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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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.
I would use Debian for servers, except that the version of Podman (at least on Debian 12) was old enough that it couldn’t do quadlets. So I went with Fedora.
Servers are debian, desktop debian. Why swap when you found the best already? 😁
I guess technically steam deck is not on debian, but I didn’t choose it so it doesn’t really count.
Yep. Debian. I like
apt, and I like shit that just…works. I’m very much a form after function kind of person. Plus, Debian was the first Linux distro I became most familiar with at a young age. So what if a bunch of packages are on “old” versions. They work. The kernel works. KDE Plasma works. I can do everything I want to do without having to constantly be on the bleeding edge. If you prefer newer things, that’s great. I prefer older, more proven things. That’s also why I drive Toyota cars and old Honda motorcycles.My Proxmox cluster runs…uh…Proxmox, which is based on Debian. NAS runs OMV which also runs on top of Debian. Laptops all run Linux Mint Debian Edition 7, and my 5800X3D/7900XTX gaming PC runs LMDE6 (will be upgrading to 7 soon). The only non-Debian machines in my house are my wife’s iMac and Macbook Pro, and the Home Assistant mini PC.
That’s the same philosophy I’ve applied for a long time. Recently, I found out that gaming is an exception to the rule, though. While older versions are just fine for the most part, there are edge cases where that no longer applies. I also found out that I care about one of them. Until you hit that brick wall, there’s no reason to switch. Just keep on using Debian for everything.
Took me a while to realise that I was spending way too much time figuring out workarounds instead of actually gaming. I ended up using Bazzite in my gaming rig because it works so well for that purpose.
I’ve yet to run into major issues with gaming. But I’m curious what issue you ran into that caused the switch to Bazzite? I actually tried Bazzite briefly on my latest laptop acquisition (HP Spectre x360) before going with LMDE 7; I didn’t like the immutable aspect. I’m a tinkerer at heart and can’t handle not being able to get under the hood, so to speak.
It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.
All the other games were just fine though. If you don’t stumble upon one of these edge cases, there’s no reason to switch.
Hmmm.
Under LMDE7, the HP Spectre does great with the games I’ve thrown at it so far (BeamNG.Drive, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Universe Simulator, Minecraft, etc), but despite exceeding the minimum specs, it really struggled with running anything in RPCS3. Stuttering, frame drops, graphics simply not loading, etc… I ended up writing off RPCS3 in general as “too heavy for a laptop” and tasked my desktop gaming PC as the dedicated PS3 emulator - works great.
Sounds like I might have to give Bazzite a shot again on the HP. I use that laptop for a lot of things, including diagnostics software for my cars, but I also have a perfectly-capable AMD Thinkpad T14 G1 hanging around that needs a purpose, too.
It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.
What was the actual issue you ran into though? I didn’t see it in your post. I believe you, but my curiosity is piqued.
Yeah, that post was getting way too long, so I made some cuts here and there. The issue was in the way SE2 detects hardware… or more like doesn’t detect my GPU at all, throws an error about it and refuses to start. Under Bazzite it starts the game first 🎉, then complains that my hardware might not be good enough to run this game 🤯, but the beautiful graphics say otherwise. It’s still in early access, so I guess this kind of strange behavior will be ironed out sooner or later.
I got tired of researching this issue in Debian, so once I got it up and running in Bazzite, I stopped reading about it. Honestly, I have no idea what’s the key difference here. Is it the driver version, Proton-GE or something else? Who knows.
Anyway, I would recommend trying Bazzite. It has some pre-configured tricks that seem to handle weird cases like this.
Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it’s perfect for everything.
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.
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.
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.
I love how this post doesn’t even pretend that anyone may use anything but Linux. Classic Lemmy.
Whoa, that’s completely untrue buddy.
Some people here use BSD-based systems.
I don’t see anyone here saying “actually I use BSD” so it seems to have been a safe assumption
i do use freebsd :) and occasionally win7/10…
usage goes like freebsd >>> linux > m$win
Alright, windows users, do you run the same version of windows on all your devices? Yes? Oh how surprising.
OoOOoOOOooooo sassy boy, over here.
I’ve converted everything to NixOS (Desktop, laptop, nas and 3d printer, rpi with home assistant) only my router is still pfSense (and thus BSD). It just makes configuration and updating so much easier from one central configuration. And I don’t have to remember what and how I installed something. It’s just there in my flake.
I haven’t looked at Nix in detail but you got me interested for 3d printers in particular, already have my klipper config in git if an SD card fails on me, going to have to look at doing that for the os too.
I love it for using klipper. But when I started doing it the klipper pkgs did give me some troubles. You can work around them, but know you might find some issues on the way. Maybe it’s better now, I haven’t really updated that part of my config much recently.
Do know that not all arm devices are equally supported. rpi 3 and 4 are, the rest is community based (see: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM). Personally I run klipper on a x86_64 thin client for this reason and because raspberry pi’s were scarce and expensive back then.
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).
Arch on user PCs and Debian on anything else. This is with the exception that our big server is on Proxmox and the NAS (as well as off-site backup) are on unRaid.
I’m kinda with you, with a slight change: raspberrys that can’t run Arch Linux on Arm run Raspberry Pi OS, so, almost Debian.
Everything else: Arch.
(Oh… and pfSense on FreeBSD… but let’s not muddy the water)
Oh, good call out. I’m also running OPNsense which is a BSD system.
I do, but it’s more out of laziness than anything else. I hate having to remember sixteen different ways of doing things, so I tend to configure all my stuff as identical as reasonably possible. Is this the best way of doing things? Probably not. But it keeps my blood pressure down.
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.
yes. Everything is Fedora Silverblue, except servers they are ubuntu on proxmox.
My hobby is gaming, linux is just a means to do that hobby, not a hobby itself.
Your comment intrigues me… I need to switch, but I’m like you…gaming is my hobby, not OSes. You make it sound like it’s plug and play as far as gaming goes?
Debian on my servers. No drama, it just works.
Fedora on my laptop and desktop. Still solid, but quicker updates.
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.)
Server: debian
Desktop: mint
Laptop: pop-os
Nanopi for travel Jellyfin: Debian.
No, and that’s the beauty of Linux.
Desktop gaming PC: Fedora KDE (might try Bazzite if I stop dual booting Windows, but I already got Nvidia set up and that’s the hard part)
Old laptop: Zorin OS
Old as dirt laptop: antiX
Wife’s Surface: Pop!_OS 22.04. Maybe change it eventually to something lighter.
I will likely go with Ubuntu Server or Debian when I set up my home server. Ubuntu seems like it has better Docker support.
I used to use a variety. I’d use Arch on my desktop/gaming machine, Fedora on my laptop, and Debian on my server. But I got the NixOS bug a few years back and now I use that everywhere. It’s great to have every change and configuration documented and available for easy review or modification, and built in generation rollbacks are a lifesaver.
Thinking of building an HTPC from some spare parts, and I think that’ll be the machine to buck the trend. Bazzite will be everything I need out of the box for that purpose without any effort for maintenance. It’s not getting customized or doing anything but games and media
