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! 😊

  • coltn@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    6 days ago

    arch on my two laptops, and desktop. proxmox on my server as the hypervisor, and debian on the vm/lxc. my routers are running openwrt.

    one of my laptops i use for testing, and i do switch distro’s… i’ve tried alpine, gentoo and i’d like to try openbsd. but arch is comfy

  • arcine@jlai.luEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    I use NixOS on everything ! This way, I can re-use parts of my configuration as a base, and customise only the few things that need to change from one machine to the other.

    The only exception is my Steam Deck. I trust Valve on that one, and my usage of it is so different from other computers as to make 95% of my config entirely irrelevant anyway.

    • Teppichbrand@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      I was like you for many years. From Windows to Mint and never changed. Now I got a second hand laptop from a couple of years ago and put ublue Aurora on it. I REALLY like the experience!

  • Bakkoda@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    6 days ago

    1 Fedora (laptop)

    1 bazzite (old gaming desktop)

    N+1 Debian on everything else than can

  • dieTasse@feddit.orgEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    Fedora just works for me in every case except NAS where I have TrueNAS, so Fedora it is and I installed it even to couple of people and they also like it.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 days ago

    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

  • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyzEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    Yes, because nixos and distributed git-based dotfiles, would be so much work to have a second setup for no real gain, I do investigate other distros regularly though

  • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    6 days ago

    My main server runs Ubuntu Server (I’m thinking about switching it to Debian), and my laptop and desktop both run Arch Linux. Generally, I pick whatever I think is best for the given usecase — things like stability, package availability, documentation, security, etc. are considered.