Which Linux distribution do you prefer?

[+Good Bot, Bad Bot Subscriber¹]

On 04/12/2025 at 01:01, Mindovermaster said:

RPMs are fine, but it's Dependencies when it becomes an issue.

Oh so you hasn't used RPMs in a long time. LOL RPMs were known for dependency issues back in the day. 

[bastones]

I use macOS at home/work, but I would use Debian on any non-Apple desktop hardware. Wonderful distribution.

For servers, I prefer to use Ubuntu Server. 

[satukoro]

On 04/11/2025 at 23:56, gargantua said:

I think that is the typical arc of a Linux user. You start off with the stable, smooth, and polished because you're a beginner. Then you go all out with your custom Arch or Gentoo configuration that is barely recognizable from the existing Desktop Environment or Window Manager that it spawned from. Then, after years of things breaking from all of that extra control, you grow tired. Back to stable, smooth, polished and, most conveniently, maintained by someone else  I'm a Debian user, myself. I think it's a good middle ground.

 

If mint/cinnamon supported wayland, i probably never would have left. Unfortunately i have 3 different resolution / refresh rate monitors that with different dpi scaling and cinnamon just doesnt (or at least didnt a year or two ago whenever i switched) support that. But until then arch with kde has been rock solid for me.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 04/12/2025 at 12:51, satukoro said:

If mint/cinnamon supported wayland, i probably never would have left. Unfortunately i have 3 different resolution / refresh rate monitors that with different dpi scaling and cinnamon just doesnt (or at least didnt a year or two ago whenever i switched) support that. But until then arch with kde has been rock solid for me.

Then use KDE, bud! IMO, Cinnamon, based of GNOME, is rather sluggish.

[satukoro]

On 04/12/2025 at 18:34, Mindovermaster said:

Then use KDE, bud! IMO, Cinnamon, based of GNOME, is rather sluggish.

I do love KDE – cinnamon is just so polished and great for new linux users. For example, i would feel comfortable putting mint on my moms laptop and be confident she could use it no problem.

One thing I'd love to see in KDE that i should really submit a feature request for would be the ability to mirror panels to other monitors rather than having to set up a separate application panel and dock for each monitor.

[RaidenX]

On 05/12/2025 at 05:59, satukoro said:

I do love KDE – cinnamon is just so polished and great for new linux users. For example, i would feel comfortable putting mint on my moms laptop and be confident she could use it no problem.

One thing I'd love to see in KDE that i should really submit a feature request for would be the ability to mirror panels to other monitors rather than having to set up a separate application panel and dock for each monitor.

Isn't that what the Clone Panel button does in the panel configuration?

[satukoro]

On 05/12/2025 at 10:23, RaidenX said:

Isn't that what the Clone Panel button does in the panel configuration?

no way, is it that easy? ill give it a shot tonight when im home.

[threesixtyflip]

Keep in mind it doesnt update the clones if you change something on the main panel, as I found out 😂

[satukoro]

On 06/12/2025 at 06:17, Stocker said:

Keep in mind it doesnt update the clones if you change something on the main panel, as I found out 😂

Oh, i'd love to see an option to just mirror x panel between monitors y and z

[threesixtyflip]

On 07/12/2025 at 01:14, satukoro said:

Oh, i'd love to see an option to just mirror x panel between monitors y and z

Apparently its been discussed (and rejected) for a while due to technical reasons lol

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=446654

Makes me sad lol

[Nick H. Supervisor]

There's nothing on the surface that has changed, but I got caught up hosting a Warhammer - Blood Bowl session in the shop and I decided to take the leap over to Fedora. As mentioned somewhere else, there is a small learning curve on the terminal commands, but I've managed to get most of my stuff just the way it was before:

The next few days will be fun! And if I can get Steam working I'll be almost set to remove Windows entirely!

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 08/12/2025 at 15:00, Nick H. said:

The next few days will be fun! And if I can get Steam working I'll be almost set to remove Windows entirely!

That's a good boy! 😛 

[Nick H. Supervisor]

On 08/12/2025 at 23:44, Mindovermaster said:

That's a good boy! 😛 

There's no emoticon to show my disdain for such a comment.

I'll give it a go. Worst-case scenario is I try it, it doesn't work, and I spend an hour putting the system that I know back together.

But it's a small adventure, I'm looking forward to it!

[RaidenX]

On 08/12/2025 at 13:00, Nick H. said:

There's nothing on the surface that has changed, but I got caught up hosting a Warhammer - Blood Bowl session in the shop and I decided to take the leap over to Fedora. As mentioned somewhere else, there is a small learning curve on the terminal commands, but I've managed to get most of my stuff just the way it was before:

The next few days will be fun! And if I can get Steam working I'll be almost set to remove Windows entirely!

Looks clean. I really like the font for the time and dates. What font is it?

