don’t worry, when you get tired of distro-hopping, Debian will still be there for you
Is this your current driver?
Extremely happy. Debian Stable. Every time I open the lid of my laptop, it's working and ready to go. Wonderfully boring and exceedingly reliable.
Gotta love debian stable. It has it's kinks, but goddammit every day you boot up it's the same as yesterday, until next major version
I'm very content. Stopped distro-hopping a few years ago and settled on EndeavourOS.
Same. Two years and counting.
I'm running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
99% happy, once in a blue moon there is a library issue during an update, I have to wait a few days, that's it.
Very solid KDE experience, all of the things I wanted to do worked out of the box. Very solid.
Fedora fees like a nice and tightly integrated distro. I'm no apple fan but I can appreciate consistent UX, I feel like Fedora for now is the closest to that level of experience, whilst pioneering in desktop-centric technologies.
I have this looming fear that IBM will somehow fuck everything over someday, but as far as I understand, the Fedora project still operates with the same level of autonomy as they did pre-aquisition.
I'm enjoying Linux Mint so far
I'm thinking I may hope around to a distro using a newer kernel but meh
Mint is pretty nice
Edit: My "meh" is because Mint has been super stable for me and I'm not really sure that the effort to switch distros is worth it given that my systems are already rock solid.
My only issue with Mint Cinnamon is it doesn't have badges for notifications on app icons. For example, when you get a Discord message.
It's a really weird omission.
my arch systems have been great for years now. had one breakage that was not my own fault though.
i also have some older thinkpads with endeavor and they're working great as well.
i would distrohop but i'm too accostomed to the arch repos and aur at this point.
Gosh that's a little personal, isn't it?
Since I installed Arch 14 years ago, I've never looked back. I guess I'm happy with it!
I'm on Fedora Silverblue and I'm pretty sure my distro-hopping days are over. After 20 years of tinkering I really like an OS that requires literally no maintenance and basically just disappears in the background.
I’m very happy with gentoo. My computer is a universe and I am its god.
I am 100% happy. I use a rolling distro, secure (firewall+apparmor), stable (snapshots tested through openQA) and easily revert to a previous snapshot (snapper). Yes, I am using openSUSE Tumbleweed and in my opinion there is no rolling distro that offers all these features.
EndeavourOS. Arch, but easy to install. I'm thrilled with it, although I suspect I'd be even happier if I'd have tried one of the convenience installers for the base. Endeavor is has prettier defaults, so less fussing with basic stuff.
Otherwise, I'm thrilled. I have Artix on my laptop, and while I like not having systemd on it, some things are a bit more kludgey, and I spend more time on maintenance and working to fill gaps. Like, there are not dinit entries for every service, and I have to write them myself; which is absurdly easy, but still. Maybe in a couple years Artix will be less of a chore; in the meantime I'm preferring EndesvorOS.
I do not like the frequency of reboots necessitated by kernel upgrades. I know that I could mask it, but IME that eventually causes problems with packages than make .ko kernel modules; it's just more things to fail, and it makes me really wish Linus would have just based Linux on MINIX.
Anyway, I have 4 computers I deal with which are Debian based, and I never love Arch more than when I have to do something on Debian. Two are Mint, which are infected with flatpack, and I really hate those.
I do not like the frequency of reboots necessitated by kernel upgrades. I know that I could mask it, but IME that eventually causes problems with packages than make .ko kernel modules; it's just more things to fail, and it makes me really wish Linus would have just based Linux on MINIX.
Here's a tip that you might not be aware of: Arch has an LTS kernel. It may seem counter intuitive to run Arch and not have the latest, bleeding edge kernel, but the upside is that you get a stabler, less breakage-prone system.
Fedora. Super stable, super smooth. Used the thinkpad + fedora combo for over 10 years and will use it for 10 more.
+1 fedora. Tried almost all popular distros but came to back to fedora every single time
I’m still a beginner but Mint Cinnamon has treated me well, as has my Debian server.
