Anyone here use Void linux?
And the best thing of all? It’s Linux, so if you don’t like the desktop environment, you just change it or swap to a different distro, no hard feelings!
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Its not that I really have a favourite distro. I just don’t like GNOME 3 as a desktop. I like KDE, MATE or Cinnamon. I have mainly used Debian based distros so that is where I am comfortable. It helps that using Steam on Debian is trouble free.
I have used Debian and CentOS at work so I have experience of the two major distro branches but those are always ‘sans’ desktop as is proper. I can’t say I prefer one over the other at this point.
Is that Mate? It is kinda close. I mean like Windows 10.
I did this back when it was gnome 2, but yea. I was going for the windows vista/7 look.
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Not bad!
There is a windows 10 theme and icon pack available for GNOME
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Initially, my favorite Linux distro was Ubuntu with the Unity DE.
Why?
- Immediate Drive Support
- Tear Free experience (more on that later)
- Easiest to support
- All around easy to use
When Canonical announced that they were killing support for Unity, I was truly baffled. So many people poured out and said “Finally!” and “Good riddance!” I couldn’t find a reasoning other than their 30 year old laptop with 644 MB of RAM couldn’t handle it anymore, and they were OUTRAGED BECAUSE!!! Well, BECAUSE!
You asked to keep it civil, so I won’t get into how Linux users, sysadmins, and people and general fear advancements in technology and change, even though they claim to hold dominance over such things.
I was primarily a Windows user, and I fired up Ubuntu to test things in Java, JavaScript, and C. I also used Ubuntu to work through some Linux books to learn the terminal and complete Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson.
Fast forward a couple of years later and I started getting more involved in the open source community. Many people were friendly, and encouraged expanding past the Canonical domain. Concerns of privacy, lack of control, and other factors were their reasoning, so I figured, why not? I fired up Debian 7 (or 8) and couldn’t get it working. I had an nVidia graphics card and once i installed the nVidia drivers the desktop would boot to a black screen. So I said screw it and installed Fedora. I believe at the time it was Fedora 24. I had used 18 or 19 a while back when I was engaged in distro hopping.
Wow, what a change! Fedora 24 was the FIRST distribution I had used since Ubuntu that offered a clean interface, tear free desktop experience, and awesome package management. Everything I had tried during my bouncing around was ugly, riddled with screen tearing, and a clunky interface.
I hear all the time “I’d rather have screen tearing than invasion of my privacy! Take that M$$$$$$$$!!!11!!11111!!!”
Uh, not me. Sorry, but I didn’t spend $3,000 on hardware to have basic composition problems. I was put off on Linux for several years because of this. Often, I would just use a CentOS or Ubuntu server VM with X11 forwarding to do Linux stuff because their composition was (and still is, in some cases) so terrible.
I used Arch a few times, when it would work. I tried it’s derivatives, but they never boot to the live CD. Something something nouveau something something disable this something something nope, still doesn’t boot. My problem with Arch is despite reading about the updates, updating would still break stuff. Sometimes it was an easy fix, like the backlight being disabled. Other times it would corrupt data and make the / partition trash.
This is a lot longer than I anticipated so I’ll cut it short, someone suggested Debian Stretch, I said I had a bad experience, someone said a lot has changed, I installed Debian, bam, it works. Really great nVidia support, really great software, and an awesome community. I still have Fedora on my second workstation, my servers, and my laptop, but Debian is my battlestation OS.
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I was a big fan of unity expect for 2 things
the whole amazon thing but meh. wish it was opt-in not opt-out
it being a bitch to compile and maintain. took some many outdated packages. i really wanted to install unity on my laptop but required packages that stop being support almost 2 years ago
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Completely understand. I conceded to those points which took me to bouncing around and ending up with Fedora and Debian.
My main beef was people saying it’s choppy, buggy, slow, etc. When you looked at the specs some of these people had they had 1 GB of RAM and dated hardware. Maybe Canonical advertised Ubuntu Unity as the computer revitalizer, or something along those lines.
I really enjoyed it, but all of the computers I installed it on had 4 - 8 cores and more than 8 GB of RAM.
I think this thread caused some Linux-nam flashbacks for me and I started rambling lol.
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I keep finding myself running Manjaro XFCE. I use XFCE when I have my laptop connected to my other two displays, mechanical keyboard, wired mouse, wired internet, ect… Then I use i3-gaps when I am using my laptop away from my desk. It works well and has lots of software for me to choose from. 
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I’ll run any linux distro that lets me run Cinnamon. I have a PC with Ubuntu LTS, a laptop with the latest Fedora and another PC with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. All have different pros and cons, all run Cinnamon pretty flawlessly. I like that the Nvidia drivers has proper repo support in OpenSUSE.
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Ubuntu ticks most of the boxes I need for stable/daily/work usage, but I love Gentoo most.
I have no explanation. Perhaps compiling just makes me feel badass 
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Since nobody else has said it yet, Slackware Linux for me.
I’ve been using it since 1995, and just don’t feel at home with anything else.
A bit of SuSE at work, and Raspbian on the Pi - which is great for that platform.
They have and they call it Reactos
https://reactos.org/
MacOS has a funny cousin called Darwin
http://www.puredarwin.org/
vista means death. is this how the kids say “kill yourself” these days?
also use mint/ubuntu and thinking of trying out fedora/debian mostly because of this level one
Ubuntu is what I am using now. However I would have to point out Fedora it has been really great for me! I don’t use much else unless you count the king of them all server OS’s FreeBSD!
~Sigala
Ubuntu Gnome here. I have tried a few and there haven’t been any that I can say I have disliked. However, I always seem to come back to Ubuntu Gnome.
Fedora 26 with Gnome atm.
I used to do Arch Linux just because I only wanted things I would actually use installed on the system. Then I realized I’d rather my system “just work”.
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Its reassuring to see some of the Arch mentions here- that people left it. I was starting to feel like you don’t Linux unless you Arch and my experiences with Arch = I don’t Linux.
I tried Ubuntu Unity, Ubuntu Gnome (before they went to Gnome), Cinnamon, XFCE, Debian, and attempted to get Manjaro working without success.
Now running the Ubuntu officially supported Gnome build. I keep going to Ubuntu due to support- google always comes through when I need help on Ubuntu. For a little while my plex server was headless Ubuntu server but it kept hanging up- same with an ubuntu headless for a Splunk server- so when it comes to headless servers I now stick to CentOS. But for desktop, Ubuntu Gnome. So I guess:
Desktop = Ubuntu
Server = CentOS
Looking through the wallpaper/screen shot thread, there is something really clean looking about Solus so I’m tempted to try that out. Maybe its the debian fandom in me but I’m a little weary of rolling release though.