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! 😊
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Arch on user PCs and Debian on anything else. This is with the exception that our big server is on Proxmox and the NAS (as well as off-site backup) are on unRaid.
I mix, my server and laptop are nixos but I use an arch variant on my desktop. Mostly I do this because of various pain points with nixos and gaming.
All normal PCs run CachyOS, includes gaming PCs, laptops and media PCs. All servers run some form of Debian (includes Proxmox) or a dedicated distro for their use (TRUE WAS, technically also Debian based).
I’m all some Debian dereritive, whether it’s Q4OS or just Debian,
I didn’t use to, but I do now. Debian on everything (except the Proxmox servers, but Proxmox is basically Debian too)
Servers are all Debian. Family member’s laptops are all Debian. I used Debian on my laptops for 20 years, but when Steam Deck switched to Arch, I switched my laptop to Arch to force me to learn it. I have a file with notes of differences between Debian and Arch. Next time I buy a new laptop, I will probably go back to Debian.
Same but a ubuntu-derivative instead of Arch.
I don’t want to think about my server, but I do sometimes want the latest and greatest app on my laptop.
For me it depends on computer capability. 3 generations of laptop… Current: PopOS Older: MiniOS Oldest (32bit): AntiX
Oldest (32bit)
I still have a functional 32 bit laptop. It’s rather slow, but it does work
Yes. Everything is NixOS. Because it’s perfect for everything.
And it’s very handy for this, I have the same config for all my devices (desktop, laptop and server). Enabling and disabling different modules depending on the host it’s deployed to.
Yep, exactly.
To be fair, if you use Debian, Arch, Fedora,… long enough, you also know how to tweak your machine for every purpose. In Nix, it’s just somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you have to know how to tweak your system to achieve… anything, and then it’s the same tweaking mechanics for every other purpose as well.
Same here, except the steam deck.
My Steam Deck also runs NixOS.
Because this way I can much more comfortably configure it, plus everything game related I automated through nix for my Desktop (e.g. mod installs, reShade config,…) immediately and without any extra steps also applies to the Steam Deck.
Proxmox with plethora of distros (preferably Debian), openwrt, opnsense (freeBSD), the pies as well somewhere … but my desktop & laptop are both Tumbleweed.
(But I should try Bazzite myself at some point to understand if it’s really a distro to recommend to Windows refugees looking for gaming & not learning anything or not that much “Linux related” immediately. It wouldn’t be my guess, but the experiences I read here stayed with me for some reason.)
I love how this post doesn’t even pretend that anyone may use anything but Linux. Classic Lemmy.
I don’t see anyone here saying “actually I use BSD” so it seems to have been a safe assumption
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LTS Long Term Support software version NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #152 for this comm, first seen 9th Mar 2026, 16:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Ubuntu for the main pc and Arch for the filthy weird frankenstein laptop from 2008. Just as god intended.
Arch for Gaming/Desktop, Debian for Server/Proxmox/VPS.
Servers are Debian Desktop is Arch Laptop is EndeavorOS
I use Debian on servers, because stable.
I use Fedora on desktops, because I game and I like having fixes for mesa, the kernel, and amdgpu for my latest gen AMD GPU. My laptop is for work, but it’s just easier having consistency.
