What did yall end up settling on?
I am trying to set up like 50 Surface Pro 5s to give away so I wanted something that felt as close to Windows/Mac as possible while still allowing me to enable all the Surface Pro features.
Settled on ZorinOS as of now. (Actually, I did some experiments and even got the CAC reader working and CAC login working on it in the event that they want to use them in a student environment.)
Have you gotten the touch screen to work perfectly? I have tried all sorts of stuff, but I just cannot get it work well enough for drawing, even with the surface pro kernel.
Haven’t tried drawing on it ever… it does work well enough to use for tapping buttons and such, but if you installed the Surface Pro kernel you’ve done everything I’ve done.
Ah… Figured as much, thanks for the answer. I got the pressure to work, yeah, but it was greatly reduced, and too laggy to actually use with the pen. I am now stuck with Windows 10, as I cannot get enough functionality from Linux distros, and there is no way I will deal with the dumpster fire Windows 11 is. Unfortunately, there are no other proper, portable computer + display good enough to draw -combinations on the market than SPs, still. At least ones I could afford…
OpenSuse Tumbleweed for my gaming PC. Fedora KDE for everything else (laptops, mom’s desktop).
Distros are tools for a job. I stick with the ones that have the most helpful communities and/or the best documentation. I avoid communities that tell you off for asking help or documentation that is obtuse.
Still successfully troubleshooting stuff through 10 year old Ubuntu forum threads. Meanwhile learning the most through the FreeBSD handbook and it’s not even Linux. lol
I settled on Solus but I broke the laptop itself somehow. Now I’m back to using NixOS with my new thinkpad with trackpoint disabled…
I’ve run most non KDE distros now I just install Debian or Ubuntu depending on the computer
Fedora - arch - nixos - arch - Debian - arch - debian
No one?? Really?
72nd* time!
TIL it’s actually 72st
Haha, I was about to be mad I was wrong somehow
I was like this before I tried regular Arch. I probably would’ve settled on NixOS if I had tried that first. I feel like Linux Mint could be the end of the line because it just works on a lot of old machines & does so quickly.
I’ve only ever used Debian my entire life
Ubuntu, Manjaro, Endeavour.
Played a bit with others before I settled, but XFCE feels like home and not having to do a system update that breaks everything every year has been great.
I absolutely love the ecosystem that’s sprung around Arch over the years.
And ofc I wish the fans of the various Arch-based distros had a less antagonistic approach to each other. 🙄 I mean Arch’s main goal is to be flexible and having a diverse family of derived distros downstream is the ultimate confirmation of that goal.
It’s also very healthy for any distro to have a big “family tree” because the upstream benefits from contributions from a larger community that may not have vibed with the parent distro otherwise.
Linux mint and often LMDE.
is funny, I always end up back at mint.
It just good, it just works yet let’s me customize.
I started on pop!_os and now 6 years later im on… pop!_os
Yeah, I didn’t really do any distro hopping :p. Though I’ve tried a bunch of distros in VMs
Same with endeavour lol. VM test drives before “buying” ol’ reliable is the way to go ;)
Although I do use SteamOS on my deck, if that counts as a hop.
A side hop if anything :3 I wouldn’t count secondary devices as distro hopping, especially something like the steamdeck, but I suppose someone might
Speaking of steamdecks tho, I’ve thought about picking one up. I just wish I travelled more to actually be able to justify the price lol. It’s a cool piece of kit
Half my time on my deck is at home tbf. I use it for gaming from the couch/bed mostly and streaming my heavier games from my desktop. Quite nice that way imo!
I tend to use macOS on the desktop (I know, booo) so I’ve landed on Alpine Linux for just about everything else.
I love that you can be on the bleeding edge but also not have tons of baggage everywhere. The downside is of course a lot of times I find myself doing things from scratch.
I started with Mint. My next and last stop was Alpine. I started trying to host my own website on a Raspberry Pi and ended up switching my laptop over to Alpine so that I could consistently learn on one operating system
I also found a side hobby in making POSIX portable scripts which goes nicely with self-hosting. It’s great having a lean and customized desktop just for myself even if it took a long time to learn how to make it all work
Yes! I’ve found myself doing this both personally and professionally. At work we’re using Docker and Kubernetes but the old way of thinking is assuming everything is Debian or Ubuntu so a lot of Bash scripts just break on Alpine-based containers.
But even for those scripts we execute primarily on macOS, I’ve taken the liberty of making them POSIX compliant because you never know who’s using Bash, zsh, sh or what have you.
I do like the challenge of POSIX scripts.
I’ve remade a handful of GNU extensions as POSIX scripts/functions. I also just enjoy trying to be as minimal as possible and building my own tools. It helps me understand how operating systems in the process too
Most of my work is on codeberg
It can be a challenge though since all searches default to bash/GNU extensions
The seventy-tooth
I can’t tell whether this is hilarious or I’m exhausted, because I’m crying from laughter
ubuntu > fedora > manjaro > endeavor > arch > fedora > arch > nixos.
started in 2015 with ubuntu, started distrohopping in 2019 when i upgraded from laptop to desktop, but ended with nixos 3 years ago
What are the advantages of nixOS? I have a Ubuntu Server but plan to run Fedora KDE on my desktop when I build it.
as t4v0 said, the reprdoucable build system
i have a desktop, a trash laptop for work (construction) and a not as trash one for personal use. also a server
but all managed with one config, where with just one command i can get a program on all my devices, and i know i get a working system out of it, bcs it just refuses to build if just one component fails. then i tweak it until it builds properly, and never have a broken OS.
also, while still heavily underused, the nature of flakes and the ability to pull from non-github repos makes it in theory very decentralized. in theory. in praxis, microsoft is our package vendor :P
Not the same dude, but I assume the Nix reproducible declarative build and deployment system. It’s what interested me the most as a former Arch user, though the poor documentation threw me off at the time. Don’t know if it improved or not.
