*or distribution
Having been a (GNU-)Linux user since 2006 (desktop only), I have done what many Linux users have also done: hop around from one thing to another.
That all stopped a few years ago when I decided that I would just stick with Debian. I was happy and comfortable. It worked. I used Stable, Testing, Unstable… no issues.
That is until about 4 months ago I was cleaning and found an older laptop and decided to try something different on it: Alpine Linux.
I even wrote about it on my blog. It was such a nice installation and process that I decided to put it on my main personal laptop.
Since April I have been using Alpine and I must say I am pleased. Differences from one Linux to the next aren’t much to write about. With Alpine however, I finally experienced another part of Linux that I hadn’t had the opportunity to enjoy: the community.
Package requesting? Easy. Asking for help? No shame. Patience and help provided? Excellent.
None of those comments are to disparage other OS communities. It is simply that I had only ever used popular distros (Debian- and Arch-based) so I never needed to ask for help. Either way, I am still using Alpine.
So, just to repeat the titular question: what have you tried out this year? What are your impressions?
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I’m usually an Arch person (btw) but I’ve been playing around with NixOS in a VM and I’m tempted to try daily driving it…
I’ve been daily driving it on my personal projects computer. The biggest issue for me is the promise of the project shell stops just before the application config files, meaning that you still have a shared environment for projects using the same software.
The idea for me was to have all my projects create their development environment and associated tools so that moving to a different instance was easy. Unfortunately VSCode doesn’t install extensions in the project nor does it understand which to enable/disable based on inputs.
I was tempted to give NixOS a try as well. It seems to be highly recommended on the fediverse.
Well, I’ll put it this way:
I’ve been away from Linux for a few years (several reasons), but this year I heard of NixOS and decided to give it a try, and I had a blast playing around with it. With how easy* and quick to configure it is, and how stable it also is, it encouraged to tinker with it more than I ever have with Linux, and I never had any really frustrating issues like I had with some other distros that I barely tinkered with.
At the very least, I think you should play around with it for a while just to see if it’s something you like.
*PS: For anyone who does not have experience with Linux, NixOS is probably not a good first distro. I meant easy more so for people already familiar with Linux.
It seems like a pretty wild idea and I’m only just starting to wrap my head around it, but it’s really interesting as well!
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because i really like that its rolling release, new software and stable. Im using it as a main distro now. It has everything i need.
OpenSUSE is one of the distros that I have never tried. If Alpine ever fails me, I think I’ll give it a try.
I distro hopped a lot and i always had a reason to switch. With OpenSUSE i still didnt find a reason.
I’ve tried it before but this year I really committed to trying Mint as a daily driver. Was going well until I ran into a weird issue with wine and text to speech integrations in a game.
I’m running Linux Mint Debian Edition after years of being biased against Mint for their early security missteps. I’m not in love with the cinnamon desktop but it is very definitively acceptable
I have been using Debian for the last 20 years or so. I also had a brief encounter with Gentoo which was a big help to dive into compiling, specially kernels adjusted to low performant and old hardware. I have been using Debian for my servers (web mostly) but discovered FreeBSD and jails for myself this year. It didn’t take long to convet my primary webserver to FreeBSD. Until now, no complains. I have an easy way to isolate websites and services in their own jail allowing users to access theirs without conpromising host security.
opensuse kalpa - the KDE version of its immutable desktop. Pretty neat combination of rolling core and applications separated out primarily into flatpak and other containers.
Ubuntu has been my daily driver for about ten years; but I’ve also had rendezvous with OpenSUSE, Linux Mint, RedHat, Arch, and Zorin. Nix has been on my mind, but I always come back to Ubuntu.
I started fiddling with NixOS and it quickly became my Docker host and my virtual desktop. I don’t know if I’m going to put it on my physical desktop but the idea is tempting.
I don’t know if NixOS is going to take off but it seems like something the enterprise IT world may adopt and I want to be on that train.
PopOS. Pretty satisfied.
I’m not particularly militant about Linux distros, but Alpine is one distro I disapprove of in particular. The reason is that it isn’t GNU/Linux – it strips out (copyleft) GNU libc and coreutils and replaces them with permissively-licensed alternatives. I think that (whether intentional or not) it caters too much to corporate interests that exploit “open source” without truly respecting the users’ freedom, and therefore its popularity is potentially harmful to the Free Software movement in the long run.
But alpine license isn’t that bad right? I mean musl is okaish?
Can you elaborate more?
Thank you
People do not like “permissive” licenses because they offer 5 freedoms instead of just the 4 that the GPL does.
The 5th freedom is to do whatever you want with code that you write. “Free as in Freedom” purists hate that freedom.
Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are “fine.” They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there’s nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.
The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.
See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they’re just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there’s an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people’s property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.
There’s a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the “tivoization” exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.
Linux Mint Cinnamon. It’s been good, no complaints. Very helpful for easing into Linux by having a GUI, and I’ve been learning CLI and bash scripting.
Linux mint was the first distro I fell in love with as a beginner.
Yeah, I believe there’s still a lot I can learn from using LM. I’m interested in other distros/DEs, but I’m saving that for later.
I did the exact opposite, and set up a virtual machine with Windows 3.1 yesterday.
Now if only I had my old apps…
It was time for me to return to Linux, which I’ve been using on and off for two decades. This time I wanted to give Nobara a go, with its optimizations for gaming. But alas, the LiveUSB is unusable. The default options lead to a black screen (I guess when the kernel framebuffer kicks in), and the “troubleshooting” option gives me a desktop that crashes in a few minutes, when still setting up the options in the installer. I guess Wayland is too unstable.
So I returned to Gentoo and am now in the middle of installing that (again). Its LiveUSB system is stable and giving me no problem.
I installed Haiku since not having played with it in early alpha stages. I have no real use case for it, but it has really come along.
I finally got fed up with Windows 11 when an update broke itself during an update. Apparently it was a pretty widespread issue. Defender got disabled because the update renamed several files.
I moved to PopOS and have been happy ever since. I couldn’t believe that almost everything on my Lenovo Flex 5 just worked, including the touchscreen, pen, and 360 degree hinge. The only thing that doesn’t work is the finger print sensor apparently due to lack of available drivers.
I really like how modern PopOS feels.
I’m in a similar boat although PopOS has been problematic for some gaming that was fine on Ubuntu (until an nVidia update broke the entire system).
