What shell do you use and why?

Hello - I just discovered Garuda last week but so far I really dig what I've seen. There's a pretty active thread here showing how users have their terminals set up and I noticed that many have kept fish though some are using bash or zsh. I thought, why does one use the shell they use? Is there an advantage to using one shell or another depending upon the distro, DE or WM? Does it really just come down to preference followed closely by whatever was bundled with the distro you're using?
I'd add here that I've never used fish before last week but I think it's well documented and I like it. I'm curious what others think.

Bash -> on low end pc, it is much faster.

Fish-> If you want simple interface.

Zsh-> If you want to flaunt your terminal, it is the best choice.

There are several other things that matter, for example auto predictions. I really love it. Also, I don't much love fish either, just because of personal preference. I use zsh, because it looks more beautiful, at least to me.

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I am of the piscatorial persuasion myself :wink:

I like simple.

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I love zsh with ohmyzsh, but it's not for everyone.

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Garuda is the first distro I have used which uses anything other than Bash, I like Fish so far, really I haven't noticed too many differences yet apart from predictive text and some formatting and coloring differences (which I like).

As a relative newbie when it comes to shells, one thing that seems to me to be a strong advantage of Bash is that it is the default 99% of the time, and its been around forever. As a newbie, staying with the herd can have its advantages until you become more proficient (particularly when looking for help or trying to follow a tutorial exactly or diagnose a problem). However in practice, I somewhat like Fish so far and there really hasn't been any learning curve or troubles (yet)

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I have strong feelings and opinions about shells. :nerd_face:

I keep Bash as my default user shell and root shell. That way, whenever I'm doing any system rescue and maintenance in the TTY, I can rely on Bash. I would prefer to have Dash symlinked to /bin/sh but unfortunately, on Arch Linux, there are too many scripts that have #!/bin/sh as the designated command interpreter, but contain non-POSIX compliant Bash extensions, like [[ ]]. That annoys me to no end.

However, I launch Konsole with Zsh which amounts to about 99% of my interactive shell use. I don't use oh-my-zsh, that's the worst thing ever. And I equally can't stand Fish... Zsh is just a fantastic shell.

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Well, it depends on what you need to do. If you want the friendliest user shell and don’t care about speed and non-POSIX settings that much, you use fish. If you need the default behavior, and also don’t care about speed, you use bash. If you want a somewhat fast and friendly shell and can give it a little time, you use zsh. If you want the fastest POSIX shell you are probably using dash, but it needs some more time for setup. I don’t think there is really a strong connection between using various shells on DE’s, WM’s, or distros. As I already said, it depends on what you need to do.

Personally, I am fine with bash functionality. I started using zsh on my other distros out of curiosity and continued because I like being able to quickly change the "theme" (really just a prompt preset). Fish seems to be almost identical in that regard, so when Garuda came with it, I had no reason to switch shells.

Bash, it’s the no BS shell for people that actually get stuff done :smiling_imp:

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