What other distro do you have? Why?

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C1REX · Post by **C1REX** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 9:49 pm

I just wonder what other distro(s) do you have and why?

I'm personally testing Clear Linux and open Suse now alongside some ubuntu clones.
I like to have something easy with good partitioning tools to help me fix my gentoo when I break it.

Post by **asturm** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 9:53 pm

None. For fixing things there is a coin-sized USB stick in my wallet with Gentoo-based systemrescuediscd on it.

Muso · Post by **Muso** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:00 pm

Arch Linux, FreeBSD, and Kali Linux.

Arch for general purpose laptops, FreeBSD on a very old laptop (all of the hardware works in FreeBSD), and Kali on a Laptop and VM inside of my Gentoo desktop. Kali is just focused on pentesting and forensics, and it's the best of the 'security' distros because everything just works out of the box.

duane · Post by **duane** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:01 pm

I have a copy of ubuntu-lts to help with testing linux games. I had to use it recently with the demo of Aquamarine. Their unity game development set-up had a few issues. (I think godot is better, but I'm not a professional.)

Naib · Post by **Naib** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:01 pm

CentOS in a VM to mess around with so I am not messing around with it on the production machine...

Otherwise Gentoo everywhere

Naib · Post by **Naib** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:04 pm

Muso wrote:Arch Linux, FreeBSD, and Kali Linux.

Arch for general purpose laptops, FreeBSD on a very old laptop (all of the hardware works in FreeBSD), and Kali on a Laptop and VM inside of my Gentoo desktop. Kali is just focused on pentesting and forensics, and it's the best of the 'security' distros because everything just works out of the box.

any benefit of kali over pentoo? I have pentoo on a pendrive for those times

AlexJGreen · Post by **AlexJGreen** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:20 pm

Muso · Post by **Muso** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:22 pm

Naib wrote:
Muso wrote:Arch Linux, FreeBSD, and Kali Linux.

Arch for general purpose laptops, FreeBSD on a very old laptop (all of the hardware works in FreeBSD), and Kali on a Laptop and VM inside of my Gentoo desktop. Kali is just focused on pentesting and forensics, and it's the best of the 'security' distros because everything just works out of the box.
any benefit of kali over pentoo? I have pentoo on a pendrive for those times

Kali is just tuned so beautifully. I've used Pentoo, Blackarch, Parrot, Kali and BackTrack and I consider Kali to be the gold standard for pentesting distros. Parrot is better if you're looking for more privacy and security in general.

C1REX · Post by **C1REX** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:41 pm

coderanger wrote:I don’t want to upset you, comrades, but all the maintainers run gentoo. They simply compile it with their options, install their packages and publish them. Red hat is a simple stage4 + graphic unpacker)))

Should I ask what flavour of gentoo people use? ;)

Naib · Post by **Naib** » Sat Feb 22, 2020 10:50 pm

C1REX wrote:
coderanger wrote:I don’t want to upset you, comrades, but all the maintainers run gentoo. They simply compile it with their options, install their packages and publish them. Red hat is a simple stage4 + graphic unpacker)))
Should I ask what flavour of gentoo people use?

the one from 37minutes ago

389292 · Post by **389292** » Sun Feb 23, 2020 10:32 am

only Arch on mining farm and EeePC netbook

szatox · Post by **szatox** » Sun Feb 23, 2020 10:44 am

Ubuntu, for work, because other admins are more comfortable with apt than emerge.
This said, I still use gentoo on my own servers.
Also, skills acquired by running gentoo saved my ass in ubuntu-land a few times too.

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Sun Feb 23, 2020 12:03 pm

only gentoo, and a sysrescuecd usbkey (gentoo base one)

Proinsias · Post by **Proinsias** » Sun Feb 23, 2020 1:40 pm

Alpine as a home server, Void on my laptop, OSMC on the Raspberry Pi.

superjaded · Post by **superjaded** » Sun Feb 23, 2020 6:48 pm

As far as baremetal machines go, it's all Gentoo. I have my main desktop, a laptop and a NUC. My main desktop also doubles as a server for what I need (WireGuard server, ZFS, docker, VMs). Though rather than compiling on my latop or NUC, I use Gentoo's binary package system to generate binaries on my desktop that my laptop or NUC can consume. I do compile kernels on those machines though.

I did flirt with Fedora in August of last year, switching those machines to using Fedora. I think I had the impression that somehow docker or VMs might work better out of the box than they did on Gentoo. They didn't. I think lasted about a week before I switched all my machines back to Gentoo because I got kinda annoyed by its semi-rolling release model.

Closest I get to distro hopping these days is VMs, and since the last time I built a new computer I wanted to do PCI passthrough, that means I can get decent performance in a VM (especially related to GPU) without needing to actually reinstall. Of course, I'm also probably in my gentoo-testing VM (which has ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~amd64 and KDE from git) more than any other distro for what that's worth.

figueroa · Post by **figueroa** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 4:19 am

I'm running several installations of MX-Linux for development and sysadmin purposes. I support a small collection of desktop Linux computers at a school that is remote from me and I'm considering migrating them to MX-Linux. I supported this endeavor using Gentoo on the desktop for about 10 years. Gentoo is a bit too labor-intensive for me to continue doing that, so last year I migrated them to Mint-XFCE. From a sysadmin perspective, Mint kind of stinks, but the users are very happy. MX-Linux, on the other hand, is extremely well thought out, smartly developed specifically for desktop users and super easy to administer remotely and has a very helpful forum.

I have been and plan to continue to promote MX-Linux to new users.

