It's 26.04 LTS season in the *buntu universe, which is usually the time I start distro hopping again (before ending up settling back to a LTS ubuntu flavor, but who knows what happens this time).
I've heard a lot of good about Pop_OS so I'll probably give it a spin, along with Fedora (w/ lxqt), Lubuntu, maybe give Ubuntu MATE another chance for the lower power laptop.
One unusual distro I've discovered recently is Garuda (https://garudalinux.org/) which is a collection of opiniated pre-config'd Arch-based flavors. Supposed to work well out of the box while still allowing you to tell people you "use Arch btw".
I've also come across some threads of people sharing their customized DEs for aesthetic pleasure (aka "ricing") and it reminds me of a time when computing seemed more fun and personal. I'll put a few examples at the bottom of this post. My favorites have to be the full Nier-themed UI and the red/black ones from Garuda.
Been using Windows on the PC for a while, since WSL became stable and usable for me, while keeping Linux on laptop, but seeing some of those desktops scratched a dormant itch to dive back in and dual boot at minimum.
So, what are y'all running? And are you a ricer?
Kubuntu, no other DE is comparable in polish to KDE... keeping an eye on the SonicDE project though which is a KDE fork without the Wayland lock-in
Straight debian for minimal footprint appliances or ancient hardware, but still generally lean Ubuntu server most servers
OpenBSD for paranoid appliances where security is paramount
Distro hopping is mostly procrastination/vanity, they're just curated preferences with little material effect... and they're all based on one of the big 3.
Picking a distro based on the out of the box theme is frivolity. Ricing is a good description, like idiots slapping Type R stickers on stock Civics in the Fast and Furious era.
In Linux you can tweak anything to your liking, which you'll have to do inevitably, so just stick to something and make it work the way you want... that's the point.
Only Debian.
Have not used Windows since last century.
Around 24 years of Debian for me. Once it starts to annoy me, I might start looking for something else. I'm not in a rush, though.
NixOS gang here, it brought back the joy of computing for me.
This has all the upsides of an image based distro like Fedora Silverblue but without trapping you in a cage, like if Arch wasn’t a brittle stateful mess.
While in Ubuntu world the package manager (apt) shits the bed when you sneeze too hard, I have actually continued installs from where it left off after it got interrupted by a power outage.
You describe the system configuration in a text file and run a command (nixos-rebuild) to apply said changes atomically, which means it either goes all the way or not at all. Like really, you can just yank the power cord in the middle of a system upgrade and nothing bad happens.
It also has some preflight sanity checks before applying new configurations, but in the rare case you manage to apply an unbootable configuration you can just pick one of the last n configurations right from the bootloader.
Using more “exotic” things like ZFS or an Nvidia GPU is a single line of config each, and speaking of ZFS, the mounter script from nixOS is more robust than the one in so called zfs native distros like proxmox and ubuntu.
And if you happen to have a mac you can use nix-darwin there to manage it like a nixOS system, you can also share configuration snippets between your machines so that your terminal, neovim, tmux etc. stays consistent across hosts.
And it’s totally rice friendly, while some distros make a whole ordeal from changing the DE/VM, in nixOS you can once again just change two lines of configuration with the system running and you don’t even need to reboot to switch let’s say from gnome to kde.
What did you move to NixOS from?
The way you describe it makes it feel like Linux squared: everything is a
fileconfig lineIt also facilitates (arguably) good discipline like erase your darlings.
I was distro hopping so hard I even ended up using FreeBSD for a while, but if I had to guess I would say Ubuntu accounts for most of my previous Linux usage.
It might be worth noting that I am/used to be a macfag at heart, ever since I started hackintoshing back in the glorious days of Snow Leopard. And even though the latest macOS releases have been really testing me, Apple still has me by the balls when it comes to the work machine.
Still, everything else, from the gaming desktop to servers has been converted to NixOS.
While I do enjoy browsing r/unixporn from time to time, I personally don't actually do any ricing. While I do think it looks cool, it is quite distracting and not exactly benefitial for productivity.
Thanks for sharing Garuda! I hadn't heard of that before.
I've been enjoying Manjaro for several years. Currently trying the cinnamon variant, and it's alright. Having tried Gnome, KDE plasma, and now cinnamon, I think KDE plasma is my favorite and I'll probably go back to it next time I reinstall.
I don't rice at all. 10 years ago I was big into that. One of my brothers and I would take turns personalizing Gnome 2 until it looked like something from The Matrix. But nowadays I just want to get the OS installed and get back work.
I'm very basic and not a ricer at all. it appeals to me, but I guess I'm worried that it such modifications will leak quite a lot of identifying info when using the internet. I'd love to be told that I'm misunderstanding this, though.
I'd have to look into it. Off the top of my head maybe apps can track via wallpapers but a higher risk online with websites/webapps would be things like screen size, resolution, user-agent and settings like prefer-darkmode etc.
I suppose it makes sense that if someone were to really hack away at their environment have have a lot of uncommon settings everywhere it makes them more unique and easier to fingerprint depending on the settings and whether it's exposed to and read by the web.
Maybe that's why GrapheneOS comes with a plain black wallpaper by default.
Debian and I do specifically netinst install that has nothing pre-installed and without Desktop Environment and then I manually add gnome-core. So it's very clean and it only has the apps that I actually want to be there.
Mostly Ubuntu
Manjaro could be an option too , even it s more dev oriented
No serious ricing here.
I'm using a tiling window manager, so the extent to which I "rice" is setting default fonts and sizes, gaps between tiles and their borders.
Arch, btw.
If the age verification nonsense in
systemdgoes too far, I'll switch to artix. I'm leaning that way for future installs anyway.Asahi (not mainly)
Linux Mint.
CachyOS
Some combination of Arch+Hyprland and MacOS+Aerospace
Recently switched from DWM to Hyprland and it's pretty good. I don't do any visual ricing personally, and I try to avoid touching my configs as much as possible after I have it set up how I like it.
Over the years my workflow has simplified a lot and now I basically just have a simple 1 program per workspace, fullscreen workflow. Very low distraction and very easy to do on basically any system, so it works for me.