Personally I started with Suse back in 2000, but very quickly switched to Linux From Scratch, which I used for five years or so, then Debian for a little while, and then Arch.
In my lab, I think I have tried every Ubuntu version from 18.04 onwards. Currently most machines have 18.04 since some tools (like Xilinx Vivado) require it. It doesn’t mean I like it 
I have two concerns about LFS, Arch, and similar approaches:
It can be too much of a learning experience. Yes, you learn how everything works. Just like if you build your own house, you learn a bit of structural engineering, masonry, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and other trades. But you may just want to live in your house, and not worry about all that.
It is my understanding that automatic updates are not supported on Arch, and of course they are impossible on LFS. This can become quite a pain if you manage multiple systems, as those few minutes spent administering, especially when security fixes make this urgent, add up very quickly. Maybe there is a solution for this now?
What I dislike about Ubuntu is Canonical very aggressively pushing their latest miracle solution (eg Unity, Mir, Snap; no one should feel bad if they don’t even know what the first two are any more). But you can easily opt out of all that.
What I like very much about Ubuntu is people making PPAs for all sorts of software, so they are easy to install.
Indeed. I’ve never run LFS or Arch except on my personal machines. They are not for everybody, but they’re great for me. I cannot stand the black-box approach of the large distros (or Windows!), which to me seem opaque, inflexible and brittle.
LFS is definitely about learning, although it can be used as a production system (I did my entire PhD work on LFS). The same for Arch; I’ve done all my work for the past 10 or 12 years using it. As you become familiar with it, it’s quite possible to reduce the “learning” and increase the actual “working”.
I have to manage the six machines in my lab, though, and I wouldn’t consider putting Arch on them; that’s why I stick with Ubuntu.
Another solution that does not require X forwarding are Jupyter Notebooks using the IJulia package. The disadvantage is that its a completely different environment but it works well. You can forward the ports from your “server” and then open a browser locally. Here is a sample ssh config (that also does X11 forwarding). I forward a couple of ports in case some are already used either locally or on the remote machine:
Host SERVER-NAME-HERE
Hostname SERVER-IP-HERE
LocalForward 8890 localhost:8890
LocalForward 8889 localhost:8889
LocalForward 8888 localhost:8888
LocalForward 8891 localhost:8891
ForwardX11 yes
User YOUR-USER-NAME-HERE
PubKeyAuthentication yes
IdentityFile PATH-TO-ID-RSA-HERE
This is my build. I’ve got dual-boot Windows10 (+WSL) and Ubuntu – each on their own 1TB SSD.
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7-9700K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor | $379.99 @ Amazon |
| CPU Cooler | be quiet! Pure Rock Slim 35.14 CFM CPU Cooler | $35.30 @ B&H |
| Thermal Compound | Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Polysynthetic Silver 3.5 g Thermal Paste | $6.49 @ Amazon |
| Motherboard | Asus PRIME B360M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard | $75.98 @ Amazon |
| Memory | G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory | $299.99 @ Newegg |
| Storage | PNY CS900 960 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive | $104.99 |
| Storage | PNY CS900 960 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive | $104.99 |
| Video Card | MSI GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB GAMING X Video Card | $488.86 @ Amazon |
| Case | Cougar MX330 ATX Mid Tower Case | $49.99 @ B&H |
| Power Supply | SeaSonic FOCUS 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply | $112.86 |
| Wireless Network Adapter | Asus PCE-AC51 PCIe x1 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi Adapter | $29.31 @ B&H |
| Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts | ||
| Total | $1688.75 | |
| Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-05-01 19:08 EDT-0400 |
Lockdown convinced me to invest in a home PC - working via remote terminal on a laptop for 8 hours a day was starting to get to me.
Spent today assembling it, look for the sticker that was the finishing touch!
I recently migrated from Arch Linux to Windows. I run Arch in WSL2 with genie so that I can run systemd services such as Docker and PostgreSQL. I use X410 to run an X server that I connect to with Emacs. Everything development related happens in WSL2, either in Windows Terminal or Emacs, including Jupyter, plotting, etc. (although I’m not a power user of either of those things).
I have identical setups on my desktop and laptop, and my laptop definitely runs a lot more sluggishly with Windows than it ever did on Arch, which is a shame. But now that I’m at home all the time, I only ever use my desktop (fairly powerful 6700K + GTX1060).
