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! 😊

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[–] 46 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

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.

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    [–] 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 24 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it's perfect for everything.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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!

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    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.

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    [–] 20 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    I love how this post doesn't even pretend that anyone may use anything but Linux. Classic Lemmy.

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    [–] 15 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

    I've converted everything to NixOS (Desktop, laptop, nas and 3d printer, rpi with home assistant) only my router is still pfSense (and thus BSD). It just makes configuration and updating so much easier from one central configuration. And I don't have to remember what and how I installed something. It's just there in my flake.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I haven't looked at Nix in detail but you got me interested for 3d printers in particular, already have my klipper config in git if an SD card fails on me, going to have to look at doing that for the os too.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    I love it for using klipper. But when I started doing it the klipper pkgs did give me some troubles. You can work around them, but know you might find some issues on the way. Maybe it's better now, I haven't really updated that part of my config much recently.

    Do know that not all arm devices are equally supported. rpi 3 and 4 are, the rest is community based (see: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM). Personally I run klipper on a x86_64 thin client for this reason and because raspberry pi's were scarce and expensive back then.

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    [+] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)
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    [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    The machines I use regularly are all some form of ArchLinux (currently mostly CachyOS). Machines I use rarely I stick to LTS distros with few updates. Machines I don't maintain myself I try to stick to immutable distros that just update themselves every once in a while (less chance of breakage).

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago

    I do, but it's more out of laziness than anything else. I hate having to remember sixteen different ways of doing things, so I tend to configure all my stuff as identical as reasonably possible. Is this the best way of doing things? Probably not. But it keeps my blood pressure down.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago

    Fedora KDE for anything I need a GUI for, Debian for anything headless.

    I've used damn near everything else in 30 years of Linux, but I'm pretty sure my tombstone will run Debian.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I use arch btw (on everything).

    So yes ... my laptop, my home server and even my wife's laptop.

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    [–] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yes, Debian. It's called the universal operating system for a reason.

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    [–] 8 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    yes. Everything is Fedora Silverblue, except servers they are ubuntu on proxmox.

    My hobby is gaming, linux is just a means to do that hobby, not a hobby itself.

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    [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    Debian on my servers. No drama, it just works.

    Fedora on my laptop and desktop. Still solid, but quicker updates.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    Oooh, look at mr. Rich guy here with multiple devices.

    /s.... (not really, cries in only computer being a dying laptop from 2011 with no way to get even just another dying 2011 laptop when this one dies.)

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago*

    Server: debian

    Desktop: mint

    Laptop: pop-os

    Nanopi for travel Jellyfin: Debian.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Debian on server, arch of some kind for personal use

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    [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Laptop arch

    Web servers Debian or fedora.

    Looking into slackware for self hosting

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    NixOS home server, gaming PC will soon move to Bazzite from Windows 10 (whenever I'm done working on my home server). I'm trying Bazzite for that machine because I use it more like a game console hooked up to the TV and don't need the same level of tweaking and customization.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    I used to use a variety. I’d use Arch on my desktop/gaming machine, Fedora on my laptop, and Debian on my server. But I got the NixOS bug a few years back and now I use that everywhere. It’s great to have every change and configuration documented and available for easy review or modification, and built in generation rollbacks are a lifesaver.

    Thinking of building an HTPC from some spare parts, and I think that’ll be the machine to buck the trend. Bazzite will be everything I need out of the box for that purpose without any effort for maintenance. It’s not getting customized or doing anything but games and media

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    No, and that's the beauty of Linux.

    Desktop gaming PC: Fedora KDE (might try Bazzite if I stop dual booting Windows, but I already got Nvidia set up and that's the hard part)

    Old laptop: Zorin OS

    Old as dirt laptop: antiX

    Wife's Surface: Pop!_OS 22.04. Maybe change it eventually to something lighter.

    I will likely go with Ubuntu Server or Debian when I set up my home server. Ubuntu seems like it has better Docker support.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    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 :)

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    ZorinOS for the desktop and PopOS on the laptop which also serves as a Plex server.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Debian always. Stablility is good, good is stability. But i am open to trying fedora in the near future

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I mix, my server and laptop are nixos but I use an arch variant on my desktop. Mostly I do this because of various pain points with nixos and gaming.

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    [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Jup, Debian stable on my three servers an on my laptop. I think its just way easier to run the same system everywhere. Also, Debian is a great distribution.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago*

    Proxmox with plethora of distros (preferably Debian), openwrt, opnsense (freeBSD), the pies as well somewhere ... but my desktop & laptop are both Tumbleweed.

    (But I should try Bazzite myself at some point to understand if it's really a distro to recommend to Windows refugees looking for gaming & not learning anything or not that much "Linux related" immediately. It wouldn't be my guess, but the experiences I read here stayed with me for some reason.)

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    My main desktop is Mint - I feel like most of the random pieces of software I find myself wanting to run are built for Ubuntu or at the very least a lfh distro.

    My server and random devices run NixOS, and I'm acrually considering combining all the config into a monorepo...

    My Raspberry PI I think runs Raspbian though. I should see if I can nixify it.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yes. Mint. Way enough, and I haven't figured out why I should like disto hop yet.

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    [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Everything but my server uses Arch (BTW). This is so I can have all devices have the same scripts for uniformity.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    i have slackware 15 on all, it's great how i can just copy over binaries and they just run because all the linked libraries are the same version

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