For my homelab I'm running Debian bookworm and I'll upgrade to trixie when I care enough to.
For the main compute, in short:
Man Jar Linux is an install of Manjaro that I randomly froze so I could keep running an ancient version of Chrome (long story). It is basically a joke that I keep running out of inertia, laziness, and some spite. It is at least 10% zip tie by weight, mostly related to the fact I am stuck on a glibc version from 2021, and they sure like to push new incompatible versions. Apparently no usecase for static linking either. By now all "new" software I have to obtain either an old enough version of, or compile myself. Not even AppImages help, they depend on system libc. I also don't get bug fixes, which on one hand I would appreciate for the noVidya card (driver and support software crashes are the biggest reason for loss of uptime, did I mention i try to keep uptime? on a laptop!), on the other hand they would probably break it because Pascal so yk. The DE is XFCE, and I'm still not sure why. When this setup fails beyond the point of no (worthwhile (judged by me)) repair, I think I will KDE, probably on the Bean.
Some family computers run Debian KDE already, because seeing them run Windows made it a choice between that and a misericorde through the 5400 HDD. Somehow I don't really get tech support questions. You haven't felt joy until you saw a random HP printer "just work" on your newfangled Lunix install on a grandparent's computer.
LMAO
I'd say glibc updating isn't as bad as software vendors insisting on linking against these newer versions when it isn't necessary; the ABI backcompat is actually pretty decent. It is annoying as shit though
I don't use Linux on the desktop much anymore (although I want to) but I have to maintain a few dozen servers which all run various distros. Our setup is split into two sides pretty much, an HPC cluster and a small web farm. The HPC cluster ran off of Debian Sarge from 2004 all the way up into 2021 when the decision was finally made to switch to Ubuntu 20.04 (and now actually updating along the way, so we upgrade to every LTS release). The web farm functioned similarly although we switched to Ubuntu much earlier.
Here's the thing: Ubuntu sucks dick
Almost all of the HPC cluster nodes aren't connected to the internet so snap auto-updating fails and it whines about it in syslog. You also end up wasting a ton of disk on machines which are connected because snap likes to hoard previous versions of software for reasons (???). We've also encountered remote machines out in the field randomly breaking because of regressions in some of the auto-updated snap packages. Snaps are genuinely the dumbest fucking thing ever created and they single-handedly make me wish I'd pushed to go with a modern Debian version instead. The only thing I can really give Ubuntu over Debian is that I run into less hiccups with package management (with Debian it seems like I am constantly having to edit /etc/apt/sources.list for one reason or another, I guess Ubuntu just keeps the old repos around longer or something?) but this doesn't really matter because the stupid fucking snaps pollute all the packages anyway; you have to go out of your way to get software that hasn't been molested by way of being snapified and crapified. They make their way into everything. Running lsblk I'm even reminded of them. They weren't even polite enough to prefix their user dir with a . so in your home folder along with your Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc. you have snaps. This is effectively the Linux equivalent of the 3D Objects folder.
Setting aside the snaps, even installing the thing is infuriating. There are ads in the installer. There are even ads in the default bash MotD.
I guess the only other saving grace of Ubuntu is Netplan. If only because /etc/network/interfaces has been made useless over the years because Linux devs can't agree on how to make a configurable static fucking IP. But I like that changing the network config is as simple as editing /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml and running netplan apply and it just works. That's kinda nice. I know it's just an abstraction on top of systemd-networkd and NetworkManager but I like that the workflow of using it more closely resembles the old ifupdown way. The choice of YAML was kinda corny though
Anyway Ubuntu sucks, install Debian.
Asus Zenbook S14 (2024) - CachyOS
OVH VPS - Debian
Actually I am very surprised things run extremely well on the Zenbook. Everything works, no further configuration needed beyond ricing KDE, setting up rclone and network manager scripts. Battery life is amazing too. I can just close the lid and not shut it down, and get back in the next day with almost no loss of battery.
In 2014 when I started using Linux more regularly as a desktop operating system I switched over to Arch on all my machines. I specifically remember pacman breaking all of my configs once and I raged so hard I trashed the laptop that it happened to (a t400) and gave it to my brother with Windows 7 installed
In 2020 during the COVID lockdowns I switched to Fedora when I had more time to do research. Having new packages but also getting a stable "just werks" distro instead of something that nukes itself felt more appealing.
Then in 2023 Fedora floated adding "privacy-preserving" telemetry by default and it sounded so cringy. Switched to Debian and have been using that since on all my PCs and servers.
I started using it when in 2018 my 4GB RAM 6-year at the time laptop lags with Win 10 started to get too annoying (that laptop had Win 8 when I got it, it was that old). I got a Ubuntu dual-boot setup so I could still use Windows if I had to. In 2019 I swapped to my current laptop and stopped using that one.
Then after COVID ended, in 2022 I picked up that laptop again because I didn't want to risk my other one being broken. I got a replacement battery in Amazon and installed KUbuntu on it. Was fun for a bit, but when I saw that I needed a more beefy computer for some assignments, I ended up bringing my newer laptop.
So that old thing nowadays runs LUbuntu because it's 14 years old and I use it to connect it to the TV of the apartaments I end up going with my friends in summer and watch movies and stuff.
windows would never allow me to use such an old computer at all, i like how light some desktop environments can get in Linux
Nowadays I don't really use Linux, I guess I'll use it again when I finally host my forum one day. Until then, the only situation I can ever see me interacting with Linux is just installing Arch on a random computer out of boredom and seeing what happens. I'm not an experienced Linux user at all though, so I dunno if I could even succeed.
considering im used to a mess from using win7 for a while, i don't find kubuntu nor the *ubuntu ecosystem to be particularly bad, even if i know some people get pretty mad at canonical. i simply disabled snaps and moved on with my life, knowing their main problems from using snaps on the ubuntu server side of things
in the future i might still consider going off of the stable track and changing to something else... considering i do relatively often run into issues whose fix is "you want to use a newer version". but whether running into that every couple months is worth dealing with slightly more hassle when installing software / updates is to be seen