I’m really happy with this setup so far, I basically get all the things I loved about Arch and Linux in general, while keeping the annoying stuff like sound, network, Bluetooth, etc. in WIndows’ hands and out of my sight. In fact, I’ll probably write a blog post that goes more in depth about how everything works. I do really miss i3 though…
I’m using Linux Mint, and have been for some time and quite happy with it, it’s working very well on my gaming laptop which has a decent amount of compute power (for a laptop).
Windows is more problematic. I’v been using julia under cygwin (because i can run in an x-windows environment) but recently something broke and now i’m getting garbage characters in the julia output which is particularly problematic when printing dataframes.
So i’m trying to figure out what to do about that. What I’m hoping to do is to simply VNC to our linux server farm so that i can not only run on a fast machine but begin playing around with MPI sorts of things for accelerated computation. However i’m waiting for on OS change to happen before i can do that.
That sure is an interesting setup… I’d love to read that blog post if you ever write it.
I mainly work on three computers:
Heavy stuff is obviously done on my Xeon and if I need to run extensive simulations or other HPC code, I have access to multiple clusters across Europe (thanks to KM3NeT).
Most of my time is spent in Emacs, iTerm2/Kitty (ohmyzsh+spaceship prompt), Safari/Chrome and Papers-ReadCube (scientific papers).
I basically only need my Emacs config and .ssh/config + SSH-key-pairs to be happy. Everything else is on my NAS and/or (at least coding and scientific projects) mirrored to different Git servers.
macOS (or MacBooks in general) is my first choice for both work and private stuff. Yes, I pay more for the hardware and I get less raw power, but in general every component is likely to be higher quality which leads to less issues in my experience (e.g. when traveling around, WiFi, printer, AirPlay, file sharing, bluetooth, NFC, etc…), let alone the superior trackpad and “glitchlessness” of the macOS GUI which I have never seen/felt on any other OS yet. But these are personal preferences 
I love the fact that I don’t need to maintain my own computers.
Most of the trouble I have is with ArchLinux when e.g. a system update suddenly breaks the whole setup and I have to boot the recovery system and repair broken dependencies or the graphics drivers are messed up and I see a black screen because I am using a not-so-popular video card (Nvidia P400). This happened many times over the last years, mostly when I skipped more than one rolling release. But I am used to this, I started with Suse Linux 4.4 and FreeBSD 2.2 back in 1998, so it was a weekly ritual to do emergency drills 
I started to think about trying nixOS or just go back to something solid like Debian which we use in our servers, but nixOS will take a significant amount of my time to get into it (as it’s a very different approach) and in case of Debian or similar “stable” Linux distributions; the package system is often too outdated for my needs.
I used Debian almost exclusively from 1995 until about 1 year ago, when I switched to arch. My desire or need to tinker seems to be about the same. In practice, I tinker less now, but I don’t think that’s because of arch. I also switched 1 1/2 years ago to i3 , initially because I was sick of memory leaks in the gnome shell. But, for the most part I found Ubuntu, Debian, and arch all to be usable.
Some of the stuff arch makes you do to install is kinda insane, but after that it’s ok. This is on a personal machine. I had to switch to Debian temporarily recently and am impatient to get back to arch. I’d have to think about it for a while to be more precise, but I find arch and i3 to be simpler than Debian (and gnome).
I have used company machines for quite a while. Buying my first personal machine in twelve years. Couldn’t find a compelling case to choose one of light weight or powerful. Sometimes I do a lot of computation on the laptop, sometimes not. But the die is cast, it should arrive soon. It is a barebones Clevo with a Ryzen 12-core cpu.
Not much to add, but here is the setup where I do most of my work:
julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 1.4.0
Commit b8e9a9ecc6 (2020-03-21 16:36 UTC)
Platform Info:
OS: macOS (x86_64-apple-darwin18.6.0)
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-2140B CPU @ 3.20GHz
WORD_SIZE: 64
LIBM: libopenlibm
LLVM: libLLVM-8.0.1 (ORCJIT, skylake)
Environment:
JULIA_CUDA_SILENT = 1
The device (a refurbished base-model iMac Pro) itself floats on a VESA arm, which I find to be a really important thing (you can push it out of the way if you want to work on equations, or eat, tilt it if you want to watch a movie, etc.)
It was probably a bit overpowered for my use (mainly scientific computing, with some ML research these days) when I bought it 2 years ago, but I think it will age well and is quite silent.
The lack of NVIDIA GPU support is a drag.
Edit: I’m not looking forward to everything breaking when Apple moves to ARM. Which is another reason I’m glad I paid for a bit more power up-front.