Does Gentoo come in flavors?

bammbamm808 · Post by **bammbamm808** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 8:38 am

Haven't installed another distro since finding Gentoo, what 18 years ago. Toy with the idea from time to time, but I barely have the time to do all the things I want to do with this install...

e3k · Post by **e3k** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 12:51 pm

After a 1year break currently gentoo again on 2 hosts. Debian on an old celeron 32bit laptop. Also Debian when resurrecting old pcs of friends
from the sickness called windows. Live distros: systemrescuecd knoppix and of course the pogo stick.

Post by **Ionen** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 12:58 pm

Still using debian on my old mini PC that I use as a server, I do intend to switch it to gentoo eventually (I'll likely make it 32bit too given only 2GB ram on that thing while still running some heavy stuff that is currently causing some swapping on that 64bit debian, but I'll build packages on another machine). But there's just so much to re-setup on that server that I've been lazy.

debian's systemd has more than once caused me grief at boot time when that server doesn't have a monitor or any input devices, I'd rather have something more simplistic to be a bit more fail safe.

Jaglover · Post by **Jaglover** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 1:10 pm

I just installed Devuan in a VM, I'm impressed. It was a little too old and conservative for my purpose, dist-upgrade to their beowulf release was a breeze. Not sure what caused (forced?) Debian to switch to systemd, there are some conspiracy theories, Devuan is the way out indeed.

tzycce · Post by **tzycce** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 3:35 pm

Void linux because I'm curious of these lightweight distros and just wanted to test a distro which uses libressl. Might convert my gentoo installation to it at some point.

I'm also a very new user so I'm not confident in my skills yet so I have another laptop with opensuse as a backup system if I break my gentoo installation.

Also I have servers running Debian, Alpine and Free- and OpenBSD.

Website · Post by **Zucca** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 5:02 pm

I use Fedora and CentOS.
CentOS if I want almost maintenance free OS.
Fedora has too frequent distro upgrades to my liking... So I'm going to test out how CentOS steam fits my use cases.

Ant P. · Post by **Ant P.** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 9:30 pm

The last distro I ran on my primary machine was Slackware. Before that, windows xp.

axl · Post by **axl** » Tue Feb 25, 2020 10:13 pm

I think I have one of each that actually matters. Or from where I want to rip something off. Or just try out.

BTW virtio devices and qxl are just awesum. Makes playing with vm's very comfortable. that's why I have a debian, a kali, a deepin, an opensuse, centos, redhat, fedora, clear, ubuntu. arch. I never ever use the arch. All the others seem very nice. It's just a joy to visit every few days, run upgrade... and just check things out. How updates go. How much time to boot. How much this that or the other. I like going through them one by one and just play around a bit.

Some of them take ridiculous small amount of time to boot. Others are ridiculously easy to maintain or install. I said this before, I will say it again. OpenSuse is just german. You can see the german oozing out of it. You can see clear... which is confused about itself. About clear linux... some of the speed increases that some people see, come from the simple fact that those guys simply cut out a lot of code because of unclear copyright issues. I read a LONG long thread ... I think it was about opencv, on the clear linux github issues thingie. The long story short is.. when you simply cut code ... you end up with smaller binary. try to compare ffmpeg binary on clear with a gentoo one. it's just not fair. not that you can't gentoo to build a similar one.

At the end of day, the other distros are just nice shiny objects to play around. But I strongly feel, if some other distro can do it, gentoo can do it too.

One last thought. I should install a slackware too. I used to love slackware.

erm67 · Post by **erm67** » Wed Feb 26, 2020 6:18 am

Funny nobody loves Ubuntu anymore ....

I use a lot a distro since I tend to get bored, or irritated and switch to another distro, after all the software is the same, distro devs didn't wrote anything ....

The Fedora release cycle is annoying, a new version every 6 months and EOL after 2 years, I usually updated when the beta was frozen since it was stable as a chair compared to arch or gentoo of a few years ago. The only way to enjoy Gnome is fedora, the gnome release cycle is synchronized with the fedora release cycle and the two projects share some developers so it is alway uptodate.
I also used Ubuntu for a while but recently Ubuntu snaps are really annoying, not the snaps themselves but the abuse of snaps in recent distros they should be used to avoid dll hell not to ship outdated software ...
Arch is amazing for its simplicity and speed, a very small number of developers concentrated in one task: package and distribute linux software; using simple tools and a small infrastructure were able to create a great product and attarct a large number of users from all other distro. Amazing. Here at gentoo they never passed over the defeat ... despite gentoo has ten times more developers and an infractructure ten time bigger than Arch; it was nice tosee a small group of people with just one shared server kick the ass of borious gentoo devs that couldn't even bump minor releases of packages they supposedly maintained.Their asses are still hurting apparently. Of course Arch just packages the last upstream stable release of everything with default config and this requres a lot more work from the user and that sometimes gets in the way when you have other work to do.
I use gentoo on the server since years, recently, server software is always uptodate but I had stopped using it a few years ago after hacker was able to exploit a vulnerability in some outdated software. Well I still have to bump some releases of minor packages sometime but the important stuff is ok atm but a few years ago I was using so many bumped ebuild from local repo that it had become a burden, it was like using LFS:..
Centos is stable as stable system instead (it's also stable as a chair of course) and never changes it gets boring quickly, I installed centos 8 recently to play a bit with some software that RedHat wrote like podman, cockpit and Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO), unfortunately Remi's RPM are not available for aarch64 so I can't use centos for webservers.
I have Debian stable + backports on the NAS because ... it works, it is not exposed to the internet and even if they don't ship the latest release the backports are timely in case of CVE.