If you had to pick one distro to use for the next five years, what would it be? Bleeding edge / stable? Rolling / periodic?
What would you prioritise and why?
After 20 years of Gentoo, I don’t see myself switching in the next five. Comfortable, capable, flexible.
18 years here (started 2008, god, has it really been that long?). And I only had to reinstall once in that time (my own fault). Even new systems are just installed from snapshots of my existing systems.
It’s really low maintenance once it’s set up. It almost never breaks, and for breaking changes you get news through the package manager months in advance, and if you actually need to fix something it’s always possible (easy downgrades, deploying of patches, etc.). I’m also using some Arch and Ubuntu on the side and stability doesn’t even compare.
Debian testing, then upgrade it as they make major releases. I have yet to have a single Debian upgrade go wrong on Desktop or Server. It is basically magic.
Void. Second choice, debian.
Debian is kind of too big to fail. Maybe NixOS if you want something that will almost certainly gain popularity in the future.
Don’t think though that distros are the layer which you want to look at. Lots of stuff happens at the level of DEs, drivers and individual apps, which sure is preconditioned by the distro you choose but at the same time not that strict of a thing. You can get anything working provided you have the time.
x11 is still in its last round before retirement it seems, using Wayland is going to future proof what you’ve got majorly.
My 2c. Feel free to critique.
nixos, same as the last 10 years. more packages than ever on it, and I’m better at wrangling nix stuff now for my own packages. Besides my personal machines, I also use it to admin several servers for work. All the config for all the machines goes into git and I can see exactly what changed and when, configuration-wise.
Familiar
So, mint with cinnamon
I’ve been on Linux for 14 years now and all the projects I’ve used as my daily driver are still kicking and doing great. Arch, Fedora, Debian, and NixOS. I’m on nix and I’d happily stay here ten more years if the governance stuff settles down, that concerns me. But from a technical and package availability perspective it’s amazing
Mint. It just works.
Want to live on the wild side? Use the Debian based version.
Debian. The answer is always Debian.
No Tumbleweed fans? :/
(°▽°)/
🙋
Fedora. It’s so easy to use and so stable. Unfortunately my bleeding-edge NVIDIA graphics card does not play nice with it, so I have been stuck with arch.
If l have a nice pc definitly qubes os
For a headless server: Ubuntu. Solid, reliable and stable for many years.
For gaming: Pop OS looks promising now that cosmic has been released, however I’d probably stick with Fedora as it’s leading edge and has served me well so far.
debian is better for a headless server in my experience, it has less issues than ubuntu server on bare metal
Reproducibility. If I’m spending months configuring my setup then I want it to stay exactly the same and easily rebuildable even if I switch/upgrade my computer. NixOS is the only answer.
Best of both worlds – Debian + Nix home-manager. Debian gives you incredible stability and plenty of usage resources. Nix gives you anything too new for Debian and functionally confines the more experimental end of your config to user space.
