By the way...
libre
Welcome to libre
A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
Resources
- Free Software, Free Society provides an excellent primer in the origins and theory around free software and the GNU Project, the pioneers of the Free Software Movement.
- Switch to GNU/Linux! If you're still using Windows in
$CURRENT_YEAR
, flock to Linux Mint!; Apple Silicon users will want to check out Asahi Linux.
Rules
- Be on topic: Posts should be about free software and other hacktivst struggles. Topics about general tech news should be in the technology comm or programming comm. That doesn't mean all posts have to be serious though, memes are welcome!
- Avoid using misleading terms/speading misinformation: Here's a great article about what those words are. In short, try to avoid parroting common Techbro lingo and topics.
- Avoid being confrontational: People are in different stages of liberating their computing, focus on informing rather than accusing. Debatebro nonsense is not tolerated.
- All site-wide rules still apply
Artwork
- Xenia was meant to be an alternative to Tux and was created (licensed under CC0) by Alan Mackey in 1996.
- Comm icon (of Xenia the Linux mascot) was originally created by @ioletsgo
- Comm banner is a close up of "Dorlotons Degooglisons" by David Revoy (CC-BY 4.0) for Framasoft
Linux Mint Debian Edition.
mostly debian
mint but i had to update the kernel to get some games to work, it was a little intimidating but i ended up getting it to work just by googling and following what other people did in forums
apparently mint is more for ease of use and stability, and less about being cutting edge
Void Linux
Bazzite on main PC because it just works and I don't want to mess around with nvidia drivers.
Almalinux for home server and anything I need to spin up short term.
i dual boot windows and solus linux. it was a good distro when i got it but the lack of support has made me just use the windows side for a while now
Nobara KDE spin on my desktop endeavorOS on my laptop but might switch to vanilla arch on there soon
I think I went Ubuntu > Xubuntu > Mint > Lubuntu > Kubuntu > Arch (LXQt) > Arch (DWM)
Mint was great as a relatively new linux user. LXQt is fantastic on old hardware. After KDE I really wanted to try a tiling window manager, really enjoying it so far.
Debian on my workshop computer
Debian on my Minecraft/plex server
Debian on my NAS
EndeavourOS on my old laptop that I fuck around with
NixOS
Declarative configuration is so good
I like the idea of NixOS but didn't like how it worked in practice. The custom language for configurations was annoying, the errors it spat out never made sense to me, I couldn't run binaries compiled for a regular linux distro, docker didn't seem to work properly, some stuff needs to be setup in a shell.nix file instead of the global configuration file for some reason. I would probably get the hang of it eventually but I just couldn't be bothered, the annoying shit outweighs any potential benefits tbh.
Yea, the custom lang was annoying, got used to it, but like, why not just take something already made instead of making yet-another-language.
I luckily rarely have to run binaries, but when I do, I chuck the games into lutris, and non games something like steam-run.
Not sure about shell.nix, too vague to talk about. I will say though, that I found direnv + lorri + shell.nix (or flake.nix) very useful, lets me cd into a dir and all the packages needed for that project are available, without having to install them globally, other people will also benefit from this if shell.nix and .envrc are checked in to git.
I would probably get the hang of it eventually but I just couldn't be bothered, the annoying shit outweighs any potential benefits tbh.
Yup. I didn't have too many annoying problems for it to outweigh the benefits. I also have a server, so that weighs on benefits.
CachyOS btw.
Guix, but it's not for linux newbies I think. Although it's completely libre, too much in fact, it didn't have some drivers I need for my laptop so I needed to non-libre it a bit...
Debian is very beginner friendly and very stable, but stable means the software is pretty old compared to other distros. Security updates are timely and everything no trouble on that front, but often I wondered why some app didn't have some feature only to find out it does, for over a year in fact, but the version implementing it hadn't made it through Debians QA yet.
I think it's a really good place to start, but if you find it "lacking" you may want to look into alternatives.
Also remember you can multi-boot, so you can try different distros, or set up a virtual machine to testdrive some distro. It's not terribly difficult but does require some time.
For servers, I'm a CentOS refugee who is stuck with Oracle Linux (*shudder*) because of work reasons, and because I didn't want to get in on the whole Rocky/Alma diaspora. For desktop, I still like Fedora, and for WSL, I think I'm running Ubuntu because fuck it, why not. Fedora was my daily driver for my work machine at my previous job; GNOME on Wayland was buggy as shit back then, but it was still a step up from Windows 10 randomly installing updates and rebooting my machine because I got up to get coffee or to pee. It also helped not having to fuck around with Cygwin to use rsync and scp from my dev workstation.
I have two devices, one runs Arch and the other runs Gentoo. Arch because I got used to it a while ago and really like the flexibility, and Gentoo because I took it as a challenge and ended up liking it.
NixOS
Ubuntu
Debian on my desktop. Fedora on my laptop.
Ubuntu LTS on server
Zorin, because it's very slim for my shit ass laptop. To be honest, it gives me grief sometimes, and I thought about switching until the other day when I needed to turn my laptop into a router, and it only took me about 2 clicks, because it was built into the network manager.
Fedora on my laptop, I switched because I wanted to use the Plasma cube but I think I ended up getting GNOME, which works well enough so I don't mind.
I put Mint on an old laptop for my kids. The laptop is so old windows stopped supporting WiFi drivers for it, but it could connect to the internet with Mint out of the box.
And I've got an old Dell off a guy I put Debian on. I went with xfce so it uses less than a gig ram at idle and I plan to use it as a server once I can figure out docker
Just slap proxmox on it and use them all
I've been using Linux as my daily driver for over a decade and after distro hopping for a few years, I finally settled on Linux Mint because for what it's worth, it just works. It's pretty close to a Windows environment, it's built on top of apt, and it's got good driver support for Nvidia. It comes with mostly useful default software and Nemo is a good file browser.
i usually just use debian but im lazy lately so i started using mx (debian with some convenience tools), no complaints
KDE Neon but I might move to fedora or ~~KDE Neon~~ Tuxedo OS eventually
Haven't used it on the desktop since forever. On servers I use a mix of AlmaLinux and Ubuntu.
This might sound really dumb, but what do you mean by "on servers"?
I run my own nameservers, mailserver, and webserver. As well as a couple of apps for file sharing and network management. Most of it runs off a HP machine I was allowed to screw into a rack of the datacenter my part-time job occupies. Some of it on local machines, notably a raspberry pi.
Alpine. It’s pretty lovely, but usually when I’m setting something up for someone else it’s either Debian or Fedora.
Arch, btw. And Guix. And Fedora. And Debian. And some more.
Almost every computing device I own runs Linux.
Arch, but I don't really use desktop linux very much. On servers I usually run debian
Been using popos for a while now. I'm at the point of Linux between wanting more ui customization options and not wanting to have to mess wit reinstalling a new distro. If I do reinstall at some point, I'll probably switch to fedora or something
Fedora Asahi Remix with Guix Home which I moved a lot of my configurations and software to for my laptop. Proxmox + Debian + Docker for my server, I have a few things on a Guix System VM but haven't had time to move anything else nor have I started it up in a while.