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! 😊
Debian on server, arch of some kind for personal use
this is the way
Server: debian
Desktop: mint
Laptop: pop-os
Nanopi for travel Jellyfin: Debian.
arch on my two laptops, and desktop. proxmox on my server as the hypervisor, and debian on the vm/lxc. my routers are running openwrt.
one of my laptops i use for testing, and i do switch distro’s… i’ve tried alpine, gentoo and i’d like to try openbsd. but arch is comfy
I use NixOS on everything ! This way, I can re-use parts of my configuration as a base, and customise only the few things that need to change from one machine to the other.
The only exception is my Steam Deck. I trust Valve on that one, and my usage of it is so different from other computers as to make 95% of my config entirely irrelevant anyway.
Yes. Mint. Way enough, and I haven’t figured out why I should like disto hop yet.
I was like you for many years. From Windows to Mint and never changed. Now I got a second hand laptop from a couple of years ago and put ublue Aurora on it. I REALLY like the experience!
I use Arch (btw) on my desktops and laptops.
On my servers I’m halfway through replacing Debian with openSUSE.
My desktop and servers have different use cases and I interact with them in different ways, so there’s little confusion for me.
I feel the same way. I use fedora on my laptops and desktops and debian on my servers. Generally my servers do not have or need a gui so debian makes it easy to install without. I tried fedora server once and i just was not happy with it.
1 Fedora (laptop)
1 bazzite (old gaming desktop)
N+1 Debian on everything else than can
I just use Debian
Fedora just works for me in every case except NAS where I have TrueNAS, so Fedora it is and I installed it even to couple of people and they also like it.
Debian always. Stablility is good, good is stability. But i am open to trying fedora in the near future
For me, I am running EndeavourOS on my laptop (for its rolling release updates and its customisability) and Debian on my homeserver (for its stability). I have also set up a secondary laptop with Linux Mint that is now being used by somebody else for its ease of use :)
yes, it’s Arch all the way for me. it’s flexible in the way that I can configure it for any system I need, and I usually know what I want from it.
my installations on my desktop and laptop look fairly similar, but my server and test computers can look different depending on the hardware specifications they have.
plus, with BTRFS snapshots, if anything breaks I can simply roll back to a previous version of the system.
Nah. Debian for servers, Fedora for desktops and Arch for funtimes.
Slackware on desktop, laptop and mini PC, Debian on anything smaller
I used to have Ubuntu everywhere, then changed to Debian for servers. Now that I’m using bazzite for my gaming rig, I really liked the idea and went to fedora silver blue on my work laptop. I’m the near future I want to re do my home lab, bit not sure yet what, unfortunately to many open questions concerning storage left.
