CachyOS with NiriWM. Cachy is Arch with none of the install drama. The performance tuning makes it blazing fast on older hardware. Installs with no bloat.
Niri is superior to Hyprland in my opinion because it’s a scrolling tiling WM that is super intuitive and fast.
For server workloads, however, not much beats pure Debian. It’s stable, well supported, and has a huge package library.
in a world where everything is dominated by convenience, eg. AI being a convenient source of information, GUI’s being a conveniet way of navigating information. I chose my distro to do the complete opposite. I wanted a distro that if an error arises it would give me a detailed message, not some vague response like “check the logs” where It doesn’t explain how to navigate there.
you may know where im going with this, I went with Cauchy OS and hyprland primarily for the speed of the kernel and the surplus amount of information and documentation with AUR. I cannot leave arch on the basis of how fast it is, for a massive update to install the latest core packages of the OS it takes about 2 min whereas fedora takes 15 and well windows (comediaclly, stereotypically popularized by space force) takes 45 minutes, we’ll leave it at that. The reason I chose hyprland is strictly on the same notion that learning skills does make the tools you use convenient, hyprland uses keybind over traditional mouse for navigating, launching apps, opening terminals, etc… and you become much faster with keybinds whereas a mouse is limited by the performance of it. using hyprland came to me as an extension when my professor taught me emacs (a TUI based text-editors). its why over the years (despite having used one initially) I just continue to despise IDE’s for writing code especially with most editors shipping proprietary AI into the mix. It’s not convenient anymore when I have to delete every code suggestion the AI makes.
“convenience” has effectively lost all of it’s meaning in technology. To me, convenience has been popularized to justify intellectual laziness, and embraced by tech orgs because they can capitalize off of it.
I use Arch, btw, but I don’t consider it the best (yes I do.) I could easily transition to Fedora, for example (I would never do that,) and be completely happy (I would rather continually hit my head with the metal stapler gun on my desk.)
Hannah Montana Linux
The one, the only, the legend…
No further arguments needed.
What made Hannah Montana Linux so good (as a joke, and as a distro), was that it was actually good. XD Good fun. Good stuff. :D
Omarchy because it installed in under ten minutes. Also it has a well riced Hyprland setup from the start. A complete install of LazyVim, OBS, and KDEnlive. I was able to start doing real work in the time it takes on other distros to read the installation instructions, let alone add nonfree packages or install lazyvim. It’s the most fun and productive Linux installation I’ve experienced since Ubuntu sent out CDs for free.
DHH is a bit of a douche. However the number of unsavory character and unpleasant people in the Linux community has always been non negligible. Starting with Stallman’s pedo chatter to Greg Kroah-Hartman banning Russians.
Does what I want and gets out of my way.
I’ve been enjoying EndeavourOS over the past three years. It works wonderfully out of the box at default settings, and was really easy for me to use and set up to my liking with minimal know-how needed.
It also works really well on the variety of machines I have in my home. My desktop, modded Chromebook, and my husband’s laptop.
It’s allowed me to get more familiar and confident with the command line, and enough so that I’ve switched to Sway from XFCE (and previously KDE).
Using Manjaro and Artix. Both are really great.
Artix is a healthy systemd-free distro, so I’m slowly migrating everything to it.
Manjaro just works, is stable, reliable, updates never break my system, their tools are very handy (Pamac GUI is the best software manager I’ve used in 21 years of Linux, with Synaptic).
I only installed Manjaro once 7 years ago, and ever since I’ve had that install copied on several partitions with success and reliability. The day I move away from systemd entirely (it’s a matter of when, not if), I’ll regret Manjaro deeply.
Artix is pretty damn good though, so I’m also looking forward to it.
Because it was my first distro that got me away from Windows. And yes, it’s Mint.
NixOS. My entire config is source-controlled and I can easily roll back to a previous boot image if something breaks like cough Nvidia drivers. I also use it for my home router and all self-hosted services.
maniacally laughs while trying to avoid eye contact with 19k lines of nix config
Out of all the ways that I have tried in the past, to reproduce not just the initial state, but also the ongoing changes of a disto (ansible, saltstack, chef, bunch of Shell scripts) — nix is by far the shortest. With all of these technologies I would never have dreamed to do this for a single Maschine. But now it’s not only possible, but actually gasp enjoyable!
Mind you, if that is not the problem you want to solve, maybe install just the nix package manager in addition to your distribution, and learn to enjoy it without having to run your whole distribution this way.
You misunderstand! It has also turned into basically a hobby (and recently, a job, lol) to manage nix configs.
Those 19k lines are clean, well-structured and DRY, and do describe every little thing about ca. 30 machines.
I do not consider Arch the best. Artix is better because is is systemd-free. I have not switched yet.
Gecko Linux because it’s OpenSuSE Tumbleweed with all the useful nonfree stuff included.
i’m using Alpine, but I’m not considering it as the best. It’s minimal, no bloat and doing all what I want.
I’ve been running Ubuntu Studio for almost a decade, but I’m pretty fed up with it. Maybe I’ll switch to Arch. I dunno. Having a turnkey media production distribution was handy. It did audio well. But with pipewire, that seems redundant now.
Zorin is boring. uses ubuntu stable, out of the box distro so you can do anything you want to do right after installation (including installing a windows program with play on linux but also like burning a disk), emulates windows. Add kde if you want to spice it up (distro really needs to change to kde out of box.). If someone is from windows and does not want to learn all that linux stuff they can pretty much go for most things right away and they can use the software store, choose the debian download for anything they find online if its available and if not they can download the windows right click and say install with play on linux. Its the lazy mans linux and im plenty lazy.
