Australian Tech

I’ve been running Bazzite for a while now, it isn’t truly inmuteable but it isn’t the best if you want to tinker.

Bazzite has been excellent for trouble free gaming but probably wouldn’t be my first choice for an older laptop

I’ve been running CachyOS for a while now after switching from Bazzite. Bazzite was really good, but I wanted to install system packages and wasn’t feeling up to screwing around with Bazzite like that. CachyOS has been fantastic so far, both it and Bazzite are excellent choices for gaming setups.

CachyOS - wanted Steam hardware compatability, and familiarity; KDE provides.

I liked Ubuntu but at the time it randomly crashed my Wi-Fi driver, killing my system within hours to weeks...

Wish I'd go back to Nyarch (KDE) for the meme but I was on Gnome and wanted to try some recommendations. I liked Bazzite more than CachyOS, but I don't understand Fedora and struggled to install an RPM file despite instructions :(

Mint, never any problems.

LMDE.

But truth be told I'd probably just use base debian at this point. I just like Cinnamon, clean and easy.

Use case: accessing virtual machines via remmina and docker containers by browser. No gaming. occasional light document work.

Debian, on both my various servers and desktop. It just works.

My old experienced ass does not like to futz so I run lazy setups. I was using zorin before but since I wanted to play games I went to bazzite but I also like the immutable philosophy.

Catchy on the PC. Kubuntu on the old MS Surface's. I preferred Bazzite to catchy.

Debian is great, especially if you don't need the bleeding-edge versions of things. And if you need a couple things more up-to-date, there are usually appimages or flatpaks available.

My personal daily driver is CachyOS. I do a fair bit of gaming and need recent versions of things, and I've found it to be stable for me. It's not one I would recommend to everyone, though.

anyone running vanilla debian for desktop?

Yes. I don't want Linux finicky bits getting into the way of my everyday productivity, and Debian just works™. It's great because it just sits there and does its job

I love Fedore KDE for daily driver, but I confess to falling (back?) To Debian Gnome for a lot of what I'm doing now. And I agree, Ubuntu's "quirks" finally pushed me into Fedora.

I've used Arch with Cinnamon as the DE for the last five(ish) years. I used to run Mint (which is what got me onto Cinnamon) on my previous desktop but figured I'd try something else. I'd often come across helpful info on the Arch wiki when I needed to look stuff up so decided I might as well go with that, and it's worked out fine (ok, I did get the system to not boot fully once due to an update issue, but I sorted it without reinstalling).

Debian is fine for daily driving. I was doing that for a while before switching to openSUSE Tumbleweed for newer components (I was goofing around with Podman quadlets and needed later systemd bits).

Traveling a lot right now, so I just changed to openSUSE Slowroll for a slower pace of rolling, and smaller download size.

Been using Linux Mint - Cinnamon starting over two years ago just before Spring. Made the decision to take the plunge when at the time, Windows 10 was going to lose support in 2025 and hated the idea of upgrading to Windows 11. Glad I made that leap, because it's been a pretty good experience and everything felt like a breath of fresh air, especially since you can actually change the fonts of everything on the desktop as well like you could Windows 7 and earlier iterations of that OS and I can even still do the gaming that I enjoy, what with proton and even Heroic.

Even decided to get a 1TB drive for my Zenbook and pop Linux Mint onto that. Since then, no computers I have, be it laptop, or even netbook have any iteration of Windows.

As for the netbook, an EEE PC 1000HE model, I would take it with me to a library just to mess about with it, which has MX Linux running on it, which sadly the 32-bit version will lose support in 2028, which is a bit of a shame.

I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora once I had enough of Ubuntu being weird. Very happy with Fedora in general. I know it's not a very enlightened suggestion.

I'm also curious how Gnome OS develops, but I'm not sure I would go there yet.

guiiiiiiix 🥰

Debian (stable, with necessary non free) for both desktop and laptops. XFCE. Solid as a rock.

I usually just run Xubuntu. I think it avoids most of the Canonical bullshit while still being close enough that everything that works on Ubuntu works on it. My main desktop and my old laptop are Xubuntu, and my work laptop is Ubuntu with a gnome plug-in to give me the top application bar like XFCE. But I'm obviously not too annoyed by Canonical.

My daily driver laptop is Fedora KDE Plasma ......... because I love updating everyday. I also have an old all-in-one for the kitchen that runs Mint perfectly. My bro uses Arch from the command line only, but I don't have time for that

EndeavourOS: the minimalism of Arch made intermediate-user-friendly.

Maybe LMDE is the best of both worlds for you.

At the moment, Aurora (non-gaming Fedora KDE Bazzite flavour) on laptops/minipc and Bazzite on desktop.

Would I recommend? If you never need to install anything tricky (unless you distrobox it) as guides don't tend to suit atomic desktops, then it just works and silently updates in background all the time. Flatpak covers most needed software. KDE version is nice. It does suit users that really don't care they are using Linux.

Nothing ever seems to go wrong but I won't lie, at one time early in the piece, there was some manual intervention required due to error they had. Nothing since.

IMO, definitely dump Ubuntu as quick as you can. Linux Mint is a great Ubuntu-based alternative that gets you all the benefits of Ubuntu (plus some) and none of the Canonical bullshit. If you want to divorce from Ubuntu entirely, LMDE is a great project that rebases Mint on plain Debian! Another lovely project by that team.

Personally, my first pick daily driver is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. If you like playing with config files and the idea of hyper-replicable system setups NixOS is a very interesting project that I've enjoyed a lot in the past.

CachyOS is getting quite a lot of attention recently, and as far as Arch-based distros go I have enjoyed using it. It has a lot of performance claims, but does come with all the drawbacks of ArchLinux and bleeding-edge rolling release distros -- not that it's a terrible experience, it just requires you to be more mindful and more capable than your average distro, especially if you're going to utilize the AUR.

TL;DR - there are a boatload of interesting distros out there. My first recommendation would be Linux Mint/LMDE for familiarity and ease of entry.