I suppose it's partly because I'm old and have built something like nine PCs for myself over the years, and the novelty of all that wore off long ago. I just want something that works.
I settled years ago on a setup I like, but until that point I bounced around like a rubber ball. That said, my current setup is built on Ubuntu and I think it's about time to switch to Debian to get rid of the corporate bullshit.
I think one of the whole reasons the mint team stick with Ubuntu is it grants them the ability to use the kernel manager which makes these things more seamless.
Sure, but that's not what "reinstalling the OS" means in general use. I'm talking specifically about the kind of reinstall that overwrites everything on your root partition, and doing that for major updates seems to be a fairly common recommendation for certain kinds of distros; MX Linux says to do it like that, too.
I used to distros hop a bunch, not so much anymore.
Not really much point for me these days, arch based distros are so well documented that I can change basically anything I want without reinstalling the os, and Debian is similar for my homelab servers.
I was like this before I tried regular Arch. I probably would’ve settled on NixOS if I had tried that first. I feel like Linux Mint could be the end of the line because it just works on a lot of old machines & does so quickly.
Haha, I feel that switch to LTS only releases. I was upgrading to every release in the beginning as well but it started to get old real fast. I run Mint nowdays. In the early days I loved testing new distros and tweaking around with my system, but after over a decade working in tech the last thing I want to do in my free time is have to fix my own computer.
Hell yeah! I was using Ubuntu 10-14 in college and now back on the train with 24, 25 and 26. Everything just works every time and all the professional apps I need are first class citizens and well supported.
Ubuntu Server, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are my server distros of choice as well. FreeBSD for a NAS. Gotta pick the right tools for the job!
I've tried hundreds, I have a laptop I just use for bare metal distrohopping.. but I've just hit 6 months using NixOS on all my PCs and laptops. I strongly recommend everyone give it a go.
Distros are tools for a job. I stick with the ones that have the most helpful communities and/or the best documentation. I avoid communities that tell you off for asking help or documentation that is obtuse.
Still successfully troubleshooting stuff through 10 year old Ubuntu forum threads. Meanwhile learning the most through the FreeBSD handbook and it's not even Linux. lol
At least we can distro-hop. Different needs, different preferences, and we can choose what works best for us. Heck, you can even go hardcore with Yocto and create your own distro!
Compare that to the poor sods on the Apple and Windows side of the fence. They have to cope with whatever some bigwig thought was best for them. A mediocre one size fits all solution, stuffed to the brim with whatever they fancy. Including ads, malware, and AI everywhere.
A side hop if anything :3 I wouldn't count secondary devices as distro hopping, especially something like the steamdeck, but I suppose someone might
Speaking of steamdecks tho, I've thought about picking one up. I just wish I travelled more to actually be able to justify the price lol. It's a cool piece of kit
Half my time on my deck is at home tbf. I use it for gaming from the couch/bed mostly and streaming my heavier games from my desktop. Quite nice that way imo!
I started with like, nothing, linux 0.99 on 8 floppies and X11 on like 12 floppies... then some kind of LFS, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then MX with Xfce (since almost 10 years)
I started using un*x on mainframe (aix, irix, hpux, etc). On a regular PC you could have SVR4, BSD, Minix, things like this, then linux came, in the 90s we had no CD, we downloaded the floppies images from ftp on the university server, then rushed to home to install linux on a 486, we did a lot of compile ourselves, no choice back in time. I used some distro after, like Mandrake (I'm French) but always liked the DIY thing, but it was more and more complicated and long... this is why I started using Debian in the days...
I'd forgotten about LFS. Not sure if it should even count, for me at least, it's not like I actually used it to daily drive. But I did use the knowledge from it to make a mini bootable "rescue" distro that I would put on backup disks so they'd be self-sufficient.
The message I recall was different though, it was advertising Ubuntu Pro for better security updates. All it did was make me feel like I'm using an insecure system.
