What Linux Distro Do I Use?

Thu Jul 06, 2023

“What Linux distribution should I use?” is a topic that is very frequently covered, and as much as I want to fall into that creative trap, I’m not going to. Instead I’m going to discuss a few of the distros that I use the most in my daily life to give you a real-world perspective on what works and what doesn’t, and maybe help inform you to make a decision of what distro to run. Or maybe not, sometimes it’s just fun reading about people using Linux!

Desktop

Let’s start with a tricky one: what distro do I use on my desktops? If you know me, then you know I like to distro-hop fairly frequently just to kinda get a feel for what’s going on in the Linux ecosystem. However, I do tend to fallback on Linux Mint the most. It scratches the itch of having a slow-moving base system but also provides more up-to-date packages for frequently used apps like Firefox, and their implementation of the Cinnamon desktop really is quite nice. Also, a major plus is it also gets a lot of third-party software and community support simply by being based on Ubuntu, and the importance of this cannot be overstated. Want to run a weird app? It’s got an Ubuntu download. Have a weird issue? The community’s likely got a fix for you. Heck you can even use AMD’s proprietary drivers on Mint, which are notorious being a pain in the ass to install, so long as you upgrade to the Ubuntu HWE kernel.

Full stop, if you’re looking for a distro to try out and you haven’t yet, or if you’re just a new user switching to Linux for the first time, I’d highly recommend Linux Mint. It really is a solid distro with a stable base (based on Ubuntu LTS), important apps like Firefox get updates instead of being an ESR release, it provides fantastic GUI tools like Driver Manager and Update Manager for those who don’t want to use a terminal, and you don’t have to worry about snaps or flatpaks if you don’t want to.

That said, currently I’m running Manjaro on my gaming PC/workstation and both of my laptops. The reasoning for this was, frankly, I was getting bored of Linux Mint, and I was seeing too many small-but-weird things cropping up, so I decided to mix things up. It had been awhile since I used Manjaro, so I gave it a try… and boy after installing it on my Galago Pro was I happy! My major gripe of the past - that I was having trouble mounting Samba shares for some inexplicable reason - was gone, and once I touched up my setup shell script for some new software additions (notably Pulsar) I was able to pretty much get going within like an hour. I don’t know if this will be my mainstay, but I am pretty happy with it so far, and I can swap between desktop environments (yes I’m one of those weirdos that has like 100 DEs installed on my systems) freely without weird quirks popping up, like GNOME not going to sleep properly or display scaling acting inconsistently in KDE.

Server

In a way, my server usage is simpler… but also more complex? As a baseline, everything in my homelab runs on Debian stable, and this is for a few reasons:

  1. I like the ~2 years update cadence that Debian stable releases give me, and having the extra third year to wait while supporting software like Puppet catches up is amazing.
  2. In my experience the Debian community has been quick with pushing security patches, which is important to me on a server.
  3. Things just generally don’t change in between major releases, or when it does it doesn’t seem to be as game-breaking as other distros can be.
  4. Most importantly, I started learning Linux server administration on Ubuntu Server (13.10 beta, but that’s a story for another time), and over the years I’ve just felt most comfortable on Debian systems.

The tl;dr is just that I love Debian and Debian loves me. But I do also have a couple other OSes running in my homelab, those being AlmaLinux/Rocky Linux, and FreeBSD. I always liked playing with CentOS and having a system that could run for several years without needing a major upgrade, and when CloudLinux got their replacement (AlmaLinux) out a few months later I hopped on that bandwagon and tried it out. Surprisingly everything just worked as expected, and I’ve had several servers running it since then. I’ve recently started doodling around with Rocky Linux now that RHEL 9 is out, but of course the RHEL-clones are again going through turmoil with Red Hat closing their source code, I feel like it’s best to move off of a product that the upstream wants to kill off. It sucks, it was a great community that formed around it, but it is what it is. Fuck IBM.

FreeBSD only runs my internal mail relays and I think something else? I really like FreeBSD for what it offers - it satisfies the curmudgeon-side of me that hates a lot of SystemD’s parts - but a lot of the tooling that I use on a daily basis either for work or video editing either requires or just runs on Linux. So there isn’t a whole lot of want on my end to fully switch over to FreeBSD, especially since I’d lose access to Docker.

NAS

This is related to my homelab but I felt deserved its own section since it’s its own rabbit hole of “what works best for X?” I’m actually running both of the popular DIY NAS operating systems in my lab - unRAID and TrueNAS. My TrueNAS system is actually an old FreeNAS system I built back in the day using five 3TB WD Red drives, is currently housing 6TB Seagate Ironwolf drives, and is undergoing a transition to 8TB drives to squeeze a little more space out of it. I use this primarily as my “personal” NAS, where I store my TV shows, movies, music, and personal documents, and I also have a RAIDz mirror of two 1TB SSDs hosting my virtual machine disks. This thing has served me very well for about seven years now, and has undergone numerous hardware upgrades, drive failures and subsequent replacements, and OS/ZFS updates. It really is a solid product.

The unRAID system I built to be my “Bit Goblin” NAS, which I use strictly for my Bit Goblin video file share and any files pertaining to the channel. This was built with unRAID for a couple reasons: I really wanted the ability to build up the array with new drives over time as I could afford them (I just bought a house and my budget was tight), and, like a lot of my projects, I just wanted to play around with something new. I didn’t initially (and still don’t) need the extra performance a proper ZFS array would grant me over unRAID’s setup that only really nets you one drive’s worth of performance at a time, so I prioritized the expansion abilities provided by unRAID. It sucks that it costs money, but hey, good software doesn’t grow on trees, and so far I’ve been pretty happy with it.

I will mention that I also have a future plan to convert my “Bit Goblin” NAS into an archive/backup server and create a separate NAS with TrueNAS and a better caching setup when the time comes that I need extra performance. Which may come when I move to editing 4K video, or if I am able to hire a couple of video editors at some point, but again this is a potential plan for the future and nothing is set in stone yet. Who knows if I’ll even get to that point!

That’s All Folks!

To summarize: I generally use Linux Mint on my PCs though Manjaro might take over the daily driver role soon, and I primarily use Debian in my homelab alongside a smattering of FreeBSD and RHEL-clones that might be getting phased out soon. Simple enough, right?

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