• he/him

I occasionally write long posts but you should assume I'm talking out of my ass until proved otherwise. I do like writing shit sometimes. ย 

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50/50 chance of suit pictures end up here or on the Art Directory account. Good luck.

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Be 18+ or be gone you kids act fuckin' weird.

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pfp by wackyanimal


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I tag all of my posts complaining about stuff #complaining, feel free to muffle that if you'd like a more positive cohost experience.

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Art and suit stuff: @PlumPanAD

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"DMs":
Feel free to message as long as you have something to talk about!


Why do you use the linux distro that you do?

Just kinda woke up in the mood to hear about how people chose their distros today. Mostly interested in desktop use more than servers, unless you feel like your story there is particularly interesting. I assume some desktop choices will also just be "it's the first thing I tried and it works".


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in reply to @plumpan's post:

It's not the best beginner distro because of all the things that make it different, but once you're used to it the package manager is excellent and the versatility to fix your own problems or make your own changes very easily is amazing. You have to know what you want or already have some experience if you want to get up and running quickly without tinkering too much, and you'll probably recompile things with new USE flags a few times while you're learning what you need. Patience and air conditioning is key.

i picked pop OS for my laptop because it has nvidia drivers built in, but ive been seriously considering switching to like, standard ubuntu, because the pop shop (the package manager for this distro) is just broken af on my install and i havent been using it often enough to fix it

For what it's worth, I never really had issues installing nvidia drivers on ubuntu when I used both of those things. I have hit weird, niche issues before, but getting the drivers in place and working was never one of them.

I can't remember how I even set them up back then, last time I was messing with nvidia on linux it was on a server using the yucky-but-effective nvidia ".run" installer.

Three:

  • Gentoo is on the solid state drive of my desktop, following Duxsco's guide on how to set it up on a LUKS partition. (I had previous used Sakaki's, but due to her work contract forbidding her to do FOSS work for some reason, it's gone outdated.) I unfortunately don't use it much because there's always something not quite right about my setup. Probably a me problem. I like the concept of it, though, and have been at the very least poking at it for years after a friend told me about it.
  • Solus is on my storage drive. I kind of discovered it in a list of distros usable for gaming. It's a little more of a curated experience, so I was curious about it. It's not especially useful on the slow 5400 RPM storage drive, though, so I'd probably need to put it on the SSD if I really wanted to use it.
  • Mint is on my underpowered laptop, because it is an underpowered laptop and Mint tends to do well on those. Cinnamon may not have been the best option, though. I might consider switching to Solus Xfce when that becomes an option (it is not currently).

It also amuses me that the local university has a general purpose Linux package mirror that spans like fifteen distros. Sadly, the download speeds are kind of low.

VPS ran Ubuntu already. Wanted dev environment to be identical to production.

Previous vague "I want to be a programmer. I should use Linux" in my late teens early 20s was Ubuntu because it had the reputation as "the easy one".

But like? No complaints really after all these years that I feel like another distro would have necessarily avoided. I guess retroactively for awhile Ubuntu did the the X to close on the left corner instead of right (or maybe it was right side but the leftmost button, I forget) and I somehow got used to that, but now it seems absurd and like something they did just to say "Look, we're not like Windows!"

Switching to Plasma however was probably the best thing I ever did.

Historically I've used arch because I was in the sickos.tar.gz pile and really liked diving into everything running and why. As I've gotten older and wanted things to work with less intervention on my part I've basically switched every machine over to either mint or more recently pop, and that's been nice.

Credit to pop, though. First machine I put it on was my weird little 2-in-1 drawing tablet and all of it's strange features worked just fine immediately.

i picked gentoo 20ish years ago because my usb adsl modem needed all kinds of patched stuff, so it was the only real choice if i wanted internet on linux. i distrohopped a bunch after those patches were elsewhere but kept bouncing back because gentoo was the only good rolling release in 200x and i grew accustomed to that. there just wasn't much choice and the other options usually didn't care for the ati/nvidia proprietary graphics drivers. i needed those because i was a linux gamer, by which i mean i played unreal tournament 2004 and world of warcraft in wine

i'm on nixos now as of about a month ago, mostly because all of my reasons for using gentoo were stuck in 200x and i finally wanted to try something new + exciting

i use nixos so i can fuck with stuff without really bloating my system at all and recover/reset easily without losing much, all feels very lean especially compared to arch that did feel like it would bloat over time if i was tinkering alot just due to installing lots of packages

I use void linux. Iโ€™ve previously dabbled in a lot of different distros because it took me a while to figure out what I actually wanted. Arch is probably my runner up, but void has a lot of the things I liked about arch (rolling release, minimal by default) and not as much of the things I didnโ€™t (so bleeding edge it would actually break, systemd). But yeah, maybe obvious to everyone but me but a distro is primarily defined by its package manager and base software. This is why I had a terrible time with slackware, will never try gentoo, and avoid the distros that ship systemd + GNOME3 by default (Iโ€™m a hater of both sorry not sorry). <3 void linux and its X-Box Packaging System.

I'm running Artix w/ runit on my main machine, and have been since I got this laptop just over 3 years ago. I love being able to use the AUR alongside a dead simple init system. Previously, I ran Arch for 4ish years, and Ubuntu for about 6 months before that.