That's exactly what I ended up with, Arch on my gaming laptop, Debian on the server.
It is weird not having a desktop computer, but the laptop plays all the games and the server does all the rest.
I used Void for a bit. I wouldn't recommend using on your main system unless you really hate systemd for some reason. Try adding the CachyOS kernel and repos on your Arch system. It will be like having a newer better Arch. No reinstall required.
Ubuntu really drove me away for some time. Only when I got to Mint, I felt that Linux could be a daily driver. Arch made me strangely reinstall it every few days. Not by not working but by having the feeling of dirtying the machine on use.
NixOS is really what I want to use the rest of my life. Very complicated on first use but definitly worth it (for me).
Not the same dude, but I assume the Nix reproducible declarative build and deployment system. It's what interested me the most as a former Arch user, though the poor documentation threw me off at the time. Don't know if it improved or not.
i have a desktop, a trash laptop for work (construction) and a not as trash one for personal use.
also a server
but all managed with one config, where with just one command i can get a program on all my devices, and i know i get a working system out of it, bcs it just refuses to build if just one component fails. then i tweak it until it builds properly, and never have a broken OS.
also, while still heavily underused, the nature of flakes and the ability to pull from non-github repos makes it in theory very decentralized. in theory. in praxis, microsoft is our package vendor :P
For reasons unknown even to myself, I hoard my old hardware and run it till it won't run anymore. All of my servers are my own old machines, corporate castoffs, and a few that were literally pulled out of a dumpster, so I have a lot of test subjects. I like to experiment with distros and will probably never stop. I like seeing all the cool stuff people make. And driver support has gotten good enough that it's not that painful to switch nowadays. I run through the installer and boot up, and everything more or less works. It's a good time to be a distrohopper.
For my main rig and "important" servers I generally stick with debian; if I need to fix something I don't want to be learning the guts of a new OS while I'm trying to figure out something else. Everything else is frolics.
I just really like exploring. I do also enjoy the feel of a fresh clean install. Getting to set things up again without all the cruft of gradual config tweaks.
Probably going to get hate for this and reveal my age a bit, but i've been on Ubuntu since 2006 back when they'd actually mail you CDs for free. My desktop's hardware has been a ship of theseus since then, and no dist-upgrade really ever broke things, and I think the last time I did a full OS reinstall was in like ~2011 when I got an SSD that was a smaller side than my old HDD, so I couldn't just clone the drive with dd. Everything works well for what I need it for, and don't need the bleeding edge.
I'm a gamer who recently switched to Cachy and honnestly it is by far my favourite yet. It runs so smoothly without feeling bloated and it's perfect for someone like me who feels too noob to try pure Arch.
Pure arch is fine, don't let internet idiots scare you. Just archinstall it, you don't have to do a manual install. I reckon have a crack at a manual install for learning purposes if your curious.
I had a look at cachy in a VM it seems very similar to me. I used that Shelly gui thing I kind of like it but every now and then I like to manually install the vulnerabilities directly from AUR and npm.
On servers: Red Hat -> Debian (with a brief detour through Ubuntu Server for a couple of years).
On desktop: Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro.
Switched away from Red Hat around 2004 after RHL was discontinued and split into RHEL and Fedora. You may think Fedora would've been a more obvious choice but it was still new in 2004 while Debian had 10 years under its belt. We also migrated the servers at work to Debian around that time and I had used Debian at school in the '90s so it made a lot of sense to use it at home.
Ubuntu on desktop was a fucking revelation when it came out (on CDs shipped free to your home 😃) in 2004. Early days Ubuntu was soooo good that I stayed with it until 2020, long after the magic was gone.
I mean I would've probably left eventually anyway given the whole snap and privacy and so on debacles but what really put me off was how it would almost never upgrade cleanly once you've added a bunch of 3rd party repos (which you wanted to do all the time on a desktop PC). Eventually I got so sick of it that I was determined to find a rolling distro where upgrades would never be a problem.
