Linux nerds - anyone running vanilla debian for desktop? I’m sick of Ubuntu’s quirks and tossing up between mint and debian for my laptop. I am ~so old~ experienced so am fine with tinkering and do always come back to Gnome so thinking to just go back to basics. Just thought I would throw the thought outbtheiand see what others are using: what’s your daily driver?
anyone running vanilla debian for desktop?
Yes. With more cult-of-the-new OSen, I got quickly tired of unwanted churn and the resulting breakages.
Standardising all my (user-facing) devices on Debian means I can choose how rapidly I want it to change, but everything about how to use and configure the system applies to them all.
Devices I never want to think about except to patch security vulnerabilities? Debian “stable”, which makes that a promise.
Devices I want software that’s had a good period of shaking out already? Debian “testing” runs on my desktop and notebook devices.
Devices I want the instability of changing packages, to whatever has recently released by package maintainers? Debian “unstable”. Though this latter has for the past decade been entirely in temporary virtual machines, that get created on demand and then discarded as soon as whatever I’m futzing around with has succeeded or failed.
Debian is fine for daily driving. I was doing that for a while before switching to openSUSE Tumbleweed for newer components (I was goofing around with Podman quadlets and needed later systemd bits).
Traveling a lot right now, so I just changed to openSUSE Slowroll for a slower pace of rolling, and smaller download size.
IMO, definitely dump Ubuntu as quick as you can. Linux Mint is a great Ubuntu-based alternative that gets you all the benefits of Ubuntu (plus some) and none of the Canonical bullshit. If you want to divorce from Ubuntu entirely, LMDE is a great project that rebases Mint on plain Debian! Another lovely project by that team.
Personally, my first pick daily driver is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. If you like playing with config files and the idea of hyper-replicable system setups NixOS is a very interesting project that I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past.
CachyOS is getting quite a lot of attention recently, and as far as Arch-based distros go I have enjoyed using it. It has a lot of performance claims, but does come with all the drawbacks of ArchLinux and bleeding-edge rolling release distros – not that it’s a terrible experience, it just requires you to be more mindful and more capable than your average distro, especially if you’re going to utilize the AUR.
TL;DR - there are a boatload of interesting distros out there. My first recommendation would be Linux Mint/LMDE for familiarity and ease of entry.
Have been dying to dump it for ages but been travelling a lot and just needed to not stuff with things and risk getting caught out. Been looking at LMDE today - looks interesting. I am home for a while now so will probably play with options. It’s been a while
Debian (stable, with necessary non free) for both desktop and laptops. XFCE. Solid as a rock.
EndeavourOS: the minimalism of Arch made intermediate-user-friendly.
EoS is just Arch, there is nothing much there that makes it different from Arch. People have this misconception that the difficulty of Arch is installing, when in reality long term maintenance is the real hurdle & EoS is 100% the same in that regard.
Arch ain’t even that hard to install nowadays thanks to the “arch install” command, too. I’ve tried following their official install instructions on their wiki, but I almost always switch to using that command to get it installed because they made that process so much easier for dummies like me.
Best of both worlds for those that wanna learn and for those that just wanna install with less hassles, IMO.
Can you explain what you mean by long term maintenance?
Is it just regular updating or something else?
Every now and then they standard update with sudo pacman -Suy will break some hardware config or package combination. Often the terminal will warn you about changed packages and dependencies, but you should check the RSS feed or website for breaking changes.
Anyone with web search and some basic cli knowhow should be able to recover things in a short period of time, but I deliberately won’t update just before anything that is time critical.
It will also happily let you break dependencies, install questionable packages from the AUR, and let you do whatever stupid crap you want. I would describe it as easy to customise, easy to break and easy to fix.
Maybe LMDE is the best of both worlds for you.
At the moment, Aurora (non-gaming Fedora KDE Bazzite flavour) on laptops/minipc and Bazzite on desktop.
Would I recommend? If you never need to install anything tricky (unless you distrobox it) as guides don’t tend to suit atomic desktops, then it just works and silently updates in background all the time. Flatpak covers most needed software. KDE version is nice. It does suit users that really don’t care they are using Linux.
Nothing ever seems to go wrong but I won’t lie, at one time early in the piece, there was some manual intervention required due to error they had. Nothing since.
My daily driver laptop is Fedora KDE Plasma … because I love updating everyday. I also have an old all-in-one for the kitchen that runs Mint perfectly. My bro uses Arch from the command line only, but I don’t have time for that
I’m on command line a lot of the time but never got into Arch. fedora KDE is a solid choice. I’m in debian based land on servers so have kept to that for ages though.
I usually just run Xubuntu. I think it avoids most of the Canonical bullshit while still being close enough that everything that works on Ubuntu works on it. My main desktop and my old laptop are Xubuntu, and my work laptop is Ubuntu with a gnome plug-in to give me the top application bar like XFCE. But I’m obviously not too annoyed by Canonical.
guiiiiiiix 🥰
Guix is interesting! How do you find it for general use? Is it hard to get non-free software (e.g. Steam) running on it?
If you absolutely need to, there is the non-guix repository, that has steam e. g. among other things
I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora once I had enough of Ubuntu being weird. Very happy with Fedora in general. I know it’s not a very enlightened suggestion.
I’m also curious how Gnome OS develops, but I’m not sure I would go there yet.
Been running fedora for over a decade now. New packages, stable, newest gnome. No complaints at all.
I’ve used Arch with Cinnamon as the DE for the last five(ish) years. I used to run Mint (which is what got me onto Cinnamon) on my previous desktop but figured I’d try something else. I’d often come across helpful info on the Arch wiki when I needed to look stuff up so decided I might as well go with that, and it’s worked out fine (ok, I did get the system to not boot fully once due to an update issue, but I sorted it without reinstalling).
anyone running vanilla debian for desktop?
Yes. I don’t want Linux finicky bits getting into the way of my everyday productivity, and Debian just works™. It’s great because it just sits there and does its job
And Flatpak for anything cutting edge
I love Fedore KDE for daily driver, but I confess to falling (back?) To Debian Gnome for a lot of what I’m doing now. And I agree, Ubuntu’s “quirks” finally pushed me into Fedora.
I’ve been running Bazzite for a while now, it isn’t truly inmuteable but it isn’t the best if you want to tinker.
Bazzite has been excellent for trouble free gaming but probably wouldn’t be my first choice for an older laptop
I’ve been running CachyOS for a while now after switching from Bazzite. Bazzite was really good, but I wanted to install system packages and wasn’t feeling up to screwing around with Bazzite like that. CachyOS has been fantastic so far, both it and Bazzite are excellent choices for gaming setups.
