Hej lemmings! (Hoping this is relevant enough for the selfhosted commjnity)
Quick question for you all: do you stick with the same distro across your PC, laptop, and server, or do you pick different ones based on the device and what you’re doing?
For me, I’ve been mixing and matching depending on the use case, but I’m starting to think it’d be nice to just have one distro (or at least one family like Fedora or Debian) running everywhere. That way I wouldn’t get confused about default settings or constantly have to look up flags for different package managers.
Right now my setup is:
- Gaming rig: CachyOS
- Laptop: AuroraOS
- NAS: Unraid
- Various project servers: DietPi, Debian, Alpine etc…
I feel like NixOS might be the only distro that could realistically handle all these use cases, but I’m a bit scared of the learning curve and the maintenance work it’d take to migrate everything over.
Am I the only one who feels like having “one distro to rule them all” would be nice? How do you guys handle your setups? All ears! 😊
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For me, I am running EndeavourOS on my laptop (for its rolling release updates and its customisability) and Debian on my homeserver (for its stability). I have also set up a secondary laptop with Linux Mint that is now being used by somebody else for its ease of use :)
yes, it’s Arch all the way for me. it’s flexible in the way that I can configure it for any system I need, and I usually know what I want from it.
my installations on my desktop and laptop look fairly similar, but my server and test computers can look different depending on the hardware specifications they have.
plus, with BTRFS snapshots, if anything breaks I can simply roll back to a previous version of the system.
Bazzite GNOME on my “it needs to work daily no matter what” school/work/light gaming laptop, ~250ish flatpak apps (mostly very awesome tiny GTK4-based tools)
Devuan on my desktop PC, Trinity Desktop Environment, almost entirely apt apps, I do heavy multimedia work and gaming on it, I squeeze as much speed as I can
Debian on my Linux phone (FuriLabs FLX1s running FuriOS, a fork of Droidian, which is a fork of Mobian, which is a fork of Debian), Phosh UI, almost entirely ~140ish flatpaks
I try to keep my operating systems and software as controlled and predictable as possible, but I approach that differently depending on the usecase. Yes, I’ve tried NixOS, fell in love with it, and quickly realized it’s overengineered and makes my head hurt. I also used CachyOS with TDE on my desktop for a while, was really speedy but TDE packaging for Arch really sucks compared to their Debian packaging
Arch everywhere. LTS kernel on servers and zen kernel on desktop and laptop. I love the idea of nixos but in practice it felt like more work than it was worth (to me).
I originally did Debian on servers but after using arch for long enough and never having stability problems, it was easier to move to the same distro.
Oooh, look at mr. Rich guy here with multiple devices.
/s… (not really, cries in only computer being a dying laptop from 2011 with no way to get even just another dying 2011 laptop when this one dies.)
NixOS home server, gaming PC will soon move to Bazzite from Windows 10 (whenever I’m done working on my home server). I’m trying Bazzite for that machine because I use it more like a game console hooked up to the TV and don’t need the same level of tweaking and customization.
Gentoo, Qubes on desktops. Cent, Gentoo, Alpine and OpenBSD for servers.
Then there’s weird stuff like MirageOS, DuskOS, openwrt, opnsense and I’m 90% sure there’s a laptop with Kali purple in my trunk.
For other people I usually install fedora spins or bazzite.
I run unraid for my main servers (mostly out of convenience/ease), and pop-os for everything else. I treat my laptop as my beta tester for my desktop which is stable, but both use the same underlying os. Who has the time to troubleshoot more than one?
Debian on my servers. No drama, it just works.
Fedora on my laptop and desktop. Still solid, but quicker updates.
My main desktop is Mint - I feel like most of the random pieces of software I find myself wanting to run are built for Ubuntu or at the very least a lfh distro.
My server and random devices run NixOS, and I’m acrually considering combining all the config into a monorepo…
My Raspberry PI I think runs Raspbian though. I should see if I can nixify it.
Jup, Debian stable on my three servers an on my laptop. I think its just way easier to run the same system everywhere. Also, Debian is a great distribution.
All my kubernetes nodes are Ubuntu but when I rebuild my cluster I’ll probably moved to Talos. My Gaming Rig/Workstation runs Bazzite. My Dev laptop runs Aurora. The little differences between Aurora and Bazzite are a little irritating so if I ever have a reason to rebuild one I’ll probably switch it.
The PIs run whatever is most convenient for their purpose.
My next NAS will probably run Unraid or TrueNAS, but for now its Synology.
My work PC and gaming PC are Kubuntu, my media server is Debian, and my Home Assistant server is macOS, because it’s an M1 mini. So yeah, kinda. I thought about putting the server on Kubuntu, but in the end figured I’d go for as stable as possible.
Fedora KDE for anything I need a GUI for, Debian for anything headless.
I’ve used damn near everything else in 30 years of Linux, but I’m pretty sure my tombstone will run Debian.
Laptop arch
Web servers Debian or fedora.
Looking into slackware for self hosting
