What linux distributions is everyone using?

[metebalci]

There are many alternative window managers on Linux, it is not like Win or Mac. I think it doesnt matter much with which one the distribution comes with.

[SiliconWizard]

People are really divided about Gnome 3 (now Gnome 4x), some love it, but many despise it.
I have used it a bit on my laptop at some point, and for some light use on the go on a laptop, it was ok. But for any serious desktop use, I would trash it in an instant, I find it unbearable.

Windows had already tried something like this with the infamous Metro start screen of Win 8, which basically looked like the Activities screen of Gnome 4x, just admittedly that Gnome looks better.
Windows 11 is trying to steer back in the same direction with their new "start menu", although you can still use desktop icons.

Gnome can become remotely usable if you install a number of extensions, unfortunately extensions tend to break at every Gnome update due to how the extension subsystem is architectured, so that bites immensely.
But for people who dig Android-like UIs, that probably works fine.

[Warhawk]

There are many alternative window managers on Linux, it is not like Win or Mac. I think it doesnt matter much with which one the distribution comes with.

Here is the thing. PC is a tool for me. A tool to browse the web, watch youtube, design PCBs, run simulations, etc. I am annoyed when I need to babysit it. From my experience, when you start "tweaking" something, you break things and introduce bugs. It may work at the first glance but two weeks later you find out that something does not work***. It steals my precious free time.
For all my devices, I try to keep as default configuration as possible. This is the configuration that is likely most tested. I also like to use all software in English.

Even fedora has things that bug me

• TouchPad palm rejection
• DPI scaling (high-res internal LCD on laptop + external 21:9 ultra-wide screen)

From what I understood, Gnome DE is probably the best DE to get reasonable experience when docking with monitors that have different DPI. I like my Framework 13 laptop. The manufacturer and the community is very Linux-friendly. However, still you need to do "this and that" to make it running. And sometimes it does not work anyways. I hate to say that but I always end up using Windows 11 again. (no problems with battery, hibernation, etc.)

What I am afraid is that when I take Fedora and change the desktop environment, I spend hours to make it reasonable and the next update kills it again. Once again, I don't want to babysit my computer. I don't babysit my pliers and wrenches in the workshop either. I expect them work 24/7.

*** had it some time ago, I solved audio but HDMI stopped working. I found out when desperately needed to connect my PC to the TV...

[DiTBho]

what I really need at the moment is a C well written and coherent tiling window manager.
I don't need any file-manager, desktop-manager, session manager.

[metebalci]

There are many alternative window managers on Linux, it is not like Win or Mac. I think it doesnt matter much with which one the distribution comes with.

Here is the thing. PC is a tool for me. A tool to browse the web, watch youtube, design PCBs, run simulations, etc. I am annoyed when I need to babysit it. From my experience, when you start "tweaking" something, you break things and introduce bugs. It may work at the first glance but two weeks later you find out that something does not work***. It steals my precious free time.
For all my devices, I try to keep as default configuration as possible. This is the configuration that is likely most tested. I also like to use all software in English.

I dont think this can be called tweaking, as it is pretty well defined and the well known window managers are pretty stable, but I totally understand your point.

[eleguy]

Debian and now for 20 years almost. Very stable and still (some?) possibility to get somewhat "latest" packages if needed. I think it is not about distribution it is about your selections that make this or that heavy/light/or so. I have now used i3 tiling thingy with some "extensions" for very long and would not go back to resizing "float" windows (not talking os now) hazzle. I3 comes with multiple desktops but is not the most easy to start with. However still pretty much easier than awesome for example. Whatever you take (specially ubuntu / debian or derivant) don't install everything and specially not with all "recommends".

[YurkshireLad]

I installed Debian 12 at home a couple of weeks ago, for s/w development. I started out using XFCE but I switched to Cinnamon after a few days. So far it's all working well.

[SiliconWizard]

what I really need at the moment is a C well written and coherent tiling window manager.
I don't need any file-manager, desktop-manager, session manager.

Don't 'awesome' or 'i3' fit the bill?

[DiTBho]

what I really need at the moment is a C well written and coherent tiling window manager.
I don't need any file-manager, desktop-manager, session manager.

Don't 'awesome' or 'i3' fit the bill?

Unfortunately no.

[BradC]

what I really need at the moment is a C well written and coherent tiling window manager.
I don't need any file-manager, desktop-manager, session manager.

Have you tried Xmonad?

[DiTBho]

what I really need at the moment is a C well written and coherent tiling window manager.
I don't need any file-manager, desktop-manager, session manager.

Have you tried Xmonad?

yes, but it's written in Haskell, and I have serious problem supporting a Haskell compiler for { MIPS-I, MIPS-IV, MIPS32, HPPA2 }.

[eleguy]

what I really need at the moment is a C well written and coherent tiling window manager.
I don't need any file-manager, desktop-manager, session manager.

Don't 'awesome' or 'i3' fit the bill?

Unfortunately no.

I am interested to hear why not?

[DiTBho]

I am interested to hear why not?

Not C well written and not coherent.
To make it support what I need I have to hack it heavily.

[thephil]

I have been using Debian for both servers and desktop for decades and I'm very happy with it. I only had a very brief period of running Ubuntu on a new laptop because of a hardware support problem but returned to Debian immediately once that was sorted out. I have used several Desktop environments over the years (KDE, XFCE, Gnome) but have pretty much settled on i3 now.

I have a virtual Windows machine on my laptop for the odd cases when I really need it.

I even converted my in-laws to Debian+XFCE when they started having problems with Windows changing on them al the time and they are pretty happy with it for their needs (web surfing, email, writing stuff, managing their pictures and a game of solitaire every ow and then). The switch has made my life a lot easier as I can now easily maintain their computers remotely via ssh without them having to do anything beyond turning it on.

[Warhawk]

I have been using Debian for both servers and desktop for decades and I'm very happy with it. I only had a very brief period of running Ubuntu on a new laptop because of a hardware support problem but returned to Debian immediately once that was sorted out. I have used several Desktop environments over the years (KDE, XFCE, Gnome) but have pretty much settled on i3 now.

I have a virtual Windows machine on my laptop for the odd cases when I really need it.

I even converted my in-laws to Debian+XFCE when they started having problems with Windows changing on them al the time and they are pretty happy with it for their needs (web surfing, email, writing stuff, managing their pictures and a game of solitaire every ow and then). The switch has made my life a lot easier as I can now easily maintain their computers remotely via ssh without them having to do anything beyond turning it on.

Do your in-laws have a static IP address, or how do you solve this?
I too need to (and want to) babysit my father's PC.

[tridac]

Most sytems here are FreeBSD, far more lightweight and clean than current Linux, which I mainly dropped after the systemd debacle. Suse or Debian otherwise, but Suse always sems just that bit more polished and feature rich than even Debian, which used to be the stock install for years here...

[soldar]

I too need to (and want to) babysit my father's PC.

I maintain remotely a bunch of computers running Linux Mint and I use Anydesk. Years ago I used Teamviewer but they became very obnoxious demanding payment saying they detected professional use. i switched to Anydesk and I am very satisfied.

[thephil]

Do your in-laws have a static IP address, or how do you solve this?

No – they don't. I'm using a dynamic DNS service. There are plenty out there (dynDNS, No-IP, ...). As they are behind a NAT router, I also configured their router to forward different external ports to port 22 (ssh) on the respective computers so I can connect. E.g. 22222 -> 22 on computer 1 and 22223 -> 22 on computer 2.

[golden_labels]

In the past I had a similar situation with my mother’s laptop. I installed Ubuntu for her. She’s behind a non-configurable NAT with no static IP address.

While the setup is no longer in place, it had an SSH tunnel configured to connect to my computer (which has a full internet connection). This way I could access ports on her machine. That does require coöperation from both ends: I must enable the service, she must enable the laptop and click a button. But for the intended purpose of sporadic or emergency maintenance it was fine.

Another often overlooked option is running SSH as an onion service in the Tor network. The downside is having two layers of encryption and authentication: one from Tor, one from SSH. But for terminal sessions it’s not particularly painful. A small advantage is lower exposure, because addresses can’t be enumerated and are expensive to discover.

[ve7xen]

The 'easy' solution to the remote access issue is to set up Tailscale on the device. NAT traversal etc. is handled for you.

I tend to just use Chrome Remote Desktop for one-off support, though.

[mapleLC]

Just a PSA

GROK3 is pretty incredible at solving Linux issues. Really surprised at how detailed and tailored debugging help is to the flavor of linux.

I stood up a LXC container in Proxmox, within 4 hours I had a working Rundeck install, python, everything, and then GROK helping me produce scripts and workflows. It would have taken 2 days to get a hello world working judging by my past work in Linux, so the acceleration here is great.

I can workflow, schedule and automate anything Python can do now.

Oh, ask GROK to tighten down your security, worked for me.

[DiTBho]

FreeBSD with Linux binary compatibility? Anyone?
AMD64/x86-only?

Just asking ... 

[Whales]

I'm not surprised, GROK is probably trained on stackoverflow answers to your questions.  If you ask it about a problem less common then it will likely struggle to understand your true problems, and give similar-sounding solutions instead.

LLMs are interpolation machines.  They are great at giving answers very close to their training data, poor at answers further afield.

Oh, ask GROK to tighten down your security, worked for me.

Uh... how do you know it worked?  And didn't just get you to do a bunch of stuff that people claim works online?  Security is complicated, running some random commands without fully understanding their impacts typically doesn't help you much.

I take it that GROK was very confident in its answers?

[Nominal Animal]

FreeBSD with Linux binary compatibility? Anyone?

I think I played with it very briefly (as in for less than a day) just to see what FreeBSD feels like nowadays a few years ago, but not truly used it.

AMD64/x86-only?

No, the the handbook says x86, x86-64, and Aarch64 are supported.  The FreeBSD Wiki doesn't mention supported arches.

As you can get basically the same userspace tooling in FreeBSD as in Linux, I wouldn't bother, though –– except for closed-source binaries.  Just like Wine, I'd only use such compatibility layers to run closed-source stuff that cannot be properly ported.  You can see a list of tested applications and their status at the FreeBSD Wiki LinuxApps page.

If we compare to say Windows WSL2, my opinion stands: if you want to do development in Linux, better use either native or virtualized real Linux environment (I recommend Debian and Debian derivatives like Mint), than deal with the corner cases where the compatibility layers aren't perfect.  For just running stuff, these compat layers are fine, as long as one remembers that if something bugs out, it is most likely the compatibility layer.  And my opinion is definitely symmetric on this: I wouldn't want to try developing Windows code in Wine, either –– well, maybe for the simplest things, but definitely would need to test on proper Windows versions, perhaps in virtual machines.  Exact same applies to Linuxulator and Wine, IMO.

FreeBSD does support virtualization just fine (even on Aarch64), as long as the hardware supports it.

For non-native emulation, I do warmly recommend QEMU.  It isn't perfect either, but it is darn good.  For example, you could use QEMU to run x86/x86-64 binaries on Aarch64 in an emulated environment, for example.

[mapleLC]

I'm not surprised, GROK is probably trained on stackoverflow answers to your questions.  If you ask it about a problem less common then it will likely struggle to understand your true problems, and give similar-sounding solutions instead.

LLMs are interpolation machines.  They are great at giving answers very close to their training data, poor at answers further afield.

Well treaded areas of the masses that an individual is not skilled in is an ideal use case for an AI like this, and it worked. I had been avoiding most use cases with AI because I felt it was still hype. 

I think the inflection point is here where a year ago it was not close to this competent. My son tried to sell me on ChatGPT a while back and I thought it was mindless. This is close to chatting with an expert now.

Oh, ask GROK to tighten down your security, worked for me.

Uh... how do you know it worked?  And didn't just get you to do a bunch of stuff that people claim works online?  Security is complicated, running some random commands without fully understanding their impacts typically doesn't help you much.

I take it that GROK was very confident in its answers?

I was simplistic in that comment. I asked for a few specific things such as helping make sure the main admin account had no connection to the app installed in the container. I asked it specifically for a routine to check, and it seemed competent to me. I've done stuff like this before, it just seemed efficient to get there. 10 x 10 min searches instead of one 20 min instruction set and a couple of follow up questions. It reminded me of watching a YouTube vid when it has the exact same problem you have and you get that 'tailor made' illusion.