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 run Alpine Linux on my laptop and two Raspberry Pi’s. I also have Linux Mint DE on my laptop but that’s exclusively for steam games. I also have GrapheneOS with Termux on my android phone.
Alpine on my laptop uses Sway as my desktop and it’s where I do all my coding and self hosting work. It’s also where I spend most of my time.
My Raspberry Pi 4 exclusively runs HomeAssistant and it doesn’t get touched unless I’m doing an update or making a backup.
I have a Pi 5 that’s going to be used to host a server. I’m just doing some background learning and setting up before I start hosting again. It should go a lot quicker and smoother this time because I set up my computer and HomeAssistant up in a standardized way. I tried to make as many files and folders as similar as possible so I have less differences to sort out from one machine to the next.
It’s feels a lot easier to manage for me.