[Nick H. Supervisor]

On 09/12/2025 at 01:33, RaidenX said:

Looks clean. I really like the font for the time and dates. What font is it?

https://www.dafont.com/nasalization.font - Top bar font

https://www.dafont.com/decaydence.font - Widget font on the desktop

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

On 08/12/2025 at 21:00, Nick H. said:

The next few days will be fun! And if I can get Steam working I'll be almost set to remove Windows entirely!

Steam is one of the easiest things to setup on Fedora I found, so hopefully you shouldn't have too many issues! I installed it from Flathub on Fedora Silverblue and it just worked.

I forget what the option is called off the top of my head, however you can go in to options on Steam and enable the installation of untested games on Linux. This will show all of your library, regardless of if the game is considered compatible with Linux or not. The shader pre-caching for some games seems to take absolutely forever, however most untested games work perfectly fine in my experience.

My goal is to hopefully go full time with Fedora at some point too. It's mainly Photoshop that's holding me back, despite trying I just can't get along with GIMP. Current versions of Affinity Photo are supposed to work quite well via Wine, so I might see if I can get to grips with that better than GIMP.

[Mindovermaster Global Moderator]

On 09/12/2025 at 04:10, InsaneNutter said:

I forget what the option is called off the top of my head, however you can go in to options on Steam and enable the installation of untested games on Linux. This will show all of your library, regardless of if the game is considered compatible with Linux or not.

Think that's under Platform Preferences. Could be wrong, though..

[Nick H. Supervisor]

On 09/12/2025 at 10:10, InsaneNutter said:

Steam is one of the easiest things to setup on Fedora I found, so hopefully you shouldn't have too many issues! I installed it from Flathub on Fedora Silverblue and it just worked.

Setting Steam up hasn't been the issue. The issue is that my games are located on an ExFAT external drive, and I can't get Steam to recognise the drive. I go to add the drive, it finds the path, but then nothing happens...

I might have to reformat the drive to a different filesystem and download everything again. 1TB of data...urgh.

I think Linux plays nice with NTFS these days, right?

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

On 09/12/2025 at 11:25, Nick H. said:

Setting Steam up hasn't been the issue. The issue is that my games are located on an ExFAT external drive, and I can't get Steam to recognise the drive. I go to add the drive, it finds the path, but then nothing happens...

I might have to reformat the drive to a different filesystem and download everything again. 1TB of data...urgh.

I think Linux plays nice with NTFS these days, right?

If you are using Steam via a Flatpak it won't have permission to access the external drive by default, that could be the issue as Fedora should support ExFAT out the box.

Try running: flatpak override --user --filesystem=/path/to/external/steam/library com.valvesoftware.Steam

I've personally had no issues with NTFS formatted drives though, although I've not attempted to use one with Steam.

[satukoro]

On 09/12/2025 at 06:25, Nick H. said:

Setting Steam up hasn't been the issue. The issue is that my games are located on an ExFAT external drive, and I can't get Steam to recognise the drive. I go to add the drive, it finds the path, but then nothing happens...

I might have to reformat the drive to a different filesystem and download everything again. 1TB of data...urgh.

I think Linux plays nice with NTFS these days, right?

Save yourself the pain and reformat your games drive to ext4. I had really bad performance trying to use an ntfs drive for my games, but that was over a year ago and i remember seeing some sort of ntfs performance improvement article on phoronix recently so maybe your results may vary.

[Nick H. Supervisor]

On 09/12/2025 at 13:52, satukoro said:

Save yourself the pain and reformat your games drive to ext4. I had really bad performance trying to use an ntfs drive for my games, but that was over a year ago and i remember seeing some sort of ntfs performance improvement article on phoronix recently so maybe your results may vary.

Screw it. If I backup the other data there and reformat it I can be up and running with a couple of games by this evening...

EDIT: Actually, how does ext4 play with Windows? I'll go and take a look...

[satukoro]

On 09/12/2025 at 09:18, Nick H. said:

Screw it. If I backup the other data there and reformat it I can be up and running with a couple of games by this evening...

EDIT: Actually, how does ext4 play with Windows? I'll go and take a look...

A quick google search yields this:

"Windows cannot natively read or write to ext4 file systems, but you can access them using a few methods. The most recommended method is to use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) to mount the drive, which allows for both reading and writing. Alternatively, you can use third-party drivers like Ext4Fsd for driver-level access or Linux Reader for read-only access."

It looks like its at least possible these days

[zivan56]

Kubuntu is my go-to and has been for over a decade. Less resource intensive than regular Ubuntu but not as plain as Xubuntu.

[+Eternal Tempest MVC]

Having a change of heart - OpenSuse Tumbleweed - https://get.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/

I'm absolutely loving it, but just started using it so I can't speak to long term stability / potential issues, since I haven't been using it that long.

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

Being fed up with the current state of Windows 11, I've installed CachyOS on my Laptop. No dual-boot, either.

So far I have no major complaints. The system runs fast, uses a lot fewer resources than Windows 11, and the games I've tried thus far also work out of the box.  

At this moment I see no reason to go back to Windows.

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