yes i did a os one but i am wondering what distros do you guys use and why,for me cachyos its fast,flexible.
Ubuntu because I’m old, uncool, and tired
Hilarious to have to look this low for it, but who want to stand up and declare themselves mainstream.
Polished, reliable, and solid, and snaps are not a big deal or an insidious evil, and neither is Canonical. They make missteps for sure. But with containers etc stability is more important than immediate updates and it’s excellent about kernel updates for new hardware. It’s slick Debian, and if the fuckery ever gets real switching to Debian is easy.
Me too. Rock solid, with KDE. So easy to learn, make it mine.
Arch because it helped me understand the os better and i like tinkering. Also pacman and the aur
Also pacman and the aur
Another reason why am using cachyos
Previously arch now NixOS, just love the reproducibility.
Xubuntu. Convenience of ubuntu, less cluttered UI.
I use NixOS for my desktop because
I hate myselfyou can configure everything without needing to edit a bunch of different config files that use different configuration languages.I use Arch btw for my Minecraft server because I am crazy.
Kubuntu, because when I got my Vega 56 GPU on release day (August 14, 2017), I had to download the proprietary driver straight from AMD to get it working, and Ubuntu was the only distro supported by both it and Steam at the time. (Otherwise, I would’ve picked Debian or Mint.)
I don’t love Ubuntu (especially how they push Snap), but I can’t be bothered with the hassle of reinstalling my OS.
My gpu twin! I was also on Kubuntu at the time for the same reasons.
How difficult was it to run games?
In 2017? Well, that’s an interesting question. On one hand, it definitely wasn’t as easy as it is now. On the other hand, I was motivated to ditch Windows and willing to make the gaming sacrifices necessary to make that happen. The last version of Windows I used was 7, and I was determined that 10 would never touch this machine – or any computer of mine going forward, for that matter. I also was done putting up with 7, given that Microsoft was starting to backport 10’s spyware and forced-upgrade BS to it by then.
It’s been a while, so I’m fuzzy on the details of what I was playing between 2017 and 2018 (when Proton came out). I think I just limited myself to the subset of my Steam games that had native Linux versions (e.g. TF2 and other Valve first-party games, Don’t Starve, Cities Skylines, etc.), supplemented with PlayOnLinux for Star Trek Online, which, being an MMO I was already committed to, was pretty much the only exception I made. Otherwise, my attitude became “if the developer can’t be bothered to support my OS, that’s their loss, not mine, and I don’t need their shitty Windows-only game anyway.”
After Proton came out and I flipped that switch to “enable Steam Play for all other titles”, I think the majority of my Steam games “Just Worked” – yes, even back at that initial release – and the ones that didn’t became compatible pretty rapidly over the next couple of years. With one exception, I don’t think I’ve had trouble getting a game working since the start of the pandemic, if not earlier. At this point, I’ve softened my “I won’t buy a new game if it doesn’t natively support Linux stance” and instead simply expect every game I buy to work. And they have!
(That one exception was Star Trek Online, which I had continued running via PlayOnLinux because (a) why mess with a working config, and (b) the Steam version of STO wants to permanently link your STO account to your Steam account, which I didn’t want to do. One day, though, they updated the launcher or something and it quit working. I eventually gave up trying to fix it in PlayOnLinux and decided to use Proton for it instead. But I still didn’t want to link my accounts, so I had to jump through these weird hoops where I installed the Steam version, but didn’t log in or play it, and instead re-imported it as a non-Steam game pointing at the executable for the Steam version and then fiddled with the compatibility settings to find a version of Proton that worked. That’s still the configuration I’m using for it to this day.)
Someone told me that he used alot of tinkering to play games before proton.
I mean, yeah, if you were trying to get a game to run using bare WINE in like <2010 or something, you were gonna be troubleshooting it for a while (and might still fail just because the functionality hadn’t actually caught up yet). By 2017, though, DirectX etc. support had improved drastically (Valve’s first attempt at SteamOS was already a few years old by then), so the main issue was figuring out the right configuration (which version of Windows to mimic, installing supporting libraries, etc.) and tools like PlayOnLinux and Lutris went a long way towards crowdsourcing and automating that.
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I use the Bluefin flavor of Silverblue. I like not having to tinker with my laptop to keep it working, everything happens in the background.
Same here, I use Silverblue as host OS on all of my workstations now, and Arch for nearly all of my containers.
Flatpak for just about everything in the userspace.
I was using Debian and Docker for my servers, but I’m switching to uCore and Podman. It was a decent learning curve, but I think I’m going to like it better.
I hated postman so much I switched back to Docker. Why compose was better at handling dependent containers then quadlets. Yes I could use postman compose but heard it’s no longer supported and if I’m using it might as well use a supported docker compose.
What do people use for command line utilities? The selection on flatpak is a bit sparse
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Options include:
- Installing them through
brew; this is setup, enabled and configured correctly by default on uBlue projects like Aurora, Bazzite and Bluefin. - Installing them within a container; be it though Toolbx or Distrobox. This is what Fedora Atomic initially intended (and probably still does).
- Some users got a lot of mileage from utilizing
nixto this effect. - If all else fails (or if you outright prefer it this way), you can always layer it through
rpm-ostree.
- Installing them through
I like flatpak
i am kinda the opposite of you, i find flatpacks meh its alright.
I love flatpak. No more dependency hell!
Agree
While true… RIP disk space.
SSDs have become incredibly cheap, and flatpak doesn’t even use that much storage space.
That’s false
I see being facetious is lost. Yes I know they don’t use a lot of space, however, they do package all their own dependencies. That means you do end up with duplicates.
Appimages do. Flatpaks have runtimes. There may be multiple runtimes but space is cheap. You can even spare the amount of space on a phone.
It once thought I should compress my images because they had 10mb each. I was wrong. I just had to put them on my server with immich and I don’t care about the space anymore. One 4k video is so big, all space related problems with apps or images are a real waste.
OMG I use cachyOS too, for the same reasons, plus I love how much I can tinker with it.
Yeah i kinda like it lets you install desktops that is in arch repos, well because its arch based.
CachyOS. I use it because I am a fan of Arch based systems, rolling releases etc, but CachyOS is optimised for my generation of hardware, and has lots of good default configurations for various apps. They have a customised proton version, a good default fish profile etc.
tl;dr It’s Arch, but optimised, and slightly more pre-configured out of the box.
Same thing.
Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It’s a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.
Tuxedo OS. Before that, I was very happy with Fedora, and then I got a tuxedo laptop and tried their distro. Now, I keep using that because I started to enjoy KDE, and I really like their hardware support and how they test and maintain the distro.
Ubuntu, because I’m fine with something that “just works”
How did you deal with snaps?
Artix because I love Arch and the AUR but networkd kept causing my home network to act like the mad hatter’s tea party with IP assignment.
Been using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop environment for a few years now. Does everything I need it to.
Arch. I need the AUR for certain applications, and the high degree of customizability and opportunity for learning appeal to me as a relatively new-ish Linux user (going on a few years now, most of that time having been on Arch).
Fedora 41 KDE at home on my daily driver laptop and desktop.
Antix on my dell mini netbook.
Multi machine VMs I manage at work run on red hat enterprise with no DE or WM.
My web app servers at work run Ubuntu server 24 LTS with no DE or WM.
My home lab runs on fedora 41 server, no DE or WM.
