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)
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.
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!
They now have a guided installer which makes installing Arch easy - dev.to/mbcrump/arch-linux-april-20...
I use Vanilla arch
I love it, bcz
Nice! I really like the fact that with Arch you have control over every aspect of your operating system.
More like, "I use Arch btw".
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.
Oh nice, that sounds pretty cool!
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After all of the great comments about Manjaro, I'll definitely give it a try this weekend!
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.
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!
That is absolutely amazing!
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.
Check out ZorinOs. It's basically the fancy version on ubuntu.
Sounds cool! I will check it out!
This is the main reason why I defaulted to Ubuntu as it lets you get going pretty quickly.
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.
Love that! Starting with Arch really helps understand how Linux works.
I am using Linux Mint because I think is very fast and simple to use
This was the first distro that I've worked with and I loved it!
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.
KDE is the best! Have you tried KDE plasma?
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.
Arch. I've my own installer to install my whole system, including all the software I use and my dotfiles.
It's flexible, fast, I can choose exactly what I want, every app are up to date, the community is great, the Arch Wiki is ridiculously helpful.
If you're interested by building your own dev environment while using the keyboard as much as possible, I wrote a complete guide for that: themouseless.dev
Ubuntu! Admittedly, it's the first one I've tried, but I love the UI and it revived my old, sluggish XPS into a snappy little thing. I may end up reaching for a different distro in the future, but I'm glad I went with Ubuntu as kind of a transition distro from Windows.
Well said! Ubuntu definitely gives you a smooth transition from Windows to Linux.
I had use Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Debian etch, CentOS, Mandriva, Elementary, two years ago use osX and is similiar although the apps and philosophy is diferent. Now I'm using Elementary because do not hurt me and is simple to use.
In my case it is elementary os. I really like the aesthetic and visual style.
I think the "Pay what you want" app center is a great way of contributing to developers.
This is pretty cool, I haven't tested it, but I've heard excellent things about it on different podcasts and streams!
It has some downsides, I'm having a hard time getting use to the multitask view but the overall smoothness and feeling is amazing.
Debian. Originally it was for the within breadth of the archive but now I have tried Ubuntu and had to deal with several crashes I don't think I have ever seen Debian crash on me.
This is an interesting observation, did this happen on Ubuntu Desktop or Ubuntu Server?
It was the stock desktop that came with my system 76. It was the first time I saw a kernel panic in the wild
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