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?

  • Max-P
    12•3 months ago

    Generally, those people are experienced users that know exactly what they want out of a distro and don’t really need help for anything. Those distros usually do a few things that the user is seeking.

    For example, for some people, typing their thesis in LaTeX using emacs is the better workflow. To any average person that sounds insane when Microsoft Word is so easy to use and does the job just fine. But they enjoy it, it works for them, paper gets written, everyone is happy.

    Distributions are a spectrum between novice users and expert users. Some people want to put the USB in and be good to go. Some people want a very precise setup for very specific needs.

    You may ask, why not start with Ubuntu/Mint/Pop and remove what you don’t like? Well, it’s much easier to start with a blank slate than making one by chopping everything out. For my particular use case, I moved to Arch in big part because I got tired of the mainstream distros getting in my way, and wanted to start the other way around and only install and configure what I want, the way I want it. So Arch for me.

    I know experienced users that really don’t care about messing around and are happy with how it runs out of the box and are happy with the development environment provided by something like Ubuntu/Fedora.

    And then there’s my box which is a NAS, a workstation, a media PC for the TV, a build server, and a few other things, and it’s all dynamically reassignable. Friend can pick up the controller in the TV room and a GPU gets assigned to it and starts up Steam in Deck mode on the TV, while I can still do my stuff and game on the workstation side for local multiplayer. If the game needs a server, no worries, it’s a kube node, I can temporarily transfer the server locally and back on one of my real servers. Guest needs a PC? Sure, take this monitor and this keyboard, here’s an ephemeral Windows install. Sure, I could probably twist Ubuntu into doing all that, but it’s one hell of a lot easier starting from scratch.

    • @logir@feddit.it
      2•3 months ago

      Would you explain better you set-up? At least a reference to the underlaying system. Is it kubernetes?

      • Max-P
        4•3 months ago

        It’s a Threadripper system which effectively behaves like two CPUs and loads of coree, two GPUs, one dedicated to my desk for the monitors, and the other one can be reassigned freely with VFIO to be a few different things. The TV is connected to that GPU. Storage is all ZFS.

        • One VM is a kube node to run stuff on that GPU
        • One VM is the media center / gaming stuff
        • Technically I have a Windows and Mac VM too but I practically never use them.

        When the second GPU isn’t attached to a VM, I can also use it on the host with DRI_PRIME. The host is also a kube node, so I can also run some (modest) AI stuff there too.

        The rest is random glue scripts like detecting when the controller connects and shuffling VMs around on that signal. The kube stuff is brand new, half the things are just regular docker compose files still.

        I’m looking into trying out kubevirt and see where that goes. The GUI is the only thing left that’s relatively normal on the host and I’d very much like to make that a container and split things up in sort of “activities” so the browser is its own thing, each project is its own thing so I don’t npm install a rat.

        • @Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
          1•3 months ago

          Weird someone has a similar setup to mine, its almost exactly the same (one nvidia one amd? Cause that’d be scary).

          Feel like its overkill for most folks though lmao

          • Max-P
            3•3 months ago

            All AMD, RX 570 and Vega 64.

            It’s not that rare, I know someone on IRC that’s also doing something similar. I stole the kubevirt idea from him.

            I originally built that box to be a VM powerhouse for development, and VFIO was an explicit feature I wanted, that was right before Proton became good and made it unnecessary.