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?

  • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club
    11·
    6 days ago

    No Tumbleweed fans? :/

    They (openSUSE) make a lot of default decisions for you, but it’s really close to 0 maintenance if you lack the time (or just cannot even for months at a time) & still a rolling release, zypper, etc.

  • Silver Needle@lemmy.caEnglish
    9·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    4·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • nyan@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    7 days ago

    After 20 years of Gentoo, I don’t see myself switching in the next five. Comfortable, capable, flexible.

    • Obin@feddit.org
      3·
      7 days ago

      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.

  • kittenroar@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    I’d go with Ubuntu LTS - it receives updates for 5 years and security updates only for another 5 years. In other words, it is explicitly for your use case. Additionally, it offers kernel live patching as a free managed service, which nobody else offers afaik.

  • IEatDaFeesh@lemmy.world
    3·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • toastal@lemmy.ml
      1·
      6 days ago

      I would 'free but folks need to learn some Nix basics before the jump in headlong into bad community recommendations like starting with flakes. It’s hard to just drop into Nix without some commitment.

    • myszka@lemmy.ml
      1·
      6 days ago

      This! I’ve got 7 machines running NixOS already and using Linux on so many machines is only manageable with the reproducibility NixOS provides. Whenever I lay my hands on a new server, PC, laptop, tablet or phone, I just add a few lines for it in my config, run a single nixos-anywhere command and it’s good to go. Syncing changes is also just two commands: git pull && nh os switch. Been using NixOS for a year and a half and it still can’st stop to amaze me

  • cow@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 days ago

    NixOS unstable. I like being able to define my system as code. I also don’t need that high of stability and would rather have more up to date software in most cases. I have thought about using stable releases for things like basic http and DNS servers but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

  • chloroken@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Spending time thinking about which distro to use is time that could have been spent learning how Linux works as a whole.