Tried a bunch of them during stay at home during the pandemic and settled on Manjaro + XFCE on the desktop and a fresh install of Debian stable + Docker on the server as a happy medium between "hands off" and "up to date". I'm at a point where I like my Linux machines to just work and to need zero maintenance so I can put the time into other things instead.
I didn't realize WHAT the problem was, assumed it was just Linux in general. But that's my experience with Ubuntu, too.
Been with it since the beginning, it was one of my earlier introductions to Linux. But I could NEVER upgrade cleanly. I was always reinstalling. And yeah there are easier ways to do that too but for a noob I struggled.
That kept me dual booting Windows, or for a good number of years running mainly Windows.
But last year I went atomic fedora bluefin on my new laptop, and I love it.
Slightly more restricted, and a couple issues with flatpaks, but the stability is top tier.
I still run Debian on my prox VMs, and I keep a win 10 ltsc VM on there too for the rare program that doesn't play nice, but otherwise I'm all Linux now.
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit I got from a CD out of a magazine from barnes and noble and it blew my mind. I had so much fun learning everything about Linux and I think I even got oblivion running on WINE, which was a nightmare compared to how easy games run on proton nowadays.
Those were the glory years for sure. Now I run Arch and want a "just werks" experience. It's why I use unRAID for my server.
How is Unraid? I've been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I've been wondering what I should install on it.
I'd like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they'd put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it's not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn't need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
I love it for ease of use. It's very straightforward, has given me few (if any) problems over the years on the OS level. The only real issues I ran into were specific to individual docker images. I like that I can open a web UI and jump right into the shell if needed. It's very easy to install docker images and VMs
However, there is a caveat about how it stores data I suppose. Your use case of mirroring drives is not possible on unRAID. Instead, it uses one drive for parity and redundancy, or you can do dual parity if you're really concerned about data loss. Basically how this works is your largest drive stores all the information about all the other drives to rebuild the data in case of drive failure, including the parity drive itself can be rebuilt if it fails. So say you had a 12 TB parity drive and a dozen or so other drives for the array. All of those drives can be literally anything so long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity. They can be 12 TB, 8 TB, 500 MB, old drives you shucked out of external storage cases, whatever. And you can add / remove these at will. The parity does not count to your max amount of storage, think of it like a mirror but for every other drive
Dual parity is an extra level of redundancy. It's basically like say you had a drive fail, and in those couple days where you order a new one or whatever, or when the data is rebuilding itself, if another drive fails, your data is still in tact. I don't bother because this would be such a rare occurrence. I do know data rebuilds are very high read/writes for days on a drive so it can be high stress on the drive so that's why the extra protection exists, but I still think it's overkill unless it's like irreplaceable data you can't lose (remember 3-2-1 backups in those cases)
Went back to Ubuntu after laying off of it for a while. Now that I'm used to not using Windows, I feel like trying either Arch or Cachy though everyone keeps raving about Bazzite.
Man, I don't miss windows. My laptop works better without it. Idk what the hell windows does but my internal wifi works better than it did with windows. A 750mbps USB adapter was needed and my 1200mbps internal wasn't able to capture my 5G internet from 2 rooms away from the router.
I install Ubuntu and I can use my laptop in the shitter/3 rooms away for the router. All or most of the streaming is 720hd or 1080hd and it loads. IT ACTUALLY FUCKIN' LOADS.
Distro hopping sounds like too much work. I went from mint and was happy on that for years, then I went to Debian and I'm happy here. I'm curious about Fedora but not curious enough to be bothered with a new install.
Debian (for 2 days because I broke it) -> Mint -> Arch (for an hour) -> CachyOS. I like Cachy and it has been half a year. With the package optimization I don't really see myself switching to anything else.
So far my personal favourite is manjaro. I always liked Arch based distros and Manjaro has done a great job at pre configuring everything. Manjaro also came with zsh as the default shell and I really liked that.
