What Linux Operating Systems do you like?

Timber said:
...Fedora seems to work out of the box and is more stable on both the PCs I've tried and therefore I am back to Fedora 39 on both.
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4 and bit months on from that post and still using Fedora 39 on both machines. However I did have an issue with Fedora 39 on the Lenovo Duet 3i (very basic n4020 Celeron powered Surface-alike machine) where somewhere around Kernal 6.7.x it would start crashing soon after startup. Usually when clicking on a program to load like Terminal, or Brave. Problem started out as a 1 -n-4 type thing but then became all the time. Couldn't work out from the logs what was causing the issue so decided it would be easier to do a reinstall.

I've used it as an opportunity to try out Fedora Silverblue as I quite liked the concept of the stability it should offer as an immutable OS. And pleased to say a few weeks later it's still going strong. On this small machine I only need a few programs so using flatpaks is perfect. Most updates seem to not require a reboot (so far). And doesn't seem to be that far behind on version numbers compared to my other Fedora Workstation installation.

On this machine I've been running Fedora since 36 but this different flavour of it has been interesting to find out about and try out.
 
I used Gentoo for a while about twenty years ago. I looked at it again recently and couldn't understand how the hell I managed with it back then. The last few years I was happily dumbed down by Mint, but I found it was freezing up gradually more and more in the last year or two. Couldn't figure out why as nothing had changed. Reinstalling didn't help, so I looked around for an alternative and for over three months I have been happy with Manjaro.
 
I have been using Silverblue (39) for the last few days, must say I am impressed it feels very polished and gives me a sense that it is a very stable system which is what I am after.
Downloading the update to 40 now.
 
Deadly Ferret said:
I used Gentoo for a while about twenty years ago. I looked at it again recently and couldn't understand how the hell I managed with it back then. The last few years I was happily dumbed down by Mint, but I found it was freezing up gradually more and more in the last year or two. Couldn't figure out why as nothing had changed. Reinstalling didn't help, so I looked around for an alternative and for over three months I have been happy with Manjaro.
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I sometimes look back too and I'm amazed at how high my tolerance for pain was :P
 
Scott C said:
I sometimes look back too and I'm amazed at how high my tolerance for pain was :p
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The nearest I got to that was installing Arch Linux as a dual boot system on my old PC. I doubt I'd be able to put up with the amount of faffing about it required again. I like it nice and easy these days so I'm happily on Fedora 40 on my server and just use Linux on virtual machines on my Mac.
 
Getting more and more fed up with Windows 11, thought I'd dip my toe back in and dual boot. Very comfortable with Ubuntu/Debian so thought I'd give Fedora (40, KDE-spin) a try for a change. I like it. Got the nvidia 555 beta driver running last night which plays nice with Wayland thanks to explicit sync support. Linux gaming has come on so much thanks to Valve/Steam.
 
Spleen Sauce said:
Linux gaming has come on so much thanks to Valve/Steam.
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It's certainly significantly better than when I made the switch to Linux around 2017 - though the only game that was really important to me then was WoW (which worked). I'm going through my Steam library at the moment (that'll take a while ;)) and I've only found one game that doesn't work so far out of the ~100 I've tested. Most of them are indie games to be fair but there are some bigger name ones. I'm also a little fixated on VR now and am happy that ALVR is starting to make some improvements so I can play some of my PCVR games on my Quest 3.
 
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Yep, proton has been the thing that made my switch possible as well. It's so good now. Many of my games actually run BETTER under proton/wine than on Windows. Go figure. With some of the older games and non-Steam things there's a little more work to get them going, and only 1 game out of hundreds I've failed to get working (TDU2).

I'm still using NixOS and honestly, I can fully recommend it. The package selection is probably one of the best and everything so far just works and it's basically impossible to screw up your installation as everything is declarative, so if it doesn't work you just revert to the previous config on boot. Even making big changes like desktop environment are easy to experiment with. There's a little bit of a learning curve to the configurations which I'm still figuring out myself (in order to manage my dotfiles and other things better) but the core of it is really straightforward with great documentation.

One thing I'm still waiting for to complete the picture is proper VRR support, but I see that's coming. I haven't missed it as much as I thought I would anyway as games either are solid on 144FPS in my case, or I've capped them down lower at e.g. 60 FPS for consistency. But it would be still nice to have as a core reliable feature and I think there's a bit of a way to go to get there.

Does the Steam Deck support VRR? Maybe if they bring a version out with a VRR panel or the docked mode to support it we can get some good userbase and development on the issue.
 
alex24 said:
Does the Steam Deck support VRR? Maybe if they bring a version out with a VRR panel or the docked mode to support it we can get some good userbase and development on the issue.
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It does with the official dock and an external monitor. Haven't tried it myself though so no idea how well it actually works compared to Windows.
 
Orcvader said:
It does with the official dock and an external monitor. Haven't tried it myself though so no idea how well it actually works compared to Windows.
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Ah very interesting thanks. I assume it’s doing this via proprietary software as well as the game overlays/interface and FPS limiter etc. It would be great to have those tools on desktop too. Maybe there are things and I need to do more research.
 
It might just be me, but I find Ubuntu to be a really easy go to desktop replacement. If you're a bit newb, there is nearly always an article online to work out how to do something.
 
Conanius said:
It might just be me, but I find Ubuntu to be a really easy go to desktop replacement. If you're a bit newb, there is nearly always an article online to work out how to do something.
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I’d recommend Ubuntu for most people, although I’ll be jumping to Pop_OS once they start updating things again.

Said it before but wish they’d converge on a single packaging format and not have this Snap vs Flatpak situation. Ultimately just another thing limiting app support.
 
Armageus said:
www.theregister.com

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

An extra-robust, novice-friendly distro, with local apps, that's not ChromeOS
www.theregister.com

This one looks interesting as another "user friendly" Linux distro that I hadn't seen before
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Quite. I’m sold on immutable distros and it seems like a great idea for users who aren’t sure what they are doing as you’re very limited as to how you can get things wrong. I guess updating the OS isn’t as simple but if most software is via flatpaks all basic use cases should be catered for.
 
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