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! 😊
I just use Debian
Debian on server, arch of some kind for personal use
this is the way
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
Server: debian
Desktop: mint
Laptop: pop-os
Nanopi for travel Jellyfin: Debian.
1 Fedora (laptop)
1 bazzite (old gaming desktop)
N+1 Debian on everything else than can
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.
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.
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.
Yes, because nixos and distributed git-based dotfiles, would be so much work to have a second setup for no real gain, I do investigate other distros regularly though
My main server runs Ubuntu Server (I’m thinking about switching it to Debian), and my laptop and desktop both run Arch Linux. Generally, I pick whatever I think is best for the given usecase — things like stability, package availability, documentation, security, etc. are considered.
Nah. Debian for servers, Fedora for desktops and Arch for funtimes.
Slackware on desktop, laptop and mini PC, Debian on anything smaller
Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it’s perfect for everything.
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.
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.
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
Self-hosting on Windows Server is a pain I don’t need in my life.
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 do use freebsd :) and occasionally win7/10…
usage goes like freebsd >>> linux > m$win
