In the spirit of this related poll, it is also interesting to see what desktop OSes are the most used by the members of this forum.
Operating systems in the poll are sorted by their market share. Linux and ChromeOS have ∼the same market share as of now; the figure varies depending on the source, but ChromeOS usually has a higher market share.
I use two GNU/Linux distributions. Gentoo musl hardened most of the time, and openSUSE’s MicroOS is always ready to be used when I need a distribution that just works.
I saw a couple of times that some say that Qubes isn’t Linux. Others say that Qubes is Linux. I disagree with the former. Qubes is very very much Linux-y, and a lot of things around it and in it are Linux-y. I would certainly say that Qubes falls under Linux.
I can see why some categorize it as such, and Qubes OS usage certainly does include using Linux distros inside VMs. However, the Qubes devs explicitly say that it is not a Linux distro, and I don’t see a reason to go against their word.
If you really want to call it a distribution, then it’s more of a “Xen distribution” than a Linux one.
I wanted to say something on that in my previous message, but I thought “the shorter the better” and omitted it.
I meant that Qubes OS is… let’s say — it’s an OS from the Linux family of OSes. I wouldn’t call it a Linux distribution, sure, I agree with that. But Qubes OS is a Linux-y thing, to put it simply. It is very much “soaked” in all Linux-y things. A lot of Linux-related technical things are baked into it (not going to list them all here).
Qubes OS isn’t specifically a Linux distro, but it’s an OS that belongs to the Linux category.
To get back on topic, I use openSUSE Aeon (MicroOS) in combination with Tails.
I struggled for a long time with deciding which one would be the best out of all available options that exist as daily driver OS for desktop devices. Fundamentally, I think the best approaches come from Arch Linux, Chrome OS and Qubes OS. However, I lack the time or knowledge required for Arch, lack the money and willingness to tolerate reduced privacy required for Chrome OS, and lack the hardware required for Qubes OS.
In the end, I chose openSUSE Aeon because it’s a rolling release, provides atomic updates, is immutable and has relatively good security and functionality out of the box. I think it’s one of the least bad options out of all Linux distros, and I’ll stick with it for now. If you think there’s a superior alternative, I’m always glad for suggestions.
Maybe I can scrape together the money to buy a device capable of running Qubes in the future, or even a Pixel tablet to try using only GrapheneOS for my whole workflow. Until then, I wish there was something like a daily-driver version of Tails or Whonix.
Others shared their thoughts on it. I wanted to try it, or Tumbleweed, but what gets me is the lack of official binaries from some software, such as Signal which supports only Debian-based distributions. And I don’t want to compile anything myself.
I don’t think it is appropriate to call it a ‘dirty trick’ but yeah, this is not the way I would go about installing software.
I think unless you really know what you are doing, and understand the pros/cons, it is almost always a better choice to let your distros package manager or some cross distro package management/distribution system like flatpak or snap manage your software. A package manager is simply more consistent, reliable, and better when it comes to managing software than most humans will be. I don’t want to have to remember to manually update a bunch of manually installed packages. For these reasons, for most people I think it is preferable to get software through your distros official repos, flatpak/snap, or directly from the developer following their recommendations if you can’t find the package in your distros official repos.
It’s not a dirty trick. It’s not seldomly done in this way. Look into the AUR pkgbuilds, you will find plenty who do it this way. Or how do you think porting a closed-source application to a non-officially-supported distro happens?