Don’t see any reason to test anything else as long as it works this well. Nor do I have time after the kids came either…
I'm super happy with Nobara. As a beginner its got everything I need without feeling too limiting
The Nobara Project, to put it simply, is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. Fedora is a very good workstation OS, however, anything involving any kind of 3rd party or proprietary packages is usually absent from a fresh install. A typical point and click user can often struggle with how to get a lot of things working beyond the basic browser and office documents that come with the OS without having to take extra time to search documentation. Some of the important things that are missing from Fedora, especially with regards to gaming include WINE dependencies, obs-studio, 3rd party codec packages such as those for gstreamer, 3rd party drivers such as NVIDIA drivers, and even small package fixes here and there.
I wouldn't say I'm 100% happy with NixOS, but there is no going back at this point.
For me Debian is living the purpose I gave it, resisting me messing around or at least being easy for me to fix.
My distro hoping days are about done. I started with ubuntu -> KDE Neon -> Arch -> Manjaro -> Solus -> Manjaro -> Pop_OS -> Fedora.
I'm sticking with fedora because I love the ideology behind the project and the pace of updates works perfect for me. Not too fast but still very up-to-date. Also I used to hate gnome but after using fedora I love it, I realized I didn't hate gnome but hated all the clunk other distro would add to it. I am interested in NixOS but for now I'm gonna continue to stick with fedora, might hop to fedora silverblue tho.
Really happy with EndeavourOS for the last few months - started daily driving Linux in October last year.
blendOS has caught my attention though, I’m very interested in using immutable distros more and more.
I've used Fedora for years and it is solid. I also use Debian, Linux Mint and Pop OS
I run Debian with gnome, headless and raspi and love it.
Used Ubuntu for years, also had a good time and still respect the project even though it deviated from my needs.
Sometimes I’ll boot up something new just to poke around but I’m happy sticking with Debian for the time being.
I run Kinoite on my Laptop and Silverblue on my desktop. After years of "I use arch, BTW", I decided I needed something that Just Works; and let me tell you, Fedora has not failed to impress.
I use Ubuntu at work. No issues with it.
I'm using Bazzite for games and I like it so much I started moving homelab machines to Fedora IoT.
Bluefin, very happy. Nice toys on top of an atomic Silverblue base. Love the concept.
Recently tried Kubuntu. It was able to successfully connect to my docking station with double 4k monitors connected too, which some other distros failed at. So pretty happy with that I suppose.
All in all, I still find most distros to be hit and miss with issues. There's always something that makes it meh. Like missing features or inconveniences.
Sometimes I think the Linux community should try to consolidate more to focus on a few well-working distros rather than the large amount of distros that are currently there, each with their own set of issues.
Fedora 40 KDE. I like it. Longest I have been on the same distro in years.
Super happy. POP OS has been entirely pain free since I installed it and has a great looming future with COSMIC DE!
I'm on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and I'm not quite satisfied, but I think it's a "me" problem. The distro is fine. It's great! It has practically all the things I was looking for in a distro when I came back to Linux. I have had no major issues that I can recall and updates have never broken anything. The only small nag I have is that Zypper sometimes wants to install patterns that I never installed to begin with when updating, but there are ways around that. I'm just annoyed that that's the default behavior.
But I'm not happy. I'm constantly weighing my options and thinking of different distros/DEs and I don't know why. The current setup serves me wonderfully but it's not perfect, what ever that means. I think I'm looking for a combination of attributes that doesn't exist, possibly can't exist. TW and maybe Debian sid get the closest and I try to tell myself that's good enough, but there's always this feeling of dissatisfaction I can't quite shake and it's annoying.
On my phone I run postmarketOS and on my Raspberry Pi I have Raspbian and those are great.
Because of all the nice feedback about OpenSUSE:
SUSE was my first (bought) Linux distribution, at a time when I would have spent days downloading an ISO, SUSE was available with a manual in store. That was nice.
But then I had an AVM Fritz! ISDN card and it was a complete shit show to get this working. Especially as YAST(2?) didn't support the configuration I needed, but every time you opened it, it would overwrite your manual changes in some configuration files.
(Edit: I'll probably need to add, that this was like 25 years ago. So besides "fuck, I'm old", my perspective in SUSE is very probably not up-to-date)
After that I hopped through a few distros and mostly stayed with basic Debian.
Nowadays I'm mostly using Manjaro (or just Arch itself, if I don't need X), because I like the Arch package system and actually also the whole system architecture... Don't exactly know what it is, but I feel much more at home.