Why settle? Software is a continually evolving ecosystem and grafting yourself to a certain distribution model or distribution team doesn't really make sense when you consider that. Some distribution might have the best things for you, today. Tomorrow, another may come along and do it better, or your current distribution may shift to not be to your liking anymore. Be flexible, but don't change for the sake of change. Change for a good reason.
I went from Windows to Mint and have been using that for almost a year now. Haven’t run into any issues that would make me want to switch: it does what I want it to now.
same but I am using Mint Debian edition and so far I've liked it okay but I think I probably should go with a distro that gets newer kernel updates sooner hmm
Systemd: no particular thoughts. It's a PID1 and process manager? 😅 If I'd had to say something, then perhaps it "hampers" my Linux learning, since instead of having to write config files and scripts and learning to work with symlinks (for instance between config and whatnot templates in /usr/share/ and things you actually apply in /etc/), it has a lot of automation built in with all its -ctl commands.
That's the truth. The problem with systemd is that it's too good.
Wayland is neat and may reach feature parity with X11 just in time for it to be replaced by the next thing!
Not really. It took a while but it's been solid for a long time. Much as I resent their "our way or the highway" policy, but Ubuntu pulling support for X11 is probably for the best. Solves the adoption problem.
I tend to use macOS on the desktop (I know, booo) so I’ve landed on Alpine Linux for just about everything else.
I love that you can be on the bleeding edge but also not have tons of baggage everywhere. The downside is of course a lot of times I find myself doing things from scratch.
I started with Mint. My next and last stop was Alpine. I started trying to host my own website on a Raspberry Pi and ended up switching my laptop over to Alpine so that I could consistently learn on one operating system
I also found a side hobby in making POSIX portable scripts which goes nicely with self-hosting. It's great having a lean and customized desktop just for myself even if it took a long time to learn how to make it all work
Yes! I’ve found myself doing this both personally and professionally. At work we’re using Docker and Kubernetes but the old way of thinking is assuming everything is Debian or Ubuntu so a lot of Bash scripts just break on Alpine-based containers.
But even for those scripts we execute primarily on macOS, I’ve taken the liberty of making them POSIX compliant because you never know who’s using Bash, zsh, sh or what have you.
I've remade a handful of GNU extensions as POSIX scripts/functions. I also just enjoy trying to be as minimal as possible and building my own tools. It helps me understand how operating systems in the process too
Ubuntu wayy back in the day, started on mint, then nobara, then bazzite on my laptop and steam deck, then nobara to cachy os on my desktop, and I quickly switched the laptop and steam deck to cachy because I liked it so much
Very happy with Fedora right now. If I ever had to switch again, maybe CachyOS. But not worth wiping and reconfiguring everything just for that. If RedHat pulls a Canonical though, definitely.
Windows need a regular reinstall. Not so much on linux.
My daily driver at work is the same install from 2000. I was so impressed with debians abillity to do a major upgrade, that it kind of became a game, to see how long i could upgrade it. A fresh install and copy over /home would have been more sane ;)
Also with lvm you can migrate your running install to a new os drive while working. So hardware swap is a 5 min process. Boot new hw on old disk, with usb adapter. pvmove the install to the new drive. Install grub.
I do fresh installs on many other machines tho. My daily driver at home and the emergency laptop is installed when they are aquired, and upgraded as long as the hardware functions.
Thanks for the insight. Truly grateful you replied as I checked your comment history and there were months between comments so I thought I'd never get one :)
I'll refrain from doing a fresh install on this, see how it goes 😄
Read the debian release docs about the major upgrade when that time comes. They sometime contain important adaptations to make your upgraded install similar to a fresh one.
I've not hopped much, and from at least one viewpoint I've not hopped at all.
If you want to count distros I've used, some even at home, however briefly, then I tried Red Hat and SUSE (actually bought a copy!) way back in the '90s, Ubuntu, CentOS and... you know I don't actually know what a few of the GUI-less ones were, at work from the '90s onwards.
