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
    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.