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Bobby Iliev
Bobby Iliev

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What is your Linux distribution of choice and why?

Hi all!

I have personally been using Linux for the past 8 years now. I initially started with Linux Mint installed on my laptop and I was quite happy with it. Then a couple of years later I switched to Ubuntu 16.04.

What I love about Ubuntu so far is that I've been upgrading it each year and I'm now at 20.04 on the same laptop. This is something that was missing with CentOS.

For my servers, I've always been defaulting to CentOS up until the recent RH changes. So instead I've been experimenting with Ubuntu Server and it's quite nice.

So for me it's been:

  • Desktop: Linux Mint -> Ubuntu
  • Servers: CentOS -> Ubuntu

I'm quite curious to hear what your distribution of choice has been!

Top comments (100)

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flokoe profile image
Florian Köhler • Edited

For my personal workstation I prefer Manjaro (or Ubuntu).
I really like Arch, but at work it just has... to work. Building Arch Linux hast too much overhead (Even though it's really fun!).

On servers, I find Debian the only viable option.
It is stable, secure and simple. Yes, you do have to do some things manually (To be honest, with automation this is not really a concern. Whoever configures servers by hand these days... do yourself a favor and just use Puppet, Ansible or whatever automation tool works best for you). Because of this it is more flexible and lightweight than Ubuntu, but still not as cumbersome as CentOS or RHEL.
I feel like CentOS/RHEL just makes life harder. Like they want simple things to be hard.

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

Really well said! Fully agree with all this!

I've been wanting to try out Manjaro for a while now so might give it a try this weekend!

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mbcrump profile image
Michael Crump

They now have a guided installer which makes installing Arch easy - dev.to/mbcrump/arch-linux-april-20...

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cmuralisree profile image
Chittoji Murali Sree Krishna

I use Vanilla arch

I love it, bcz

  1. It's extremely lightweight,
  2. You are building your own system, so it will be solid stable
  3. Pacman and AUR,
  4. Availability of software
  5. Infamous archwiki,
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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

Nice! I really like the fact that with Arch you have control over every aspect of your operating system.

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natalia_asteria profile image
Natalia Asteria

More like, "I use Arch btw".

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yanivbah profile image
Yaniv Bahalker

POP OS.
Based on Ubuntu so huge community support.
Includes awesome window tiling out of the box.
Hybrid Graphics support.
I tried CentOS and Ubuntu before, both was frustrating with screen scaling and my laptop used to overheat and I heard the fans too much on basic stuff.

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

Oh nice, that sounds pretty cool!

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alexisfinn profile image
AlexisFinn • Edited

+1 for POP OS, it's truly awesome, replaces Mint in my heart as the Linux to showcase what Linux can do to Windows/MacOS users.

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darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

Linux became harder and hardware to manage as a system administrator, as necessary tools became obfuscated away by more and more layers of abstraction, on average doubling the time it took to resolve issues in production when they came up.

Had FreeBSD running to mirror and backup some content on the Linux servers. Found that it was significantly faster to troubleshoot issues on these FreeBSD machines. Over time, shifted the entire infrastructure over to FreeBSD, and now that's where I live.

FreeBSD Jails and ZFS have really opened up the possibilities with my infrastructure to support applications in wildly new ways, yet retaining a level of simplicity and consistency never found on Linux.

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Frederico Corrêa

We're in the same page here. Have been used FreeBSD for almost five years by now, though still run Linux for academical reasons.

As for the linuxes, I do prefer Gentoo and Arch Linux.

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

I've heard so much good stuff for both FreeBSD and ZFS and it's a shame that I've never got to use FreeBSD in prod.

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Damian Nowak

I used to use a lot os different distros - ElementaryOS, ubuntu, debian, manjaro, raspberryOS, but after all I'm using Archlinux as main distro. If i've had a business laptop with linux, i would install manjaro, because i have the best experience with Arch based distros.

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

After all of the great comments about Manjaro, I'll definitely give it a try this weekend!

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Damian Nowak

For me Manjaro is easier version of Arch. The installation is much easier to do. There's no need to use commands, and the whole proces doesn't need any knowledge about command-line what so ever. It feels like I'm on Arch. I'm KDE Plasma fan, and on both of those (Arch and Manjaro) performance is in my opinion the same, which is very good.

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James Linden

When I started, there were essentially three options: Slackware, Debian, Redhat. My brother used Redhat, so I did too. 25 years later, still using Redhat or derivatives. I've taken various forays into SUSE/OpenSUSE, Ubuntu variations, and even building custom distros for small devices (prime-linux.org).

I'm happy to see anyone using any flavor of Linux!

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

That is absolutely amazing!

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Jean-Michel Plourde

I mainly use Ubuntu for my job and university. Even though I'd like to use fancier distros, I really have to ship software so I can't be bothered by all the overhead from a more hardcore rolling release like Arch Linux for example.

Using Ubuntu never prevented me from using productivity boosting tools. I recently started using i3wm, which is a tiling windows manager that's highly customisable and use few resources to work. I followed some videos to customize it to my liking and I really appreciate how all my windows are in the same place all the time and I can finally ditch Alr+tab. You can find my i3wm config here.

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Abraham

Check out ZorinOs. It's basically the fancy version on ubuntu.

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

Sounds cool! I will check it out!

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Bobby Iliev

This is the main reason why I defaulted to Ubuntu as it lets you get going pretty quickly.

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g33n profile image
Celiz Matias

Archlinux!

Because it is very customisable and contains no rubbish from the installation. 3 years ago I love build my own distro with arch, you can choise any desktop, and install only the necesary drivers, software... And the best part for me was pacman with ths package manager you never touch the source again always is updated.

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bobbyiliev profile image
Bobby Iliev

Love that! Starting with Arch really helps understand how Linux works.

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CristoferK

I am using Linux Mint because I think is very fast and simple to use

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Bobby Iliev

This was the first distro that I've worked with and I loved it!

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nicm42 profile image
Nic

Linux Mint is my favourite.

I used to use Ubuntu back in the day, but then they changed it, right around the time when Mint was relatively new and I swapped to that.

I always used KDE - I love KDE. I am possibly the only person in the world who likes the bouncing icons. But Mint recently don't have a KDE desktop, so when my LTS came to an end I tried Manjaro briefly. But found I missed Debian where everything is easy and just works. And Kubuntu was really slow on my (getting on a bit) computer. So I am back to Mint and am liking the colours of Cinnamon.

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Bobby Iliev

KDE is the best! Have you tried KDE plasma?

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nicm42 profile image
Nic

I have, but although I can see the KDE desktop settings, I can't switch to it. I suspect I have broken something in my profile - when I had Linux Mint KDE the icons wouldn't bounce, even though the option was turned on. I can't quite face setting everything up from scratch.

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