I use Ubuntu, which is apparently the least popular distro around.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Does Gentoo count?
It's not that unpopular. I chose it because it is very powerful. It really makes use of every Linux power there is. It makes solving problems yourself much easier, and customization is big.
I switched to NixOS almost two years ago, and it's really nice being able to define my whole system in a single set of config files. If my hard drive dies or I switch computers, I can just reinstall NixOS using my config files and everything will be set up the exact same way. It's extremely solid and I don't need to baby my system because if it breaks I can just reinstall everything back to normal.
And I can share parts of the config between devices, so when I change my Neovim or VSCodium configs using Home-Manager it gets synced to my other devices, as well as being saved as part of my NixOS config files.
Guix, because I love nix but love lisp even more
Always great to see a fellow Guix user!
Idk if this counts but I found my home in a less popular distro, kind of.
I'd tried a few back in the early '00s. While my friends were experimenting with drugs and shit, I was experimenting with Linux distros and virtual machines lmao.
I started with Suse. I'm not too sure what made me switch or where I heard about this one from, but I eventually moved on to Mepis. It was originally rooted in Debian, then moved to Ubuntu before being discontinued.
My good friend at the time was big into Debian. I felt like pure Debian was too much for me to take on as a noob, but I wanted to be able to reach out to him for help now and again when I needed it. Switching to Mepis was pretty much a no-brainer. It was easy enough to get accustomed with. I was still mostly a Windows user, so the transition to KDE was simple. I'm old enough to remember the days of DOS so bumping around a CLI was also not that big of a deal.
The hardest parts were understanding how to install software (the concept of the repository was new to me), and the basic terminal commands. From there I was mostly good.
I remember when Mepis moved to Ubuntu, there were a lot of groans - myself included. But ironically, I've been a pretty much dedicated to Ubuntu for my linux stuff for ages. These days I'm running it with i3wm and I have no major complaints.
To be completely honest, though, I still don't really fully understand the standard file layout... I get it conceptually, but then stuff gets so fragmented - binary files in usr instead of bin, how to track where installed stuff ends up, etc.
I'll figure it out one day, when I really need to... But that time hasn't come yet. A quick find in the terminal always gets me what I need.
Why are people still using anything other than Debian and Redhat tho?
Arch and its derivatives (and once, NixOS) are the only distros that provide me with the range of software I need. But guess what? NixOS has some issues if you don't want to go deep into it, and for me they mostly stemmed from the immutability of it. And Arch and derivatives are all rolling release, when I don't want a rolling release. I want a machine I can keep running for 10-15 days or more and not have to bother with the idea of updates.