I even tried PC-BSD for a very brief moment before conflicts with an unusual hardware setup sent me scurrying back to Windows.
But since I quit Microsoft Windows for good at home, I've been nothing but Mint. I switched to LMDE after using the original for a while, but I can see arguments each way for whether that's a hop or not.
Frankly, it will take something drastic to make me want to hop to something else.
distros i have been distrohopping on so far:
TailsOS (somewhat for the LuLs,multiple times),Linux Mint(twice, i think),NixOS,Arch (twice),CachyOS (or Distros based on ARCH),OpenSUSE(Twice)
i stuck to CachyOS
The only issue I've encountered is with the apt updates as It throws gpg handshake error (i forgot the whole error called) happened last year. And for now no big/small issues so far
Used Manjaro for a while, gave EndeavourOS a try and have been happy there for a few years now. Before that it was Ubuntu, Mint and Debian. Also had OpenBSD on my servers for many years.
I am trying to set up like 50 Surface Pro 5s to give away so I wanted something that felt as close to Windows/Mac as possible while still allowing me to enable all the Surface Pro features.
Settled on ZorinOS as of now. (Actually, I did some experiments and even got the CAC reader working and CAC login working on it in the event that they want to use them in a student environment.)
Have you gotten the touch screen to work perfectly? I have tried all sorts of stuff, but I just cannot get it work well enough for drawing, even with the surface pro kernel.
Haven't tried drawing on it ever… it does work well enough to use for tapping buttons and such, but if you installed the Surface Pro kernel you've done everything I've done.
Ah... Figured as much, thanks for the answer. I got the pressure to work, yeah, but it was greatly reduced, and too laggy to actually use with the pen. I am now stuck with Windows 10, as I cannot get enough functionality from Linux distros, and there is no way I will deal with the dumpster fire Windows 11 is. Unfortunately, there are no other proper, portable computer + display good enough to draw -combinations on the market than SPs, still. At least ones I could afford...
This is my daily driver and it's so stable I have been using it for work for the last 16 months or so.
When Hyprland upgraded to 0.56 it broke some of my config. I was still able to launch apps so no panic, but it took me a couple of hours to read the new documentation and fix everything.
I would not recommend this particular combo for a newbie, but honestly it is a lot more stable than people seem to think
I went with the Garuda catpuccin Mokka KDE plasma after using the Garuda i3 (computer upgrade prompted the change, not breakage)
Been solid for me for about 3-4 years now.
Garuda has a pretty good Hyprland install as well but it's too "neon lights puked all over me" for my taste
I installed one of those pre-packaged Hyprland dot files which was awesome but a lot more than I wanted (which made it harder to change). It did serve to help me understand things better; so I installed Garuda Dragnonized (which is what we had before but I wanted a fresh start after years of tinkering and modding), installed hyprland and started from scratch with my own, very basic, config
Off and on with Linux since 2003 until I went full conversion in 2018. I know red hat, ubuntu and mint were all in there as well as others that I can't remember. In 2018 I went through EndeavourOS, and Manjaro then settled with simple wonderful Arch like 5 years ago.
Played a bit with others before I settled, but XFCE feels like home and not having to do a system update that breaks everything every year has been great.
I absolutely love the ecosystem that's sprung around Arch over the years.
And ofc I wish the fans of the various Arch-based distros had a less antagonistic approach to each other. 🙄 I mean Arch's main goal is to be flexible and having a diverse family of derived distros downstream is the ultimate confirmation of that goal.
It's also very healthy for any distro to have a big "family tree" because the upstream benefits from contributions from a larger community that may not have vibed with the parent distro otherwise.
Mint -> Manjaro -> Arch
I also have absolutely broken Mint install that I'll probably keep using until it stops booting. I thought it would be simpler to put Mint on a headless computer and use GUI over VNC.
Then come issues with permissions/dbus or whatever is going on.
