I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones…

And it just seems to me like there’s more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they’ll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.

So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?

  • Steamymoomilk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    10·
    4 months ago

    Gentoo linux, the main reason is ive tried many distros, which to alot of there credit worked pretty well for 99% of stuff. But like for example bazzite somthing broke upstream to where because of how OCI works and it layers systems. It takes Silverblue and adds alot of packages to become Bazzite and then my repo stripped out stuff i didnt want. But it became A NIGHTMARE when your builds fail and you cant figure out why. And its because of somthing upstream. And you cannot build/update because upstream brokey. And like with NixOS which i still daily on my main rig, but gentoo on everything else. Is really powerful but the immutability gets in your way for some things and it takes alot of time to adapt scripts or troubleshoot. So i ended up installing gentoo on my other computers because they do simple tasks, i dont half to worry about breakage because of snapper and stable channel (at least on the NAS) And its alot of fun to turn a live CD into a OS that has only what you want in it. SystemD or OpenRC, hardened toolchains or normal? And distcc and binhost are S tier

    • gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com
      2·
      4 months ago

      On an atomic distro your build environment should be in container, where it doesn’t matter what ships with the base image

    • msage@programming.dev
      2·
      4 months ago

      Gentoo is the best!

      Build flags are absolute godsent.

      Ever wondered how much shit goes into your software? How many packages include blutooth or CD drivers? Well, you would be suprised.

      LibreOffice REQUIRES MySQL client (or MariaDB), and you can’t build it without it. Sounds weird? Then you have no idea what happens inside your packages.