What's your favourite linux distro, I'm curious (truly, I am). (Let's keep this civil!)

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Hi all,

I’m pretty new around here, even though I have been tinkering in Linux for the most part of over 20-something years. Back then, modems used to chirp down copper, with tcp/ip packets being converted to sinusoidal waves first, and back to, we’ll digital packets - ohh the fun.

Funnily enough - and I digress, I do recall what it was like connecting at 9,600 baud; just last week I got 100Mbps fibre to my home. Speedtest rocked 109MB/s downlink and over 50MB/s up. Times have changed!

To give you some background - my early intro to Linux was RedHat 5 and sometime since I recall tinkering with Gentoo. I did a Gentoo install from source which took about a week to compile on my old AMD Athlon 64. Since then though, my tastes in linux have been less adventurous apart from a recent love for Arch.

Over the past 6-years though, my distro of preference has always been Ubuntu (whatever version) but most importantly LTS (server side). I actually haven’t used linux with X11 running in, forever as I am happy living in headless SSH land.

Until about a week ago; well sort of. I’ve setup a NVR at home where I’m running a UniFi video controller (you just grab and install the deb package, that’s it) and have a dedicated box with WD Purple surveillance drives running in a RAID1 btrfs volume.

During the last month and a half, I have also re-built one of my existing boxes, and built two-new PC/Servers.

(1) I moved my Skylake-server 6700K, well its internals, into a Corsair 570X RGB case. While it is running Ubuntu right now, I may pull that SSD out and setup a different config with Ubuntu/Windows 10 as a HTPC. It has a GTX1070 8GB EVGA Superclocked card in there with 32GB Crucial Ballistix RAM.

(2) I built a Xeon E5-2620 v4 / 32GB Crucial ECC RDIMM / Asus X99-E WS/USB3.1 / 8x WD 4TB Red based FreeNAS box, inside the Corsair Air 740 from which I pulled out (1) above. This was my first time playing with FreeBSD; so far I’m happy with it. As for FreeNAS - loving it to bits. Super easy setup, got VMs working, UPS monitoring and a whole much of stuff. I just haven’t played with jails.

(3) The NVR I mentioned before - Pentium G4600 / Asus Z270 Prime-A / No GPU.

So to frame my question correctly -

  • What’s it like living with Fedora 26; if/when I have time I will try to spend some time with it. I’d assume the benefits of Fedora would be as a desktop given how a ‘default’ install installs so much stuff.
  • What other distros should I be playing with?

I’m a geek/hacker/tinkerer at heart; I have no allegiance or ‘bond’ with any Distro. While I did buy a “Your Distro Sucks” L1 Tshirt the other day, given my penchant for SSH/headless living, as long as it is linux, I’ll get by.

So that’s my way of saying - this is NOT meant to be a flame war at all; please be civil.
I will be posting some build-logs of my past builds and some videos if anyone’s interested.

Oh one more thing - @Wendel, what’s your preference and what do you use daily? Why?
Would a headless distro be different to say your desktop distro?

Thanks all!

Best M.

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Windows Vista

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Solus Linux

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Keep waiting for someone to make a Windows clone that is actually Linux. Would be interesting to see.

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Solus. I mean, I’ve probably said that before in so many other threads, but it’s Solus. Though, I’m relatively not too picky, I use just about everything I can just to toy around with it. I like Fedora, but my stance on that is that it serves the software itself, not the user, which is totally cool, because it’s also pretty forward in terms of being super awesome FLOSS stuff. Linux Mint has created its own little plague upon itself, but I do really like the Cinnamon desktop, and while on the system level, Mint fails horribly, it provides one hell of a nice desktop experience. Debian is, ehhhh, not my cup of tea, but I deal with it when I have to. Manjaro is probably just about my runner up. Getting in with KDE recently, Manjaro has been a pleasure for me to use. I find Antergos to be more of a blanket distro, and it doesn’t suit me too well, though I had a good time when I was running Antergos GNOME. Ubuntu, it’s uhhh, transitioning, so we’ll see… I actually liked Unity 7, and I think Unity 8 was garbage, apparently so did most everyone else. As for the various flavors? Ubuntu MATE is pretty damn cool, and there’s a lot of development going on there for 17.10, however it’s 18.04 that I think it’s going to really lay down the bricks :smiley: Hmmmmm, Kubuntu was disappointing IMO, but I can see the appeal, Elementary is fun, but limited for most. Zorin is… Zorin. There’s so many choices, but that’s a quick blanket of some of them. Solus definitely takes it away for me though.

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Heh, I’ve only tested Ubuntu 16.04 desktop, and yeah Unity 7 is alright. I’ll probably install xfce or GNOME at somepoint. I haven’t setup a ‘linux’ desktop yet, but I may do that pretty soon.

Appreciate the comments, will checkout Solus.

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Was watching Wendel’s latest live stream on IOMMU on Threadripper - so it seems that setting up virtualisation in Fedora is as simple as dnf update and dnf install @virtualization and dropping in 4-lines into a config file.

So that’ll at least be a reason for me to checkout Fedora again. 22 years later. LOL!

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I use mostly Ubuntu based distros because there are just so many of them that it is easy to find one that is mostly set up the way I like. I just installed Lubuntu Next 17.10 Alpha 2 with LXQt on an old Core2Quad rig and I like it a lot. I mostly prefer LXDE/LXQt desktops.