With apt I sometimes found myself in situations, where a fresh install will resolve things faster than trying to restore/save the system. With Arch I always was somehow able to restore everything.
Can someone tell me how Tumbleweed differs/excels?
Thanks in advance!
Currently waiting for my new laptop (Framework 16 :-D) and that would be a nice opportunity to try something new.
But as I need my device for work, it's important to me, that I really have it under my control and am not depending on some half-baked configuration utility like YAST was.
Edit: I'm also playing with the thought of moving to something immutable. NixOS looked nice in concept, but the more I read about it, the more I see that it's more suitable for more server than my laptop - but maybe I'm wrong here, as I don't have any hands-on experience
The main difference between Arch and Tumbleweed, apart from the package type, is the update system. Tumbleweed does it through snapshots, which allows you to use the openQA automatic test to test the snapshot before sending it to the community. Arch upgrades on a package-by-package basis, regardless of the other packages that are part of the system.
I've been using EndeavourOS for a few years now, which is effectively a "good sane defaults" Arch out of the box. I've attempted to use numerous distros in between (including plain Arch) but there's always something I feel is missing or just isn't right (for me).
I’ve been using NixOS for the past few months and it’s been great. Before NixOS I was using Fedora Silverblue so immutable distros aren’t a new thing to me. I like that NixOS has a configuration I can keep backed up. I can copy different options from my desktop to laptop easily. I’m still learning about flakes and the nix language to be able to do more advanced things, but overall NixOS is a great distro if you want something you can configure once and be done.
Vanilla Arch w/ KDE plasma (I know)
It was a bit of a struggle at first but that's what I signed up for. Very happy with the finished result.
I've been on Nobara for almost a year now and am really happy with it. The only distro I'd probably switch to is Bazzite just to try out immutability, but aside from that I'm good where I am.
I've settled on Manjaro for this computer, and I'm pretty happy with it (I've stooped distro-hopping, I just don't have the energy, nor the time to entertain that on my only laptop), though I'm considering changing to base Arch for my next one (which I hope is still 3 years or so in the future; this machine is only 4 yro still). Why? Because the version wait on Manjaro seems a bit arbitrary sometimes and that lag often doesn't play nice with the AUR (which I love). Sometimes I think of switching to more esoteric distros, such as the neat Alpine (which I've been using on servers for a while) and reproducible NixOS, but then I question the day to day usability and pain points, which are quite relevant to me atm.
Why do I like Manjaro though? I like the Arch made easier, the mhwd tools, the support forums (which I know people have mixed feelings on, but my experience has been nothing other than very pleasant).
Feel free to discuss my points!
I was quite satisfied with Debian Stable for a few years on at least two different laptops, and felt I had found my "forever distro", until I got a Framework laptop whose AMD graphics were quite buggy on it. In order to get rid of all the issues, I had to upgrade to Testing and install a mainline Liquorix kernel (and along the way, I briefly made a Frankendebian and fiddled with kernel parameters). While my years of experience with Debian and derivatives has prevented me from breaking anything, I do wish I didn't have to use all of this beta-quality software just to prevent games from freezing and crashing constantly, just because I bought "new" (about a year old) hardware.
I still want to keep Debian, because I've found nothing else that works quite as elegantly or stably, but I'm hoping to find ways to get the performance I need without Liquorix, and if something forces me to reinstall between now and the time Debian Trixie becomes stable, I'll probably give Fedora or KDE Neon another try.
I'm unhappy that after an update gdm has a logo of the distro I'm using. I don't want people to be able to see what distro it is, that way I don't get the fun of telling everyone that I use arch btw.
No other issues.
I'm using Manjaro for my desktop and laptop. If I had to pick a new distro today, I'd likely give EndeavourOS a try. But Manjaro has been working well for me for a several years now, does everything I want with little drama, and issues have been few. So I'm a happy camper and I'll keep on using it.
I have a home server that has been running Debian Stable since the mid-2000's or so. It just chugs right along, so complaints are few. Though occasionally having to deal with the old versions of some of the packages on it can be annoying.
Linux
A community for everything relating to the linux operating system
Also check out !linux_memes@programming.dev
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP