Linux

I've been fully daily driving Linux for about 15 years now, and for me it's almost all Arch now.

I started out distro-hopping between Debian, Mint, Ubuntu, Slack, etc, but once I found Arch (and spent two weeks getting it installed, booted, and customized exactly to my liking) I was finally at home.

I know the meme. I'm not here to claim superiority, or diminish the value of other perfectly good distros. I love Debian, I love Void, Ubuntu can die in a fire, etc.

What I love about Arch is the lack of bloat. You get precisely what you ask for, no more, no less. You can legitimately run htop and recognize literally every program, and know if something's wrong immediately.

Every one of my Arch boxes is a perfect little snowflake, suited to exactly the task(s) I built it for. And if there was anything I had to learn or configure along the way? That's just the journey, man.

I have been eyeballing NixOS though...

NixOS so I can keep my config in git. I have a single nix config for all my machines (desktop, laptop and server) so I can share configuration between them. I use it to configure both my system and my user config, my dotfiles, with home-manager. Even my neovim config is in nix thanks to nixvim.

I don't think I could go back now. It can be a bit of a pain from time to time and the learning curve is steep but it has so many advantages. Being able to rollback between config versions (called generations), having a consistent config between my machines, having it all in version control… The repo have so many packages and when there is a module it's really easy to add a service. Writing new packages (derivations) and modules is also not that hard. It can be as simple as calling nix-init.

Had my main ssd fail on me a few month back and it was very simple to just replay the config and just get everything working as before. I only had to do the partitioning by hand (it can be done by nix but I've not gotten around to it yet). That's why I only backup data and home partitions, not system partitions.

debian since forever. no reason to switch yet.

The answer is Debian like crabs on a long enough timeline it will eventually become Debian. - Linux user for 27 years

I used a linux desktop for a few years back in 08-09, started on ubuntu then got on the Gentooooooooooo bandwagon. (Went back to Windows after this due to college + games, naturally)

Ever since then, I just use stable LTS versions of either debian or ubuntu for server applications. Recently changed back to Linux on desktop and went with CachyOS, it's been super solid.

I've tried many distros over a 20 year period. I'm happy with CachyOS.

15+ years on Fedora

Solid

Debian

Arch on my personal machines, Debian on my servers.

Debian on the streets (servers), Arch on the sheets (laptop).

Debian.

It's pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it's got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it's got nonfree firmware on the disc, they've really upped their game.

(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It's not for the faint of heart though.)

-- Frost

Debian.

Debian on everything (well except the router is on OpenWrt).

First installed Debian more than 25 years ago. Tried some other stuff, Debian is still best for me.

Debian and alpine. Coming up on 27 years of linux for me.

Debian. For decades.

My first installation was slack and from then until now has been a mix of more things than I care to list, but includes things like freebsd on a DEC multia, a sparcstation pizza box with a 2.6ish kernel maybe?, along with things like Ubuntu, suse, fedora, centos, gentoo, ive built from scratch, I ever remember the days of configuring x with fvwm95 because I thought it would be easier for my parents.

I always go back to Debian. Though I'm happy with arch when I want something 'current'.

Suddenly realizing I use linux for more than 10 years

[despair noises]

Arch, btw

Debian mostly. I appreciate the democratic, non corporate governance, the classic Free Software ethos, the stability, and their not going blindly along with upstream defaults (e.g. telemetry).

My server runs OpenBSD because I find it more tightly designed, and simpler. Laptop Fedora because the hardware wasn't originally well supported by Debian stable.

Debian, on the server, the laptop, the desktop, and the gaming machine. Debian.

I started with Slackware many years ago. Eventually switched to Kubuntu on my desktop and laptop machines, then later the server switched to Debian. The desktop and laptop switched later.

An old pop os system for everyday use.

An old debian server for most self hosting.

Onion os for my miyoo mini plus retro game console.

And a mess of things all over the house.

Debian. It does everything I want and nothing I don't

For almost 30 years Debian somehow.

Been daily driving Arch on my laptops for the last 10 years. It's been great. Getting the latest software has been especially handy for laptops, where the kernel sometimes needs time to catch up to the latest hardware.

I ran Guix for a few months when I had some extra time and I liked it, but it was very different and not all software I needed ran on it (or ran well). I ended up going back to Arch, but I brought Guix with me, as a package manager.

I also ended up trying Fedora for the first time (ok, I was unemployed) recently and was pleasantly surprised. Turns out Fedora is pretty close to how I configure Arch. And it's got some extra polish that was neat. I ended up installing Fedora Silverblue for my parents 6-8 months ago and it's been working out great for them.

Anyway, Arch has been my reliable companion for the last 10 years.

If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?

I distro-hopped every few years until about 2015. Since then I've been trending toward Debian for everything.

Have I been on 10 years? I dunno, but I like to think I'm pretty experienced for an amateur.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed! It rolls! It games! It works with newer hardware and gets along sorta reasonably with Nvidia!

Best part? If any of that ISN'T true (rarely after an update), it seamlessly integrates BTRFS snapshots with the boot menu, to just roll back and wait like a week til the wonderful souls working on it, fix stuff.

The community is also very supportive.

Debian. I like my computer to work.

Debian stable, it works fine for a workstation and for the few games I play

33 years with Linux (kernel 1.2.13, slackware). Worked at a distro. Worked in OS security -- Unix and enterprise Linux. I helped build United Linux out of the dismembered corpse suse kicked over the fence as 'collaboration'.

Because of the validation issue in the .deb package format and others, I'm on a mixture of Rocky and Nobara.

I'm subscribed to cloudLinux's tuxcare enterprise updates for some older stuff, and I can't recommend it enough. It's excellent; and if almalinux releases their sLTS distro release and actually covers it for 25 years, that will be such a coup.

I'm worried at the direction Linux has been taken by IBM and I hope it can be unfucked one day. I miss the reliable, fast boots and uncomplicated tooling before this systemd shitshow.

Linux hobbyist for 20+ years, pro for 6+. Fedora for workstations, proxmox for hypervisors, and rocky for servers is my usual personal recommendation. Beyond that, secureblue (a hardened downstream of fedora atomic) with heads firmware is a fantastic daily driver if you're into that kind of thing.

Started with debian sarge way back in the day, currently using secureblue and qubes with fedora vms for most work, with a debian htpc on the side. For servers, I'm mostly debian-based on hardware (a bunch of proxmox machines at various sites and debian-based raspberry pis everywhere), with mostly redhat-based vms. Some alpine and freebsd baremetal and virtual machines sprinkled in here and there for flavor where they fit right.

I have started with Mandrake (later renamed to Mandriva) then went through few other distros before settling on Gentoo.

Gentoo installation is one of the most complicated because there is no installer, you do everything yourself.

This is like buying car parts and assembling them together into a car using a manufacturer's manual. its painful but once the car is assembled you almost never have to take it to a repair shop. Not because it doesn't breakdown but because you know well how it function and thus how to fix it yourself.

I started using Linux in '98 with Red Hat 5.2. I have swapped between many, many different distros. But for the last 10 years or so, I've mostly stuck with Fedora. It generally just works, is up to date, and I've never had issues upgrading on their 6 month release cycle. My desktop probably started on Fedora 20-something and has been upgraded to the latest (43) without ever doing a reinstall!

My primary computer is my Frame.work laptop running Fedora 43.

Gentoo since 2004.

People are going to hate me for this, but here goes...

I'm using Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Studio, to be precise.

You've had me realise how long I've actually been using Linux for, though not quite at the ten year mark unless you count some very early endeavours with ubuntu.

fully agree with you on Debian as a rock solid server. my "don't fuck with it, just work" client system for several years now has been fedora workstation, though I've only relatively recently switched all of my personal computing over to it (still have several windows installations for work-related testing).

The first linux distro I remember using was Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), so I'm just about at 20 years, maybe a bit less than that; I think it had been released for a while before I decided to give it a go. I tend to stick with debian-based distros, though I've used arch variants off and on for my daily driver for years at a time. Still got it kicking around on some machines now, though not any of my daily drivers. Servers are a mix of Debian and Ubuntu Server, machines with UI are either Ubuntu or Mint, or some resource-light version of Ubuntu, depending on the device and the mood when I last reformatted them. I have used Fedora/RedHat/CentOS at various points, but usually because someone was paying me to do so. Same story with OpenSUSE, but even less commonly. I have a few devices running variously dated versions of PostmarketOS, Lineage OS, even one device that still runs CyanogenMod (it does not get internet privileges). I have a few Raspberry PIs that all run Raspbian (or whatever it's called now).

EDIT: Just remembered I used to use CrunchBang Linux for a long time. I bought the only computer I could afford (a "netbook" with Win 10 Starter), put crunchbang on it (after experimenting with a few distros), and really kinda fell in love with OpenBox. I don't use it anymore because I don't like the default settings and haven't been bothered to set it up properly lately, but I had that netbook set up just so and it worked really well. it was my main and only computer for several years.

Linux user since 1998 or 99. Debian-Testing for my desktops, Mint for my laptops. I like things that work well with a GUI (I dislike the terminal, despite being well familiar with it), without bad surprises (Debian-Testing is surprisingly stable).

I think I started back in the day with Ubuntu Gnome, with some dabbling in Manjaro and then Arch.

But since then I have used Fedora Workstation, and then Fedora Silverblue / Fedora Kinoite (immutable versions of fedora, with the past several years on Kinoite [kde] over Silverblue [gnome])

On the server side of things, I am using Debian (with everything running in podman containers).

If I were to consider migrating, it would be to migrate my laptop to secureblue (likely, rebasing the OS image rather than clean-installing) and migrate my Windows 11 desktop to bazzite. Both of these are still based on Fedora's immutable base, albeit with changes to the base OS image. At some point in the future, I would also consider migrating my server to an immutable OS, however, which one remains to be seen.