cliché question, but hey why not?
Debian, because I know they won’t pull a redhat ever. They do things the right way for things that matter.
Been on Ubuntu since forever but I’m seriously considering debian. What, in your view, would be the biggest advantages (or disadvantages, if any) for debian over ubuntu?
Drivers and kernel modules. Debian with “proprietary drivers enabled” works on about as much stuff as Ubuntu without proprietary drivers enabled. I’ve never got it working without issues on a laptop. You’ll definitely be avoiding drivers that probably have government backdoors if you’re using Debian but it comes at a price.
Arch is ironically easier to deal with in this regard. To give credit where credit is due, Debian is very stable. Once you install it on a sever, it won’t break on its own. It may be harder to get all your hardware working but once you do, if you never upgrade you’ll never have to mess with it again.
Mint, because I’m a basic bitch.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed. A rolling release distro with a ton of quality assurance work already done for it. (Open)Suse is actually a family of distros so if I ever need a stable or enterprise distro that I’m already familiar with, I have Leap and SLES respectively.
NixOS. I’ve been running Linux since Slackware 1.0, since then have run Debian, LFS, RedHat, CentOS, Gentoo, Arch and Ubuntu. After years of Ubuntu I discovered NixOS and after diving deep into it, have never been happier with a distro. All of my machines and dot files are in a straightforward single language in a git repo. The mutable parts of all my applications are nicely isolated and backed up and I can make changes to my systems fearlessly. It has a very steep learning curve, but it’s amazing.
Xubuntu Minimal for me. I use my MBP for the most part, but like the idea of turning a Chromebook with soldered memory and storage into something useable for programming. The 16GB of storage on the model I bought makes it difficult to find a Debian based distro that leaves more than 1GB free. Xubuntu has been the best on that front at 4GB free. That and out of the box touchscreen support. I like the idea of being able to say that the setup I use for programming in my spare time is a $37 ThinkPad Chromebook with Xubuntu on it.
Arch Linux.
Running Ubuntu w Mate desktop on laptop and PC. Debian for servers. I need all my weird devices to just work and Ubuntu has the best compatibility. PopOS seems nice, but if I run Mate for me DE, it doesn’t really matter, AFAIK.
Debian Stable. It doesn’t break with updates, it doesn’t break when I try to customize it, it has all the software you could ever want, and it just works. It’s robust, elegant, and free forever.
For most people I’d recommend a derivative like Mint, Q4OS, or SpiralLinux, since those smooth out a sometimes annoying setup process, but for me vanilla Debian is perfect.
Arch on my desktop because I customize it to how I like and don’t care if something breaks (rarely does). And linux mint on my laptop because I need a more reliable distro when taking my laptop to work.
I love love love Debian
NixOS all day: unimaginably stable, fun to mess around with, shared configs (including dotfiles) on every device, I really like it.
I use Arch (btw) because for me it just works. Minimal system packages, most things installed as flatpaks.
NixOS
Whenever my system is in an incorrect shape, I can not only roll back to a previous one, I can go back several updates ago. But an update on NixOS could be a system package installation or a settings change.
My system settings are all in two files, both in git. There’s also the versions of all of my packages that are installed into the store, each with versioned dependencies, but not globally installed so they don’t conflict with each other. This is why I can have a rolling system using the stable wine version.
I also found out packaging is not so difficult so I’ve actually successfully packaged some of the software I use
Xubuntu because I like a non-frills desktop that just works and don’t mind snaps.
arch because it was more viable of a rolling release when i installed it 10 years ago
