(Also extends to people who refuse to use Linux too!)

Every unique Linux Desktop setup tells a story, about the user’s journey and their trials. I feel like every decision, ranging from theming to functional choices, is a direct reflection of who we are on the inside.

An open-ended question for the Linux users here: Why do you use what you do? What are the choices you’ve had to make when planning it out?

I’ll go first: I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with the Niri Scrolling Compositor(Rofi, Alacritty and Waybar), recently switched from CosmicDE

I run this setup because I keep coming back to use shiny new-ish software on a daily basis.

I prefer this over arch(which I used for 2 years in the covid arc), because it’s quite a bit more stable despite being a rolling release distro.

I chose niri because I miss having a dual monitor on the go, and tiling windows isn’t good enough for me. Scrolling feels smooth, fancy and just right. The overview menu is very addicting, and I may not be able to go back to Windows after this!

This was my first standalone WM/Compositor setup, so there were many little pains, but no regrets.

Would love to hear more thoughts, perspectives and experiences!

  • prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
    2·
    15 hours ago

    I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I’d found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

    For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in “Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?” ways, which I didn’t want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

    Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

    I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I’m experimenting with local LLM on it.