.
Will check out secureblue for sure. I rather enjoy Qubes concepts as well, although never daily drove it.
Qubes as a daily can be pretty cumbersome with a steep learning curve, but once you get the hang of it it’s a very unique modular kind of experience, and a pretty good way to safely(ish) use one machine for many things - certainly much more so than any of the main linux distros. If you’re interested in security, worth checking out!
33 years with Linux (kernel 1.2.13, slackware). Worked at a distro. Worked in OS security – Unix and enterprise Linux. I helped build United Linux out of the dismembered corpse suse kicked over the fence as ‘collaboration’.
Because of the validation issue in the .deb package format and others, I’m on a mixture of Rocky and Nobara.
I’m subscribed to cloudLinux’s tuxcare enterprise updates for some older stuff, and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s excellent; and if almalinux releases their sLTS distro release and actually covers it for 25 years, that will be such a coup.
I’m worried at the direction Linux has been taken by IBM and I hope it can be unfucked one day. I miss the reliable, fast boots and uncomplicated tooling before this systemd shitshow.
Debian, on the server, the laptop, the desktop, and the gaming machine. Debian.
I started with Slackware many years ago. Eventually switched to Kubuntu on my desktop and laptop machines, then later the server switched to Debian. The desktop and laptop switched later.
Debian.
I used Mint for about a decade. When I upgraded the drives on my desktop RAID from 2TB to 14TB the newest version only recognized 999GB. After some troubleshooting I begrudgingly tried Ubuntu, same thing. I figured Debian would be the same since that’s Grandma but I tried anyway. It worked perfect so I’ve been on Debian for a few years now and haven’t noticed any big differences so here I’ll stay.
Love me some Debian
I think I started back in the day with Ubuntu Gnome, with some dabbling in Manjaro and then Arch.
But since then I have used Fedora Workstation, and then Fedora Silverblue / Fedora Kinoite (immutable versions of fedora, with the past several years on Kinoite [kde] over Silverblue [gnome])
On the server side of things, I am using Debian (with everything running in podman containers).
If I were to consider migrating, it would be to migrate my laptop to secureblue (likely, rebasing the OS image rather than clean-installing) and migrate my Windows 11 desktop to bazzite. Both of these are still based on Fedora’s immutable base, albeit with changes to the base OS image. At some point in the future, I would also consider migrating my server to an immutable OS, however, which one remains to be seen.
I’m the same way only I did do the migration. It’s been great
Archlinux. The wiki and forums are comprehensive, occasional issues I create easy to google, surprisingly reliable. AUR makes it easy to install third-party software.
For the above mentioned reasons, I would recommend you go with one of the big 3: Debian, Fedora, or Arch. Most other distros are either derived from one of the 3 anyways, or are niche.
