Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
Debian for everything.
Yes ! I don’t get why debian always seems to be forgotten outside of its server use. I have been running it for 2 years now (homelab, laptop and desktop).
I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it’s installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.
First one is that it doesn’t have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren’t for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven’t been updated since Debian Buster days!
A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.
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Beyond none of its branches actually satisfying my preferences, I feel like the way it handles major version upgrades is way too involved. I suppose it makes sense; it’s paying back the accumulated debt of a couple years worth of bliss…
Having said that, my experience on Fedora Atomic is (almost) equally blissful without requiring any of that whenever a major version update strikes.
Don’t get me wrong; I definitely do believe Debian has its uses on desktop Linux. But I can’t shake off the feeling that they’re definitely more niche compared to say Fedora.
The upgrade issue is exactly why I don’t like Debian-based distros for my desktop
Debian is nice & boring, but I have had issues with how old its kernel and software versions are. 6.12 isn’t too bad for Trixie, but previously it was really terrible. When I was running Bookworm, I ran into plenty of situations where software I was compiling or getting from outside the repos (for niche software), wasn’t backwards compatible to the library versions Debian provided.
No hate for Debian, but it just doesn’t work for a lot of people. However, these days I would go for Debian over Ubuntu 10 times out of 10.
Debian for everything I need to not fall over, CachyOS for computers I want to fiddle with.
If you like to fiddle, I might suggest Arch. 😁 Hit me up if you want help with getting started!
CachyOS is Arch with a few tweaks, some of which are hard to do by yourself.
Fair enough. I thought it was one of those distros that you couldn’t change much once installed. My bad, if incorrect.
You probably think of Bazzite. Same gaming focus, but on immutable base, also very popular :)
No I was thinking of CachyOS, I just incorrectly thought it was immutable. 😊
Yeah, I tried pure Arch first, fucked up by not installing the right drivers for my old Nvidia card, and was never able to really get it running properly. So I gave up and tried CachyOS instead, on the basis that it’d probably get the drivers right for me. And it did.
I’d come with a word of caution then - while CachyOS automatically and conveniently installs with correct defaults, it is still a direct Arch derivative. Going forward, it will be just as easy to screw the system up and not know where to go next.
With that said, I strongly advise to learn to revert any change you can make to your system. The simplest way (assuming CachyOS installed root filesystem as btrfs) is to learn your way around snapper early on. Check tutorials on how to do it right on CachyOS.
With Snapper set up well, you can essentially undo any change. And this will be essential as you learn Arch (which CachyOS still really is).
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