I’m wondering what the current favorite distros are besides the most popular ones like Arch, Debian and Fedora.

  • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    13·
    9 months ago

    OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It’s very up to date, yet it’s somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven’t had any problems finding software, yet it’s not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.

  • SteleTrovilo@beehaw.org
    13·
    9 months ago

    NixOS for me. It’s a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there’s also an entire distro based on it.

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
      4·
      9 months ago

      Yeah I’ve gotten into Nix recently and it’s slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I’m on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I’ve got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol

  • synthsalad@mycelial.nexusEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    Alpine.

    I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.

    So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.

    I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!

    • 1984@lemmy.today
      1·
      9 months ago

      It will bite you after a while. I remember using alpine in a docker image many years ago and running a python program that needed some modules installed, where one of them required compiling c code. Naturally that didnt work on alpine since its using its own c library. So couldn’t run the python app at all on alpine.

  • Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip
    8·
    9 months ago

    Gentoo. It’s amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.

    There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.

    • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      +1 for Gentoo - Portage can be fun in a weird way. I’m more of a “just work” type of person though, so I’ve stuck to Arch, but the time I had with Gentoo was pretty great and the new binary package format might bring me back. I do have a 7950X nowadays so I wonder if that’d fly through Gentoo on bare metal.

  • Gunpachi@lemmings.world
    91·
    9 months ago

    Some of my favourites are Void Linux, Artix and Opensuse Tumbleweed

    Void was my first non-systemd distro, and it was super snappy as well. Some packages may not available but overall I had a really great experience with it. It also offers a version with the musl C library. Pretty cool if you ask me.

    Opensuse tumbleweed is an overall a great distro, it’s one of my favourites. Also I noticed that many people have recommended it and that’s for a good reason. It’s installer isn’t that user friendly but I would prefer it over Fedora’s installer any day. ( I haven’t tried the last 3 iterations of Fedora, so it might have changed now )

    Artix is well… arch with different init systems. Nothing too crazy. Its what I have been daily driving for the past year or so.

  • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
    7·
    9 months ago

    Can it still be a favourite if I haven’t touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      9 months ago

      Same! I’m on Ubuntu and Pop these days but I fondly remember my old distcc build cluster…

      Portage is still far and away my favorite package manager.

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      9 months ago

      My reason against using Guix is software availability. NixOS repos are just larger, and I like that on NixOS unfree software can be enabled with a single line.

      • fishinthecalculator@lemmy.ml
        1·
        9 months ago

        with nonguix the lines are like five instead of one, but yes there are less packages than nix. the real selling point imho is how everything is human-sized and consistent

    • Liam Mayfair@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      9 months ago

      Very intrigued by OpenSUSE as an alternative to Fedora. How do you think the two stack up against each other? Is it a noticeable leap switching between them?

  • fishinthecalculator@lemmy.ml
    6·
    9 months ago

    I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .

    The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that’s very intense, let’s say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials