Linux

Alpine Linux + LabWC – as I update my hardware, I seem to end up paring down my software – the more powerful the computer is, the less use I make of its capabilities 🤷 – I’ve worked with Macs and Windows, and settled on Linux more for its simplicity than anything – I don’t have any problem with MacOS or Windows themselves so much as the companies behind them

Alpine is a nice, clean, lightweight distro that works surprisingly well on a desktop despite the whingers complaining it’s for containers only … Pop!_OS ⇒ Debian Stable ⇒ Alpine (with Gentoo back in the dawn of history)

LabWC is the spiritual successor to Openbox, a nice simple stacking window manager that I’ve added a handful of tiling keybinds – I’ve added utility programs as I’ve wanted them rather than going for the cohesiveness of a proper desktop environment … Gnome ⇒ Xfce ⇒ LabWC (and with Openbox way back when)

Used it at work and wanted to learn on my own. Then installed Ubuntu as a noob, and was like "why tf is everyone still using Windows?"

I use Devuan and TDE because the setup is so incredible boring and dusty that i do not have to get acquainted with anything new (SystemD, Wayland... whatever hipster WM is currently cool) and keep working with the tools i like.

I use Arch with KDE Plasma. It just works.

I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I'd found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in "Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?" ways, which I didn't want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I'm experimenting with local LLM on it.

I use Arch with hyprland, waybar, walker, pcman-qt, Kitty.

Reason is I hate mouse or touchpads I try to use them less. Hyprland is a tiling wm but I am not a fan of tiling at all. Most of the time I switch through workspaces with command+tab and only one window on each workspace.

When I was new to the Linux desktop world (late 90s to 200x) I tried lots of different distros and (X11) window managers and tools and whatnot. Changed themes a lot. And so on. And I think there's value in all that, because it expands your horizon of what's possible on the desktop, how different UI/UX paradigms work out in practice for you, and you learn how to use different environments.

On the other hand, there's also value in having a consistent, well-integrated desktop environment. It can mean less "pain points" in various circumstances, and it's also efficient when multiple programs share the same libraries or code base instead of having separate tools all around.

In the end, it comes down to what works best for you. But this might also change over time. For example I'm really considering switching to Cosmic once it's mature. I'm also considering taking a look at Niri because it seems well thought-out. But currently I feel cozy using Plasma at home and Gnome at work because Plasma is currently the least-annoying and at work I still use Gnome because it's been historically more stable than Plasma for me. I've tweaked Plasma's hotkeys so they work more like Gnome's and since I also need to use a couple of Windows-based systems at work I've also configured common Windows shortcuts like Super+L, Super+E, Super+R so that they all behave the same everywhere.

Oh, and my distro is Arch everywhere because I've used it for ages now and I like its technical simplicity, stability and modularity. It's the one distro that gets in my way the least.

I think one should learn enough to be flexible and be able to use everything, while also not being too narrow-minded and just focus on one solution too much. What works best for you now might not be the best choice for you in a couple of years.

For my gaming rig I use Mint Cinnamon with the Xanmod kernel and kisak-mesa PPA for bleeding edge performance but otherwise a very low-maintenance, convenient system.

For my personal laptop (ThinkPad T480s) I use Arch with KDE. For my various mini PCs used as servers, I use primarily Debian derivatives, except for my Mac Mini which runs Asahi Arch so I could optimize the use of its 8G of RAM.

I use mint that I haven't updated in years because one time I tried and it failed so I stopped trying. It's my old work Thinkpad that I now use exclusively to run weekly events. It's old and heavy and I needed a more lightweight OS than windows.

I use Fedora because I barely have to do any customization to get it how I like. An almost vanilla version of Gnome? Check. Flatpak? Check. Nothing to uninstall (I’m looking at you, snapd)? Check. Steam with just a few clicks? Check.

It’s almost perfect, and making it perfect is trivial. That used to be what I said about Ubuntu.

I haven’t used Windows much since Windows Vista, so I don’t really have any way to compare with Win10/Win11.

i use gentoo now from arch becuase i wanted to use portage and be able to control dependancys and i run chadwm (fork of dwm) for added features and the rest of the things i use like st dmenu neovim all are part of the workflow ive made

I use Linux because it is free and good enough to do most stuff I want to do on a computer.

I use windows at work because I get paid - so from my perspective it is cheaper than free. It makes it frustrating to do the stuff I'm supposed to do but my employers are fucking idiots so it doesn't really matter.

I use Windows because

My pc does not tell a story. It's a thing I use for work and play. I can't be bothered, it doesn't interest me, what niri, alacritty cosmic de is. Why should I care? Why should I invest that time? My pc works already. My framerates are high, it's stable and all the stuff I need for work, works. Out of the box.

Every single time I tried linux for the desktop the system failed within weeks. Dependency error after an automatic upgrade. Grub killing itself. Again. X refuses to start. So many config files littered all over the place just waiting for you to fuck something up. Gpu driver bullshittery. Printer hell. Other peripheral shit. (Flightsim gear)

And honestly, the last time i seriously tried was more then 5 years ago. In IT terms that's a lifetime. So surely it will be much better now.

But after the umpteenth fail to start X, I just thought: wtf am I doing? I could also next next finish my ass through a Windows installation, insert a pihole in my network to block the most obnoxious stuff and just do my thing.

Which is what I did.

Now, I do use linux. A lot. Just not for my desktop.

I used to run SUSE on a laptop i only used once every three years or so. Because of the "full open source" principle i couldn't run a lot of online Videos because the codecs were free but proprietary. When i decided to get a new computer as my tower was getting 15, i wanted to switch to a Linux distro as my daily system. Bought a laptop without windows preinstalled and decided to roll with Manjaro as it has KDE and was recommended as suitable for gaming.

Works fine for the most part. The last wave of updates caused some fuss with the desktop, but i can just do everything important from the terminal, while waiting for the next release.

Windows doesn't have a real choice of desktop environments. So I moved to Linux 15 years ago. I'm not in IT and always use a mouse. Importantly for me, I've never needed the CLI, despite people telling me that's impossible. Plasma lets me tweak it to my needs. I use Kubuntu, yet don't care about what's below the desktop environment. Happy to change distros.

i started with slackware ~2003 and moved to gentoo in 2005. it was very transparent to me as a newbie. use flags and compilation from source were way simpler to me than mysterious precompiled binaries. also ndiswrapper worked with my wireless chipset on gentoo. that helped