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! 😊

  • coltn@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    3 days 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

  • eksb@programming.devEnglish
    471·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • Rioting Pacifist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      Same but a ubuntu-derivative instead of Arch.

      I don’t want to think about my server, but I do sometimes want the latest and greatest app on my laptop.

    • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      I would use Debian for servers, except that the version of Podman (at least on Debian 12) was old enough that it couldn’t do quadlets. So I went with Fedora.

    • Tanoh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      Servers are debian, desktop debian. Why swap when you found the best already? 😁

      I guess technically steam deck is not on debian, but I didn’t choose it so it doesn’t really count.

  • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    30·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      7·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        I’ve yet to run into major issues with gaming. But I’m curious what issue you ran into that caused the switch to Bazzite? I actually tried Bazzite briefly on my latest laptop acquisition (HP Spectre x360) before going with LMDE 7; I didn’t like the immutable aspect. I’m a tinkerer at heart and can’t handle not being able to get under the hood, so to speak.

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.

          All the other games were just fine though. If you don’t stumble upon one of these edge cases, there’s no reason to switch.

          • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Hmmm.

            Under LMDE7, the HP Spectre does great with the games I’ve thrown at it so far (BeamNG.Drive, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Universe Simulator, Minecraft, etc), but despite exceeding the minimum specs, it really struggled with running anything in RPCS3. Stuttering, frame drops, graphics simply not loading, etc… I ended up writing off RPCS3 in general as “too heavy for a laptop” and tasked my desktop gaming PC as the dedicated PS3 emulator - works great.

            Sounds like I might have to give Bazzite a shot again on the HP. I use that laptop for a lot of things, including diagnostics software for my cars, but I also have a perfectly-capable AMD Thinkpad T14 G1 hanging around that needs a purpose, too.

            It was Space Engineers 2. Even made a post about the journey.

            What was the actual issue you ran into though? I didn’t see it in your post. I believe you, but my curiosity is piqued.

            • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              2·
              2 days ago

              Yeah, that post was getting way too long, so I made some cuts here and there. The issue was in the way SE2 detects hardware… or more like doesn’t detect my GPU at all, throws an error about it and refuses to start. Under Bazzite it starts the game first 🎉, then complains that my hardware might not be good enough to run this game 🤯, but the beautiful graphics say otherwise. It’s still in early access, so I guess this kind of strange behavior will be ironed out sooner or later.

              I got tired of researching this issue in Debian, so once I got it up and running in Bazzite, I stopped reading about it. Honestly, I have no idea what’s the key difference here. Is it the driver version, Proton-GE or something else? Who knows.

              Anyway, I would recommend trying Bazzite. It has some pre-configured tricks that seem to handle weird cases like this.

  • Bakkoda@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    1 Fedora (laptop)

    1 bazzite (old gaming desktop)

    N+1 Debian on everything else than can

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
      9·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        4 days ago

        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!

        • StellarExtract@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          Nice, I’ll have to remember that GitHub trick. The main thing I’ve found lacking so far is config examples.

      • StellarExtract@lemmy.zipEnglish
        31·
        4 days ago

        I’d say that if you’re an experienced developer, the learning curve is probably overstated, at least based on my limited experience. I’m still a relatively new user, but I’m feeling pretty comfortable with it so far.

        • Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          Hitting obscure issues with limited documentation and barely any forum discussions on it in search results is killing me though. But at the same time NixOS makes a lot of things incredibly easy and offloads having to remember any changes so it’s worth all the effort for me.

    • ivn@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
      9·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        4 days 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.

  • arcine@jlai.luEnglish
    5·
    3 days 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.

  • FaygoRedPop@lemmy.worldEnglish
    233·
    4 days ago

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

  • dieTasse@feddit.orgEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    Fedora just works for me in every case except NAS where I have TrueNAS, so Fedora it is and I installed it even to couple of people and they also like it.

    • Teppichbrand@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      I was like you for many years. From Windows to Mint and never changed. Now I got a second hand laptop from a couple of years ago and put ublue Aurora on it. I REALLY like the experience!

  • Decq@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • needanke@feddit.orgEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      How quick could you pick it up? And how does it handle one config for different devices (due to different hardware(fstab/cryptsetup differences), propietary/non-mainlined drivers?

      I have been thinking about switching because I’d love a reproduciable system but fear it would take some of that flexibility I rely on (I’ve had some issues with ftstab/cryptsetup and initramfs customizations on the fedora atomic base of bazzite on my steamdeck).

      • Decq@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        4 days ago

        I have to be honest and say it was a journey. Nix in itself isn’t really difficult I find. But everything together and finding the right documentation and figure out how NixOS comes together can be a bit daunting.

        But a simple straight forward config is pretty doable. My advice is to start small and build up. You can reuse your old dotfiles and include them in the configuration directly, so you don’t have to convert everything to nix (right away). Also don’t scare away from using flakes, they are the way to go in my opinion.

        You can define multiple hosts/systems in one configuration with each their own nixosSystem call. So you can define hardware/fs/network etc per system.

        Also I like to add that the vimjoyer video’s on nix helped me with understanding some of the concepts, They are usually short and straight to the point.

      • OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Best advice is can give you is to #DOCUMENT everything you do for what reason and how it works inside your config file. So you know what each code block does and how it executes making your entire config dummy proof also helps learn the syntax super fast!

    • morbidcactus@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • Decq@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        4 days 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.