cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/35084396
Hej lemmings!
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! 😊
I’m only a recent Linux convert, so you probably know better than I, but it seems having distros suited to different use cases is a strength of Linux to embrace, not shun. And, even if it’s a little more work to maintain up front, staying familiar with distros from different families keeps you ready to pivot in any direction you might need to later if one family massively improves or sours.
Still, consolidation doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Instead of consolidating down to one distro, can you consolidate down to two or three with much less hassle? Instead of trying to “migrate everything over,” can you make it more piecemeal where each individual changeover is progress?
I’m personally just doing CachyOS for both my daily driver desktop and NAS with Bazzite on my laptop and friends and family gaming PCs. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was also high on my radar, but I’ve got nothing running it at the moment.