Linux

A mixture of NixOS and Debian, depending on the machine. NixOS is trivial to maintain and to keep predictable and tidy. When its weirdness is a problem, Debian is my answer. It doesn't get more normal than Debian.

I still hop but less often, I always come back to an Arch-based distro though, mainly because there's so much in the AUR. Garuda at the moment after quite a long time with EndeavourOS, and a very short time with Nobara before that.

Mint. Because apparently "task bar and start menu that looks like gnome 2 and/or xp" is heresy in modern ui design (although maybe kde would also work? Had some papercuts that put me off it last I tried though).

Also, it turns out that getting a full time job really kills your desire to tinker and mess around with your personal system. I just want something that works.

Debian. Seemed like the most generic "Linux" there is. Nothing special, nothing weird. Just Linux. Gray, boring, system defaults Linux.

I've been hopping between Arch and NixOS for about a year, and I've been on Arch For a few months before that (wirh the exception of a few short-term hops to Ubuntu, Fedora, Starting off with Mint and ArcoLinux, And I almost stayed on Tumbleweed about a week ago but I couldn't figure out dnf5 (a few days later I was told that installing dnf was installing dnf5 so I just had to configure it properly). So right now I'm on NixOS, where SDDM broke last night and I had to switch to GDM, and with my recent switch to Emacs, NixOS keeps on throwing issues at me (and here I was, thinking NixOS could be my forever distro). Tumbleweed is missing a lot of packages I use, I'm tired of Arch, and I feel like NixOS is giving me problems every time I try it, so at this point, I'm at a loss.

Like, I'm seriously considering abandoning Wayland and everything, and just switching all the way back to AwesomeWM (my first window manager) with Jonaburg's fork of Picom (to give me Hyprland-like animations, rounded corners and floating bars) on Debian and sticking with it until we get Hyprland on Debian and then sticking to that. Alternatively, Fedora (even though I felt dirty using it after the whole redhat debacle, and hyprland and waybar weren't working the way they were supposed to). I don't know. I'm tired, I want all my stuff on a distro that I can just not update for weeks, because I'm often too busy or just forget, and where things just work (tm). So... yeah. That's the crap I'm dealing with.

TLDR: The only distros that have all the packages I need (I really, REALLY, don't want to compile anything if I can avoid it) are either, broken and problematic (NixOS for some reason), have slow package management and are missing packages (Tumbleweed) or do not have a stable branch (Arch AND Tumbleweed), meaning that when they aren't updated for weeks (as it often happens with my system), they can break (Arch).

So I distrohop cuz NO distro out there meets my criteria and works well for me. I just want Debian's stability with Arch's repos and AUR, so I can get Hyprland and all my (often not very popular) software I use, from the regular ol repos so I don't have to compile.

Not sure if it qualify as distrohopping, but for a long time I tried to test every major Linux distro release, and they all had problems with sound, but when Ubuntu 5 came out everything worked out of the box, so I switched my desktop to Linux. A couple of years later, Ubuntu began some introducing some (IMO) questionable things, so I tested the main distros again and landed on Debian, most of all because I knew the system relatively well from Ubuntu.

The first desktop distro I tried was Mandrake (back in 1998), but since I use my desktop for making music, it was just too much work every time I wanted to record something back then.

As for servers, I have always just used what the customer wanted or had, and for most parts it was Red hat.

Fedora atomic GNOME aka silverblue

• It has very good defaults, works out of the box, I can switch anytime to another de or a ublue image without messing around with my setup
• selinux
• podman
• flatpak centric
• auto updates
• widely used

Current Cons:

• openssl is not installed by default (for gsconnect)
• gnome-tweaks is not installed by default
• uses toolbx instead of distrobox. Toolbx is better for servers, distrobox better for desktop, imo.
• flatpak firefox isn't used

Arch Linux (Endeavour OS if you are scared of the terminal) for personal use. It's almost all the software you want one click away, plus the best documentation ever.

Debian on my company's computer because Debian.

I switched to guix and haven't looked back.

Mostly because:

1. I like the idea of functional package managers
2. I like guix's dedication to making every package buildable from source (thus the no non-libre code rule)
3. I like the expressiveness of scheme vs Nix's package description language

Guix is the smoothest time I've ever built packages for a distro before (well outside arch). Which is good because there's a lot of out of date and unadded packages for potential.

Fedora.

(Specifically Workstation - i.e. the Gnome variant, but I've used other spins and they're also great)

Pretty up to date, reliable, spearheads new developments that go on to benefit the Linux desktop as a whole, they don't make a bunch of crazy alterations to the DEs they ship.

And to think I was reluctant to try it for ages because the name sounds like it'd be some neckbeardy distro.

I am now at NixOS. I like the reproducibility and immutability of the distro, but the documentation is far from great and configuring the OS you want is not that straightforward. I also don't like that even though it has a great number of packages, they tend to be slightly outdated.

I am not sure if I will stick with it, but I really like that I can create very specialised configurations that are also portable. I am currently using KDE but I am thinking of switching to Hyprland once I get more comfortable around NixOS and home manager/flakes, as nothing beats tiling managers in my opinion.

Which one(s)

Arch.

why?

1. The Arch-Wiki
2. I like pacman
3. The Arch-Wiki
4. I wanted a rolling-release distribution.
5. The Arch-Wiki
6. It just works. I had only one more serious problem in ~8 years of running Arch
7. Did I mention the Arch-Wiki?

Edit:

Having said that, I have an eye on immutable distros. Maybe one day I'll try one out.

Arch. Minimal, fast, rolling and it doesn't break. Plus, the AUR and the Wiki are unvaluable.

Had been on: RedHat (199something), Mandrake, Slackware, Ubuntu and Debian before.

Arch, cause it has everything I needs + I don't have to reinstall between big updates (Arch is Rolling release)

I settled on openSUSE Tumbleweed because it's rolling and reliable. I chose KDE Plasma long before I chose my distro.