Couple days ago I tried to do version upgrade, but couldn't use GUI anymore due to broken permissions. One of the python scripts that do the upgrade managed to at least partially work (GUI wouldn't run as root), by which I mean the GUI package manager complaining about "corrupted" repo list or something like that. But at least it updated the repo names, and what is Linux OS other than a bunch of packages, so I just rolled with it and ran apt upgrade.
I mean, it's running Linux mint, but the main method of connection is SSH and in case things go bad, serial port. This is already cursed.
I am just too used to Arch. I have no idea what versions even do aside from keeping major package versions separate (which sounds like I should be able to just change version name in sources list).
But I do cursed things often. I also have a laptop with Proxmox that I put KDE Plasma on, and pass windows from VMs using Waypipe. Yeah, similar to Qubes OS, but also unstable and less secure.
Can you elaborate? When I first chose between them back when they first forked, Alma was not as mature as Rocky and Rocky was run by the founder of CENTOS, so I chose that one, but I have no real attachment to either. It would take a lot to switch, but if Alma is better in that way, I'd be happy to migrate as I upgrade.
Sure. Red Hat moved CentOS where it belonged, upstream, in between Fedora and RHEL. That generally upset people who wanted a bug for bug free version of RHEL. Rocky and Alma were both born out of that era. Alma actually works with Red Hat, created its own SIGs and contributes upstream to Fedora. Rocky on the other hand is backed by CIQ. Does not contribute anything upstream, bends/breaks licensing to get source from Red Hat to get as close as they can to that bug for bug code without doing any engineering themselves. Then CIQ poaches Red Hat employees and customers by offering way cheaper support because they don't pay for any of that pesky engineering.
Honestly at home there really isn't a reason not to just use CentOS Stream imo. It is ABI compatible with RHEL. There is a misconception that it is a "rolling distro" but it only rolls through minor releases in that it doesn't even have minor releases. Alma is something in the middle. Actively contributing, ABI compatible, and offers minor versions.
Hell, even Oracle at least adds their own twist to OEL instead of straight up ripping off RHEL.
I bought a secondhand Steam Deck and was convinced by using it docked with kbm that Linux is ready to be my one and only.
From there, my 2015 laptop moved from Windows 10 to PopOS -> Cinnamon Mint -> CachyOS -> Cinnamon Mint. I plan to build a desktop sometime between now and the release of PlayStation 6, and I'll probably go with CachyOS for that. I would just buy a Steam Machine, but I can't justify the price vs performance when I don't really care about console comforts like CEC. I'd rather pay the cost of the higher Steam Machine to get PS6 level performance.
My wife moved her laptop from Windows 10 to Cinnamon Mint. She has to have a Windows partition for proctored exam spyware for online classes, but she's now only using Windows for that one thing. She's much more comfortable with Mint.
Arch for many many years. Then Bazzite for round about 8 months. Now CachyOS for 9 months. Super happy with it.
Additionally, I am running Debian on my Thinkpad and server.
I had experienced other distros before (not on my pc, at least), but as a joke my cousin suggested Arch, while I had some trouble setting it up, the documentation was so good I stayed for a while. Though I've always liked MacOS, so when upgrading my notebook, I took chance to install Elementary OS 8. Overall, it's ubuntu based, so I can't complain.
Today I'm using Chimera, but KaOS, Arix or perhaps some unholy install of Alpine with DINIT are tempting me. Seems a persistent kernel panic on wake from sleep has been fixed, so I'm not super tempted to hop ATM.
