I’m wondering what the current favorite distros are besides the most popular ones like Arch, Debian and Fedora.

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    19·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • SteleTrovilo@beehaw.org
    18·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
      6·
      10 months ago

      Yeah I’ve gotten into Nix recently and it’s slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I’m on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I’ve got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol

  • Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip
    14·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      +1 for Gentoo - Portage can be fun in a weird way. I’m more of a “just work” type of person though, so I’ve stuck to Arch, but the time I had with Gentoo was pretty great and the new binary package format might bring me back. I do have a 7950X nowadays so I wonder if that’d fly through Gentoo on bare metal.

  • synthsalad@mycelial.nexusEnglish
    12·
    10 months ago

    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!

    • 1984@lemmy.today
      2·
      10 months ago

      It will bite you after a while. I remember using alpine in a docker image many years ago and running a python program that needed some modules installed, where one of them required compiling c code. Naturally that didnt work on alpine since its using its own c library. So couldn’t run the python app at all on alpine.

    • Cwilliams@beehaw.org
      1·
      10 months ago

      I remember having all of these libseat and elogind errors when I tried to use anything wayland-related: Sway, Hyprland, even KDE. Since then I switched back to Arch because I felt like everything Just Worked™️ there

  • iopq@lemmy.world
    133·
    10 months ago

    NixOS is not based on any other distro because it has its own package manager which is better than all the other distros’

    • leidkultur@lemmy.one
      83·
      10 months ago

      Yes, that package manager will surely be the best one and not just be another one in the zoo.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
        4·
        10 months ago

        The whole system is built using it, so every time your system will be the same when building from the same configuration. Even if you such to another computer, you will download locked versions of all packages and get the exact same system

        In Ubuntu installing and removing a package doesn’t even guarantee it’s cleaned up

  • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
    10·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      10 months ago

      Same! I’m on Ubuntu and Pop these days but I fondly remember my old distcc build cluster…

      Portage is still far and away my favorite package manager.

      • Unforeseen@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        10 months ago

        Hahaha same on the distcc cluster. It was a rare proud moment for me many years ago. I rememeber when I got the cross compiling working it felt like magic. Good times.

    • 1984@lemmy.today
      2·
      10 months ago

      Yep, for me the most exciting moment in 2024 will be Cosmic being released and partly also the release of KDE 6, even though that probably won’t be a big deal. Just nice to use qt 6 I guess. It doesn’t have any new features really.