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! 😊
No, I’ve got nobara on my gaming rig, batocera on my wife’s retro console that’s just turned into a kodi device, and proxmox on my server
Currently my primary laptop is on LMDE and my secondary laptop is on GhostBSD just because I wanted to try out BSD. I’m thinking of taking a third laptop and putting EndeavourOS on it. That was my primary OS until an update blew up the EFI partition and I read “yeah, that happens sometimes” and decided my primary system should be a bit more stable than that. But I did really like EndeavourOS other than that. I have an old notebook PC I’ve thought about putting Haiku-OS on just for fun, if I can figure out what I did with the power cord for it.
My gaming PC runs Nobara so I started using Fedora on my general use desktop and my laptop for consistency. I have an older laptop that runs Debian. I have two server machines that run Proxmox and Debian, and all my VMs are Debian except one that is Fedora server (I read somewhere Fedora would provide better GPU support out of the box, but I’ve never confirmed this, it just works)
Yes. Mint. Way enough, and I haven’t figured out why I should like disto hop yet.
I run OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my Daily Driver Desktop, Bazzite on my Laptop, Debian on my Game Server
I use Arch (btw) on my desktops and laptops.
On my servers I’m halfway through replacing Debian with openSUSE.
My desktop and servers have different use cases and I interact with them in different ways, so there’s little confusion for me.
I feel the same way. I use fedora on my laptops and desktops and debian on my servers. Generally my servers do not have or need a gui so debian makes it easy to install without. I tried fedora server once and i just was not happy with it.
I use Fedora on my personal laptop and DietPi on my RaspberryPi 4 where I selfhost a bunch of stuff.
I used to have Ubuntu everywhere, then changed to Debian for servers. Now that I’m using bazzite for my gaming rig, I really liked the idea and went to fedora silver blue on my work laptop. I’m the near future I want to re do my home lab, bit not sure yet what, unfortunately to many open questions concerning storage left.
I use Fedora on my desktop, laptop and server. On my mother‘s laptop I have installed Fedora Kinoite.
For my Gaming PC I ended up with cashyOS. Justs works and still gives me enough flexibility for customization. Server is Proxmox with mostly Debian LXCs but I started to add in some alpine containers. Probably going to throw alpine on my old laptop as well, just for fun. Ah and then there is my MacBook with macOS, which for now I plan to keep…
I typically use EndeavorOS because I enjoy how well documented and organized the arch wiki is.
I tried switching to fedora on my laptop recently but actually had some issues with software that was apparently only distributed through the AUR or AppImage (which I could have used, I know).
When I also had issues setting up my VPN to my home network again, I caved and restored the disk to a backup I took before attempting the switch. The VPN thing almost definitely wasn’t Fedoras fault since I remember running into the same issue on EndeavorOS but after my fix from last time didn’t work I was out of patience.
My servers runs either on debian or Ubuntu LTS though.
I do - more or less. Since I am the IT guy for my entire family and don’t feel like doing tech support on 10 different distros.
I’ve thought about it, but I like having Bazzite for my gaming PC and Debian for my laptop, so I’ll probably keep using multiple distros. For me it’s:
- Gaming PC: Bazzite (it’s plugged into my TV, like a console, and goes straight to Steam’s big picture mode)
- Laptop: Debian with KDE Plasma
- Home Server: Debian (a little single board computer, no desktop environment)
Due to bazzite,I checked out fedora silver blue for my work laptop. So far I’m happy.
I normally install Linux based upon what I am doing. Gaming wise is usually popos. (I have eyed up CachyOS). I use Endeavor for a lot of old mac stuff. etc.
I was HEAVILY into the apple ecosystem, so I have a lot of macs. I have a macbook, running MacOS, and i have a desktop computer that i was using for my server, but instead bought a ras pi, and now use my desktop AS a desktop (partly because i want to dump apple because of all the bootlicking that Tim Apple is doing towards drumpf), which runs linux mint. My ras pi runs ubuntu server. Aside from that, that’s the extent of my home computing. I have an iphone too. But my mac mini goes unused now, and thinking of selling it, but not sure. /rambling
I usually stick with ubuntu/debian based distros, because it was the first distro system i used when i first used linux. so I stick with what i know. Though I did support a RH server once when i worked in IT.










