Hello all -
Short intro promised - I’m iFearghal - I am new to linux as of Oct 2025 but did switch from windows without dual-booting. ALL IN.
I currently am running PikaOS -(still debian lol) and am thoroughly happy with it. Niri and DMS are my choice of WM and Shell.
I do host some homelab servers for gaming and a couple utilities. Nice to meet you and be here!
Welcome in! Glad to have you. I must admit I never tried Pika, but then again I never tried at least 50% of distros. However, I am interested in hearing about your Niri experience. I tried it only once and it felt far from finished (which was true) so I placed it on hold for a bit.
Yea it’s not like there are a few thousand distros! lol
PikaOS is built off of debian sid, and is customized out of the kernel for performance in gaming - but i find the OS to be pleasant enough to use as a daily driver on a notebook.
I found that I love Niri after months of using a mix of KDE and Gnome and just wanting something different. other tiling window managers felt like i was running out of space - but that’s the exact opposite for niri. I don’t know how long ago you’ve tried it, but I use Dank Material Shell with Niri and it works for me.
I also run an all debian homelab now. It was a mix of debian/fedora/alma linux - but i just moved my production server over to debian last night and have been migrating the services back on to that today.
I have one production server on OpenBSD and one on Ubuntu (the one hosting this forum). The reast are all Debian and I will swap this Ubuntu for Debian when I find a bit of time. I should probably practice my RHEL knowledge too, but Debian is so convenient and familiar.
personally just moved off of rhel (based) and fedora. I had alma running my prod server for a while. Just wanted to centralize the distro a bit. and debian gives me a good reason to do it.