Ask HN: Which distro do you use? (2023)

27 points by laserstrahl ↗ HN
What are your daily used distros?

91 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] thread
Right now i'm using what was manjaro, but has become more Arch after all the changes I've made. It was installed 4 years ago. I've been looking at getting a Freebsd install setup for laptop use, but haven't gotten it working enough to make the switch.
I use Arch, but I have a mix of VMs, Intel hardware, and Raspberry Pis and have been running into issues with Archlinux ARM due to stale packages and gaps in the kernel config.

I’ve been trying to decide if it’s worth trying to fork my own updates to deal with it, or switch to Ubuntu or something else.

to the arch users: Is there a encrypted, hardenend install you can recommend besides the default one in the archwiki? ty.
It's maybe not exactly what you asked for, but I use EndeavourOS, which basically provides a calamari installer experience for Arch, and installs yay by default. It's not really "hardened" anymore than having firewalld on by default, but it definitely makes it easier to setup Arch on an encrypted volume.

Also, if you wanted hardened, best to stick with OpenBSD or it's ilk. Linux tends not to be hardened easily, and usually severely limits functionality when you do start hardening it (i.e. BlackArch or Parrot).

I appreciate your answer. FreeBSD is also on my list being interesting. But I never installed it by now.
What’s the threat model you’re hardening against? For most use cases, a stock Archlinux from the wiki with LUKS/LVM is gonna be pretty solid.
Just general security. I wanna see whats doable these days.
Look into exploring SELinux and similar systems.
Other than staying up to date on packages, this comes down largely to service config that’s independent of the OS.
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Ubuntu in WSL for Windows 11 right now. I'm also considering a native Linux partition, and I need something that can handle GPGPU applications for a combo Nvidia/Intel discrete GPUs setup.
Ubuntu LTR for work. Soon reformatting home machine to same from Win10.
I'm using Arch as the base distro, but spend increasing time inside (mostly Ubuntu) Docker containers, and using remote VSCode (whole window remote, via ssh) to a more powerful machine.
NixOS with Distrobox, JuNest, and VMs.
PopOS! has worked OOB on a Razer laptop and I'm thrilled with it. Buggy at times, feature-barren at times (filebrowser is a joke) but otherwise it's good.

I switched from kde-neon to EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma, and I love it. Arch-based distros that handle things for me, and let me type "yay" and be fine? Bless. Linux is in a beautiful place, UI/UX is quickly overtaking Windows.

Exactly the same for me :-) Because of the package management I have only been using Arch based distros since 2020. I used Manjaro with xfce for quite some time, but now I have installed EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma on my work and personal laptops. Everything works fine, even the bluetooth connection to my Bose noise cancelling headphones works very reliably. I just needed to deactivate some animations, especially the default one for switching between desktops because I do that about 100 times each day and would get sea sick if I kept that.
Ubuntu for work

Manjaro for personal

(Oh and some Raspbian but I hardly have had any time for that this year ^_^; )

Debian testing on my workstation. An install that has been there for around 5 years, and which only broke down like 3-4 times, always related to nvidia shenanigans.
UBlue - Bluefin DX edition. It is chef’s kiss perfect.
Fedora Kinoite, an immutable desktop operating system built on Fedora with the KDE desktop environment. Most applications are flatpaks and I use toolbox for development.
I used to use Silverblue until a motherboard swap caused the Nvidia driver to stop working. Since the OS is immutable, there was no way for me to even attempt to diagnose or fix the problem. :(

I think the most luck I've had with a distribution was Arch, but I did really enjoy getting Alpine to run from a USB stick.

Bunsenlabs [0], which is based on Debian stable, with a nicely configured Openbox window manager on top.

Debian stable as a base because it's reliable, rock solid, and has long term support.

Openbox because it's lightweight whereas fully featured.

Highly recommended if you want productivity and hate bloat.

[0]: https://www.bunsenlabs.org/

Debian 12 at home. RHEL at work.
Gentoo. I'm using it to write this comment! It's been my daily driver since 2009 - sans a brief period of stupidity two years ago when for some reason thought that using FreeBSD could be a good idea only to learn the hard way pkg/pkgsrc doesn't comes near to Portage about letting to fine tune your installation.
What do you like about Gentoo? I ran it a long time ago, like around 2005, but got bored of compiling everything and fiddling with settings.
having the coolest package manager i think is the major draw
NixOS for 3 years but unfortunately switched to Mac now for the M1 and love the speed.

I can’t wait for great SoC Linux laptops.

Pop!_OS. I really really wanted to use Fedora, because I once contributed to it and still have lots of friends in that community, but it wasn't doing well in terms of video drivers, codecs, and (especially) sleep/wakeup. Pop!_OS just handled all of those things right out of the box. Bit slow waking up, runs the fans more than it seems it should, switching between touchpad and touchscreen sometimes takes a few moments, but those are all things I can live with. This is on a super-common Lenovo laptop (Yoga 6 a.k.a. 13ALC6) BTW.
I run Debinan Sid/Unstable, both as my home desktop (with XFCE as a DE) and as my headless WSLv2 OS on my work machine. I've had it on the desktop for something like, 4 years now? Before that, I ran Manjaro on the desktop since something like 2017, and Xubuntu on the work laptop (as its own partition).

I've only ever had one problem with Debian Sid, which was this year I believe when a `libssl` update broke a lot of things (git, ssh, etc). Other than that, anecdotal smooth sailing.

Debian at home, Debian at work.
Mint, for the last few years. I honestly don't remember why I chose Mint after using Ubuntu previously. In any case, I'm not shopping for a change. It does exactly what I need.
Mint was my first distro and still the one I would recommend to newbies.
Fedora since Fedora Core 1