I’m between distros and looking for a new daily driver for my laptop. What are people daily driving these days? Are there any new cool things to try?
I have been using linux mint recently. I have used nixos and arch in the past. Personally, linux mint uses flatpacks too much for my liking. Although, I might have a warped perspective after using arch. (the aur is crazy big)
Artix (Basically Arch without Systemd)
Does artix only boot without systemd or is it completely systemd-less? If it is systemd-less, how do services like docker work with that?
Most services just need the init system to start, stop and monitor them. There’s no special integration needed for each of them beyond running a command, monitoring the PID, and killing the PID when it’s time to stop.
If you mean the special integration of docker and podman with systemd, first of all that’s only required in rootless mode and not everybody runs rootless (most users probably run root docker). In rootless mode you have to manage each container individually as if it were a standalone service instead of just managing docker. Basically you have to integrate each container into the init system, whatever that is. There are some tools that make it easier to with podman+systemd because they write the systemd units for you but you can do it with any init system. The distro mostly doesn’t care because you have to do the work not them.
Arch on my home server, Zorin on my laptop
I have very mixed thoughts on Zorin OS
It looks nice in the screenshots, but it charges $40 for “premium” which is pretty much the same as the free one, besides it having a few extra themes, and some “professional creative software” and stuff (free software that they are bundling in, and acting as if it’s exclusive to Zorin or something)
They also have an IT management tool called Zorin Grid that has said “coming soon” for years now
If you want the cool new thing, it’s Nix
I tried nix actually. Personally, I think it would make a great server os, but I do not enjoy it as a daily driver. I didn’t like the fact that I was forced to install everything through nix and couldn’t compile software from source.
Nix is a source code package manager and compiles everything from source, except when there’s a binary substitute available.
NixOS user here! Fedora is a very good contender as well
Fedora but I’m not loving it. Due to my hardware I think I’m limited to that, arch and openSuse.
