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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I use Fedora on my personal laptop and DietPi on my RaspberryPi 4 where I selfhost a bunch of stuff.
no, i use archlinux on my main desktop as i use it daily and is my main workhorse. i have a laptop that rarely gets used at that has debian on. then i have a mini pc server with debian and a raspberry pi 4 with debian based raspberry pi os.
The machines I use regularly are all some form of ArchLinux (currently mostly CachyOS). Machines I use rarely I stick to LTS distros with few updates. Machines I don’t maintain myself I try to stick to immutable distros that just update themselves every once in a while (less chance of breakage).
Servers are all Debian. Family member’s laptops are all Debian. I used Debian on my laptops for 20 years, but when Steam Deck switched to Arch, I switched my laptop to Arch to force me to learn it. I have a file with notes of differences between Debian and Arch. Next time I buy a new laptop, I will probably go back to Debian.
Same but a ubuntu-derivative instead of Arch.
I don’t want to think about my server, but I do sometimes want the latest and greatest app on my laptop.
Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it’s perfect for everything.
Same here, except the steam deck.
My Steam Deck also runs NixOS.
Because this way I can much more comfortably configure it, plus everything game related I automated through nix for my Desktop (e.g. mod installs, reShade config,…) immediately and without any extra steps also applies to the Steam Deck.
What is the learning/on-boarding curve for this?
I ask because my home folder has a giant just file I use to script everything. I feel like I’m 80% there to just migrating.
It’s a very steep curve to start, with some additional minor steep parts along the way, but it’s not a long curve. Once you got the core concepts and the basic language constructs, you’ve learned most of what you’ll ever need.
Two nice resources: search.nixos.org is super handy, and you can search GitHub with language:nix and a search term to get tons of examples from other people.
Oh, and nix and just is actually a pretty common combo!
Nice, I’ll have to remember that GitHub trick. The main thing I’ve found lacking so far is config examples.
I’d say that if you’re an experienced developer, the learning curve is probably overstated, at least based on my limited experience. I’m still a relatively new user, but I’m feeling pretty comfortable with it so far.
Hitting obscure issues with limited documentation and barely any forum discussions on it in search results is killing me though. But at the same time NixOS makes a lot of things incredibly easy and offloads having to remember any changes so it’s worth all the effort for me.
And it’s very handy for this, I have the same config for all my devices (desktop, laptop and server). Enabling and disabling different modules depending on the host it’s deployed to.
Yep, exactly.
To be fair, if you use Debian, Arch, Fedora,… long enough, you also know how to tweak your machine for every purpose. In Nix, it’s just somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you have to know how to tweak your system to achieve… anything, and then it’s the same tweaking mechanics for every other purpose as well.
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.
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.
I was HEAVILY into the apple ecosystem, so I have a lot of macs. I have a macbook, running MacOS, and i have a desktop computer that i was using for my server, but instead bought a ras pi, and now use my desktop AS a desktop (partly because i want to dump apple because of all the bootlicking that Tim Apple is doing towards drumpf), which runs linux mint. My ras pi runs ubuntu server. Aside from that, that’s the extent of my home computing. I have an iphone too. But my mac mini goes unused now, and thinking of selling it, but not sure. /rambling
I usually stick with ubuntu/debian based distros, because it was the first distro system i used when i first used linux. so I stick with what i know. Though I did support a RH server once when i worked in IT.
Debian always. Stablility is good, good is stability. But i am open to trying fedora in the near future
I do - more or less. Since I am the IT guy for my entire family and don’t feel like doing tech support on 10 different distros.
I typically use EndeavorOS because I enjoy how well documented and organized the arch wiki is.
I tried switching to fedora on my laptop recently but actually had some issues with software that was apparently only distributed through the AUR or AppImage (which I could have used, I know).
When I also had issues setting up my VPN to my home network again, I caved and restored the disk to a backup I took before attempting the switch. The VPN thing almost definitely wasn’t Fedoras fault since I remember running into the same issue on EndeavorOS but after my fix from last time didn’t work I was out of patience.
My servers runs either on debian or Ubuntu LTS though.
I’ve thought about it, but I like having Bazzite for my gaming PC and Debian for my laptop, so I’ll probably keep using multiple distros. For me it’s:
- Gaming PC: Bazzite (it’s plugged into my TV, like a console, and goes straight to Steam’s big picture mode)
- Laptop: Debian with KDE Plasma
- Home Server: Debian (a little single board computer, no desktop environment)
Debian home server, macOS desktop, newer laptops run Arch and Fedora, and the two old MacBooks both run Mint DE. Oh, and OpenWrt on the router.
For my Gaming PC I ended up with cashyOS. Justs works and still gives me enough flexibility for customization. Server is Proxmox with mostly Debian LXCs but I started to add in some alpine containers. Probably going to throw alpine on my old laptop as well, just for fun. Ah and then there is my MacBook with macOS, which for now I plan to keep…
I use Fedora on my desktop, laptop and server. On my mother‘s laptop I have installed Fedora Kinoite.