I have played around with Arch, but for some reason I can never get vanilla Arch to install on bare metal. I like Raspbian and I look forward to the new Raspbian x86 release coming in the next few weeks. Deepin is pretty fun, OBRevenge was interesting, Sparky Linux ‘Game Over Edition’ has lots of cool stuff. I’m sure I could spout off a number of distros that have some redeeming qualities.

I almost exclusively use Firefox and Steam, so it really doesn’t matter too much what is underneath that. The most sensitive info I ever put into my PC would probably be passwords for sites such as this, so I have little to lose as far as security goes. I didn’t leave the Windows ecosystem because of security, I was just bored with it.

I have always liked Lubuntu based distros, but plain Lubuntu always had bugs that downstream versions didn’t have which puzzled me greatly. My main machines have all been LXLE and usually Peppermint on one of the other machines floating around. When Lubuntu 18.04 Alpha comes around I will probably start switching a lot of my machines to that. I’ve switched a few people over to Mint Cinnamon edition and that’s a solid distro for basic stuff. People who use their computers for different purposes might find more value from other distros.

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Interesting and very valid point KleerKut - and you’re right; I too have primarily gravitated towards purpose-based distros. I suppose, there isn’t anything that I’ve run into (on the Ubuntu LTS side) that has required me to look elsewhere, at least in terms of server side for web/app/DevOps/orchestration/automation systems.

With regards for passwords, I’ve been using 1PassWord a good while, but I also plan to host a Vault cluster. The cluster needs minimum 3-nodes for any HA application. My options there would be to -

  • Setup an EXSi system and virtualise instances for this
  • Alternatively, run this in AWS and setup VPN between the AWS VPC and a sandboxed area in my LAN. Not keen on the AWS costs though.
  • Setup Fedora and run VMs there.
  • Or for the time being spin the VMs up in FreeNAS. It’ll eat 3 cores though.

Check out Vault by Hashicorp; its codebase has been audited several times and there are some huge players in the industry using it at scale. Heck, you could run it in virtualbox on any old server at home too if you wish.

Arch- yeah, that’s the challenge with it, and I guess the fun too. If I want a headache free install I just need to breakout Ubuntu or any other well-adopted distro.

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At this current moment Gentoo Linux

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TempleOS baby!!!
Don’t mess around with all that Linux gobbledygook! (It’ll never work)

HolyC is the only language for me.

And if we are honest with ourselves… 640x480 (16 bit color) is really all you need, anything more and it just shows how much of the CIA really owns you.

Now I know what your thinking, “but @SEP why would I use something that has no networking capabilities?!” This is just a show of how little you truly understand! In one breath you groan about how the government is watching you, breathing down your backs, and reading your emails; and in the next breath you ask such a stupid question! Well I say, if it’s privacy you want, then by using an OS that doesn’t even know how to connect to the internet is the best way to keep yourself protected from those on the internet (the CIA and friends).

And who could forget about the RedSea file system!?! I hear it’s so easy to use even Moses was able to set up a new partition in a pinch.

You heard it here first folks, join us, the awakened ones, and leave those ancient and broken systems behind!!!

I’m liking Qubes at the moment but I wouldn’t advise it to the average user.

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My favorite linux distro right now is fedora but i doubt that will ever change. I played around with debian, arch, ubuntu, and gentoo. No matter how much time i spend with other distros i keep finding myself coming back to fedora.

Why? Honestly because it just works and has what i need out of a distro. It manages to be bleeding edge while being stable, getting stuff like optimus setup is almost point and click, dnf is just a holy god among itself, and if i want too i can get as deep down into the OS as something like arch.

If i had to switch i think i would go with arch or maybe pull a @Kat and go with gentoo. Only thing i would have against arch is that 32bit support is a bitch. the AUR is on its own level though fedora has copr.

Ok, ill stop rambling for now

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you should. fedora has gotten alot better and the more advanced stuff is almost point and click to get working

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Arch was one of my favorites. All the rice.

Currently on ubuntu Mate, mostly for the DE and I needed something stable while I go back to school.

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Manjaro, really liked Lunar but it died out. Used Puppy a lot since series 2. Had a bunch of versions installed for a long time on a 4GB thumb drive and used that for main OS’s with bunch of SD cards for music and other files. Was kinda handy, if I needed to fix some ones box I could just load my main OS on their machine and fix it.

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Fedora 26. Anything I want to do always seems painless and gnome is my favourite de.

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Windows 7 64 bit : Linux haters Edition

: P

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Lately, I gotta hand it to Solus. It’s super clean, stuff works great out of the box, and it just keeps getting better all the time. No real bloat to me, and overall I just can’t say enough good stuff about the Budgie desktop. Oh, and Ikey is awesome from the interviews I’ve seen.

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Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and on occasion Fedora in that order.

Arch because you do the stuff yourself so you kind of know what you’re getting. Ubuntu and Debian for compatibility or on servers and on occasion fedora for Desktop. I really liked mint too but I haven’t used it for some time now.

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My main system is windows10 these days, but Linux wise I typically use Debian or CentOS… used arch for a while but got sick of the higher maintenance, it’d be worth it for many still though. To say least favorite distro, Android x86, More than just twiddling with it I’ve tried to use that for an actual shipped project before and it just wasn’t anything good, huge pain in the ass all the way, and not great to even use or light on resources compared to a more normal distro.