Fedora is just a straight line, as I’ve found.
A boring OS is a healthy OS.
Yeah, that’s me comfortably sitting on Bazzite right now. There are definitely ways for it to improve, but I’ve only really ever had one issue in the last few months, and that was fixed the next week. I just get to use my computer, and it’s nice.
Did you also have an issue booting due to some network driver issue on 43.20260309? I had to rpm-ostree rollback to 43.20260217 a couple weeks ago. Besides that, Bazzite has indeed been very smooth sailing.
Ah, thankfully I didn’t run into that one. I have a goxlr and they broke it for 2 weeks so I did a manual rollback until it was fixed, because having audio is kinda nice.
I was about to say! Who the hell thinks their computer being reliable is boring!?
People who like fixing things.
I am one of those people, but I’m still annoyed when my tools don’t work right. I hate having to fix something, only to find out that my tool I need for that also needs repairs. I use my computer’s primarily as tools, so I almost always am at least a little annoyed when my computer demands attention all of a sudden.
Maybe there are others that are hobbyists. I guess if you’re a computer tinkerer primarily, troubleshooting that crap can be like cultivating a zen garden, but it is the opposite for me.
I totally understand. That’s why I have a working Mac and a sometimes working Linux machine.
Yeah but I like to tinker when I chose to tinker. Not randomly when I’m trying to get work done
NixOS manages to be all of these at once except the manual dependency management
And to cover complexity, I just let an LLM do most of the work - it knows more about NixLang than me anyway (though I can read it).
NixOS is indirect manual dependency management.
Come to Mint. We’re standing by X11, and Cinnamon looks better than Plasma.
And an older version of Xfce than Debian
Why
Because it just works. Which is what an OS and DE need to do first and foremost.
based.
Agreed. I use Arch, Debian, and Mint with Xfce on all of them. It’s stable as a rock in every iteration.
That being said, Debian’s the distro famous for out of date packages, so its a little silly that Mint has it beat in this regard, especially when updates to everything else are much more frequent.
I also work as a sysadmin maintaining all these devices, and every time I move files between the laptops running Mint I’m confronted with Xfce’s old file transfer dialog. You’re gonna love the improvements 4.20 made when it finally hits the repos.
You aren’t standing by X11, Wayland support just isn’t finished yet.
🤷
Well, I guess I’m not responsible for the mistakes of the devs.
I think Cinnamon might even be one of the first desktops other than the big two that is going to be finished (more or less) with Wayland support.
Personally, I have been using window managers for years. You’d think that would make the transition easier (sway is even explicitly designed as a drop-in replaced for i3wm), but you need to configure so many of the tools around it (task/statusbar, screensaver/lockscreen, clipboard manager …) and I just couldn’t be bothered. I’m definitely past that “tinker with all the things”-stage of being a Linux user …
Cinnamon can be installed on most mainstream distros, actually. I definitely agree that it looks better than Plasma.
I use CachyOS with Cinnamon, so…why not both?
For me, I always keep coming back to Arch tbh
Sometimes I get fed up with managing a whole system and once in a blue moon bricking my system on an update, but the alternatives are always worse, and with btrfs now, I don’t have to worry about the latter problem.
Nix was the closest to pulling me away. A centralized config? Beautiful. Static package store without dependency conflicts? Beautiful. Immutable applications? The WORST idea we’ve ever had as a community. For instance, imo, VS Code extensions are fundamentally incompatible with Nix. I spent weeks trying to get it to work doing multiple different things to try and hope it would work. It can’t. VS Code just has to be mutable.
Anyway so I’m back to arch and have been for over a year since I tried Nix (and before that Fedora which has its own issues). Before that I had been on Arch for 4 years.
I think I’ll stay now. It’s really the best option out there. In my mind, Arch is Linux, i.e. it’s how an OS should be built for the Linux kernel and the FOSS ecosystem, and it won’t ever be beat
The main thing that keeps me from going back to it is how much I hate manually setting up an encrypted logical volume over multiple disks with BTRFS snapshotting.
A centralized config? Beautiful.
That can be done in regular distros with Ansible.
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop I tried arch and never looked back. In hindsight, backports are insanity and just always using upstream is obviously the way to go. As a bonus, I can actually understand how arch is constructed when I need to because the wiki is amazing
As soon as I realized distro upgrades are a minefield every time on a desktop
How did you realize that? Hasn’t been my experience on Debian and Ubuntu at all, they always just worked for me, and that’s despite running a bunch of PPAs for GPU stuff on my Ubuntu install.
By ubuntu blowing up 3 times over a decade when I tried distro upgrade? Arch requires you to turn a wrench periodically, but keeping upgraded is nowhere as risky.
But have you tried Gentoo?
Yes. I tried it for 6 months. Terrible. Takes way too long to compile
I think Nix is better used for things like servers instead of a daily driver PC. Having to fuck with config files for my laptop/desktop would be a nightmare that I refuse to go through. I’ve been playing with Nix on a home server and I’m loving it for that. With a limited scope on what actually needs to be installed it makes managing the configs possible.
Many people do ‘config files’ with Ansible, or at least with some kinda dotfiles hosted on their Github. This way, firstly, setting up a new machine takes maybe an hour mostly because of downloading all the packages. Secondly, no need to guess what settings one has changed somewhere years ago, since they’re all written down in these files.
It’s actually very convenient if one adds things to the configs gradually when the need arises.
It makes sense if you have several computers, where you want the same setup.
I have several computers I actively use, but they all run different operating systems and different software. There’s typically a main machine, a vintage machine, and an experimental one. I like the variety.
My Arch install has had no issues upgrading for years, even with the big KDE updates
CachyOS
Slackware in 2026? Didn’t know it was still around
Yeah, but in my experience it isn’t great. Salix is a lot nicer.
Of course, your mileage may vary. There are definitely still a lot of true slackers out there!
It’s not a “hip” distro but it is very much used, just not talked about.
Time to learn kernel maintenance
“Manual configuration is exhausting” my brother in christ that’s the whole fun of having a fucking computer
maybe gentoo?
GUIX GUIX GUIX
Do people really be using Slackware these days? I’m on Bazzite atm and it’s cool but a bit different esp with the ostree stuff.
Curious what the use case is for Slackware nowadays
Slack is great when you need to make something completely out of the ordinary. It’s right there just one step removed from a system from scratch without GNU.
That said, embedded computers nowadays run full Debian. So I dunno what use it still has.
Feeling superior to Gentoo and Arch users.
I see the main use case for Slackware, if you’re a Linux graybeard, who has used it for 20 years.
A few thousand people in the world, yes.
It combines the stability of Debian with the simplicity of Arch, and turns both up to 11.
Main selling point is that it never does anything unexpected.
You set it up and then it works the way you’re used to, literally for decades.
Tune Arch ONCE. Sets you for life
and also back up in case a borked package(s) appears in an update
Until you switch laptops or upgrade your PC parts.
In this economy? Really, GreenBeanMachine?
Installed gentoo on my desktop, never looked back
And once you do this there’s distcc for the laptops
