wanting to hop into the world of linux on a dual boot method (one of my favorite games unfortunately cannot be run on linux at all, and it’s a gacha. I don’t want to gamble with my account being banned, so I’m keeping windows for it specifically.) this’ll be my second go at it, I used Pop!_OS briefly but had some issues with wifi and didn’t love the GNOME layout. I have a new distro picked out, but I just was curious what other people are using in this community. was also wondering what made you fall on your current one.
and maybe as some bonus questions, what are some distros you’ve tried but didn’t like? what about a distro you want to try eventually? I’ve seen distrohopping is a thing, hahaha.
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I used to be on pure Arch for 2.5 years, but currently uses cachyOS. And its so much removes the pain points of arch, as well as giving super fast performance.
Mint 21.3 as my main Desktop OS - almost zero complaints after over a year. Everything just works.
Ubuntu using Linux-Surface on my old Surface Pro. Breathed new life into a device I had abandoned (after all 8gb of ram isn’t enough for Windows malware these days). Gnome works really nice on a touchscreen two-in-one. Kudos to the Linux-Surface folks. They took one of the few positive developments from Microsoft (Surface hardware) and made it possible to remove the worst part (windows). Not that I’ll ever buy a Surface again. It also allowed me to retire my iPad.
Fedora Linux on a cheap Dell laptop as my media client. Fedora is nice and runs well, haven’t done too much with it other than Firefox and Calibre. Nice to see a different ‘branch’ in action.
I’m pretty basic and generally lazy so I don’t delve into some of the smaller distros or distro hop. Maybe later I’ll do it with VMs, but eh not sure it’s my kind of hobby. Too many other things to do.
Best of luck and let us know how it goes.
Seconding this experience with Mint 21.3, although on a laptop here. I just wanted something that works without much fucking about, and it delivers.
Yes! Linux Mint is such a great project - it made me excited to get on my desktop again.
I have a Surface Notebook 2 and for the life of me can’t get Ubuntu (or Xubuntu in my case) to work with it. No matter which installation style I use, either it crashes during the installation or never boots into the bootloader. Eventually I installed some custom Arch, but I hate it.
If it’s any comfort, it took me a few tries to get it to work. It was over a year ago so the details are a bit rusty. I started out trying to install Debian, and it also crashed during installation, so I went back and tried some of the bug fixes. (One was something to do with the MOK). Debian didn’t work after that but Ubuntu did. It was a strange experience, and there’s nothing that would motivate me to switch after I finally got it to work.
Perhaps you can give it another shot sometime and it’ll work. If you hate the custom arch that’s on it, and you don’t use it, you might as well try.
Yeah I’ll try eventually, but I got another Laptop running Xubuntu just fine, so I just don’t really use the Surface at all. It’s more of a last resort for the time being, and for that, any OS will do.
Debian, Mint, Arch (by the way).
Had Ubuntu as my main driver for about 2 years but didn’t like Gnome and had more trouble with an Nvidia card than on Mint or Arch.
Fedora is top of my to-try-list but I’m not a distro-hopper, so who knows when I’ll have a use case.
Currently running Garuda for gaming and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for everything else. Very much look forward to combining them in my own Arch/Void install when I get my new laptop.
Dumb question, why don’t you use Garuda for everything?
As somebody who rarely PC games at the moment, I feel it’s pretty bloated for what it is. But my Nvidia GPU worked out of the box so
I have a few machines, which run:
- Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it’s fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it’s 2004.
- openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
- Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
- FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I’d give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
- Gentoo (WIP) - I’m just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
- crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.
Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.
Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.
The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.
I’ve tried a couple different KDE distros and settled on Fedora 40 KDE spin. It seems to be the most complete KDE experience without all of the Canonical/snap bloat. It works great on my Thinkpad. Also runs decent on my gaming desktop using the latest Nvidia beta driver - I used to get stutters and artifacts in games/steam/plex and now with the beta driver those apps run fine
Debian on my servers, LMDE on my laptops.
Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.
this is actually what I’m going to be giving a go! I have very little experience (I have servers that run Debian and DietPi, but I get help with those) with linux but I’m really excited to give the KDE version a try. and I’ve been trying to learn, too, because also my partner is going to be moving to a dual boot setup as well. been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot too, especially while my desktop is out of commission.
do you find that anything is missing in Bazzite for you?
I really like KDE. As a long time Windows user, it feels so much more natural than Gnome.
The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.
The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.
I just installed Bazzite over the weekend on my main computer. It’s definitely not the smooth experience that Windows is, but I’m hoping I can get used to it and keep using it.
It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!
Arch + riverwm on my desktop. I know barless tiling window managers look daunting, but simplicity is liberation.
I can’t imagine doing that on my laptop though, so I’ve got arch + KDE Plasma and I love how it just works.
Arch KDE and SteamOS.
I use EndeavourOS because I like having access to the AUR but didn’t want to risk messing up my Windows installation by trying to manually set up Arch for dual booting (this was before
archinstallwas made). I like it, and I like using KDE. My only complaint with it would be that pacman kinda shits itself if you go too long without updating.The first distro I ever used was ZorinOS back in like 2017.
Antix! It has a couple of rough patches but overall I really like it. Mainly I like having my RAM back
NixOS on my Laptop, Desktop, Gaming Machine, and around 10 servers.
Still have two servers on Arch, waiting to be migrated, and I’m really itching to but NixOS on the Steam Deck as well.
Endeavour and KDE.
Like the look of it. Easy to update, no bloatware or games reinstalled.
If I do swap again it’d probably be back to Mint. I had some issues a while ago and moved to MX. That worked well but there was so much guff. Tried Endeavour about a year ago and have been here ever since.EndeavourOS on my desktop and laptop. Works like a charm. By far the happiest I’ve been with a desktop distro.
On my server VMs I’m running Ubuntu Pro because it’s absolutely impeccably stable, Pro is free and I like the idea of having the option of not upgrading them for 10 years.
All running on Proxmox. I have a few appliance type VMs like opnsense and 3CX and they’re nice and stable too.