I have a couple other boxes to experiment with- my media laptop runs Void, which is also very cool. I'm also toying around with Gentoo on musl libc, which is a bit tricky but really fun. Once I feel really confident with musl-Gentoo, I'll probably migrate my main machine over too.

Musl is a lot faster! Changing my /bin/sh from the standard dynamically linked glibc bash to dash-static-musl probably has given me the best performance gained / time spent ratio out of just about any tweak on my Linux boxes! I'm running Void-musl on an x230 as well, and it's ran shockingly fast for how old that device is.

honestly can't remember why i chose void. i think i just heard about it from someone i know and was tired of dealing with pacman keyring b.s. and well, now i think every computer i touch (phone excepted) is voided and i spend most of my free time working on void stuff

Ubuntu was the big hype distro in 2006 when I first used linux and the rest of the story... yeah it's hard to see it as anything other than "i'm lazy i guess". I keep meaning to give other distros a real try but ubuntu has always been just about good enough to not make me desperate enough to go to the bother

I use Pop!_OS because my computer has a lotta weird issues with Linux and Pop is the distro that's the most compatible out of the box. I don't like GNOME with a mouse (with a touchscreen, I don't mind it), but system76 has done so much to make it usable with a mouse.

I haven't used anything outside of Ubuntu when I play with Linux, but I have to download xfce when I do so. Gnome is just miserable to do anything in for me.
That's not so much a case of me trying a bunch of stuff, just that it's the first thing I've tried that wasn't a mint install with tiny UX that didn't want to run outside of single digit framerates for some reason.

There's a version of ubuntu with XFCE out of the box to streamline that a lil bit!

I'm a big XFCE fan myself. It's familiar enough but still very tweakable. KDE was surprisingly non tweakable when I messed with it (at least without getting real deep into it) and GNOME is.... well I don't know what's up with GNOME but I'm glad some people do actually enjoy using it and it's not some weird waste that literally no one touches.

The way I see it is like, while I don't like a lot of what windows does, I do very much appreciate a lot of their baseline ui philosophy. Just bc I wanna swap to an os without their junk doesn't mean I also wanna throw out the parts of the os I enjoy.
Gnome feels like it's trying to not be windows, which is an entirely different goal from what I want, lol

I generally agree with that. I grew up with Windows so that's kind of where I expect things to be, and I've never felt the need to learn something dramatically different at least as far as the taskbar and window controls. Maybe GNOME makes more sense coming from newer macOS.... but using OSX makes my head hurt a bit too lol.

I use Pop!_OS because LTT mentioned it being good for games and for n00bs, along with Manjaro and Garuda.
And I broke my Manjaro system after accidentally deleting /bin and then being unable to get a stable system that would work with my nvidia card lol.

I can't remember if it was right before or right after I stopped watching LTT, but I remember Linus slamming right through a warning on popOS that required him to type in "I understand this will break my system" to some effect, and then being shocked pikachu when the package manager decided to uninstall his DE for whatever reason. Deleting /bin is also a bad idea.

Sometimes I wonder why people have so many issues with nvidia cards, despite the very well documented issues stemming from nvidia I never had any troubles while I had cards from them.... and then I remember I'm always at least one generation behind. Usually more.

No idea if my issue was from my RTX 2080 or Manjaro-related, as I would do everything through the UI to not break things too much, and the settings UI would just die on me.
(That and my first ever desktop Linux install came with a broken mhwd pushed in a stable release, which I figured out after reading forum posts delivered with an expired SSL certificate :D)

Deleting /bin is also a bad idea.

I wanted to delete Snapshot backups using Dolphin to free up space, and my used-to-win7 mind did not think in that rightClick>delete would delete things outside the selected directory :(
Fun learning experience though, and is consistent with me breaking Win10 systems in the past when removing the cortana/edge/xbox/msbloat builtin stuff before abandoning and settling on win7

For better or worse I just assume most GUI frontends in Linux are likely to be broken, I think they're underetested because most people just drop into bash to do it.

Curious how the right click > delete thing worked? Maybe the file manager is weird.

Could have in fact been a symlink to root, or a mount point to its disk? but I still had half the root including /usr after the fact, so I dunno. that'll stay a mystery.

Linus slamming right through a warning on popOS that required him to type in "I understand this will break my system" to some effect, and then being shocked pikachu when the package manager decided to uninstall his DE for whatever reason.

ahahahaha I remember that. I at least had the good sense to back up my important files first when I did that when I was (checks notes (brain)) 11 years old lmao.

Don't get me started on that guy, but I think that was the moment that I went "You know what? Linux isn't for everyone. Some people can just stay on Windows."

"I ignored this obvious as possible warning and proceeded to fuck up my install, but it's not MY fault" is the kinda behavior that earns you forced Windows updates.

At the moment, I've got a(n unbootable...idk what I did) Xubuntu install that I use mostly for hobby CFD stuff. I chose it mostly by Ubuntu inertia/familiarity, but I like the lightweight and simple xfce interface.

As a result of seeing @noviri successfully gaming on Garuda, and some of the comments in this thread (I kinda missed the systemd thing, but that seems...not great), I'm now wondering if/how much of both CFD and my daily stuff can be done on other distros.