Ubuntu -> SteamOS (Steam Deck as PC convinced me to change my main PC) -> Endeavour OS -> Mint -> Kubuntu -> Zorin OS -> OpenSUSE (first one that stuck longterm) -> CachyOS (PC permanently now) + Debian (home server) + Bazzite (lounge console)
Early on I went from mandrake to gentoo, been on gentoo forever but decided as I was building my docker swarm that I wanted to go easy so I went with Ubuntu server on my 2 additional nodes, and then for my wife’s machine I went Linux mint. When windows is no longer needed for anything I think I will probably do gentoo on my primary machine. The programmer in me likes seeing compiles
Ubuntu (like 100 years ago) > Debian > Mint (for several years) > a bunch of things > Kubuntu > PikaOS (GNOME)
Cinnamon Mint is almost perfect as a daily driver, but had hangups in gaming (frame stutter, controller disconnects, etc...)
Tried PopOS! for a hot minute, Cosmic is pretty but very clearly still WIP
Rode the plasma train for a little while on Kubuntu, but everything felt a little half-baked and games crashed pretty regularly.
I've settled on PikaOS GNOME for now as my daily driver. Things seem generally solid, but I've only been using it for a few weeks, TBD on the long-term stability, but I'll probably hang here at least until whenever Mint reaches stable Wayland support, at which point I'll give that a go.
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OpenSuse Tumbleweed for my gaming PC. Fedora KDE for everything else (laptops, mom's desktop).
EndeavourOS is home. 💜
Am I the only one here that uses their computer instead of fucking with it?
Most kids these days use em to fuck, I hear
Don't call me kid, mister.
When I was a kid I just fucked with it and had a great time, now I'm too old for that
Yes
I mean... uh... no comment.
Found ninajirachi's alt account
Ubuntu -> Mint.
Mint works for me. So, I use Mint.
I suppose it's partly because I'm old and have built something like nine PCs for myself over the years, and the novelty of all that wore off long ago. I just want something that works.
I'm a big fan of boring, tbh. It works. What more could I need.
I settled years ago on a setup I like, but until that point I bounced around like a rubber ball. That said, my current setup is built on Ubuntu and I think it's about time to switch to Debian to get rid of the corporate bullshit.
Yeah I’m a mint guy and I might switch to lmde, but not anytime soon
Aren't mint users supposed to reinstall when it's time for a major version update, anyway?
Last time I think it updated through the update manager. Might have reinstalled itself in that process.
I don't think that's how that works Ü
I think one of the whole reasons the mint team stick with Ubuntu is it grants them the ability to use the kernel manager which makes these things more seamless.
Sure, but that's not what "reinstalling the OS" means in general use. I'm talking specifically about the kind of reinstall that overwrites everything on your root partition, and doing that for major updates seems to be a fairly common recommendation for certain kinds of distros; MX Linux says to do it like that, too.
I like to do both.
I used to distros hop a bunch, not so much anymore.
Not really much point for me these days, arch based distros are so well documented that I can change basically anything I want without reinstalling the os, and Debian is similar for my homelab servers.
Yes
The seventy-tooth
I can't tell whether this is hilarious or I'm exhausted, because I'm crying from laughter
I've only ever used Debian my entire life
I was like this before I tried regular Arch. I probably would’ve settled on NixOS if I had tried that first. I feel like Linux Mint could be the end of the line because it just works on a lot of old machines & does so quickly.
seventy tooth
Ubuntu 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 -> 9.10 -> 10.04 -> 12.04 -> 14.04 -> 16.04 -> 18.04 -> 20.04 -> 22.04 -> 24.04 -> Fedora J/K Ubuntu 26.04
I like how sh.itjust.works
Haha, I feel that switch to LTS only releases. I was upgrading to every release in the beginning as well but it started to get old real fast. I run Mint nowdays. In the early days I loved testing new distros and tweaking around with my system, but after over a decade working in tech the last thing I want to do in my free time is have to fix my own computer.
Hell yeah! I was using Ubuntu 10-14 in college and now back on the train with 24, 25 and 26. Everything just works every time and all the professional apps I need are first class citizens and well supported.
Ubuntu Server, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are my server distros of choice as well. FreeBSD for a NAS. Gotta pick the right tools for the job!
I've tried hundreds, I have a laptop I just use for bare metal distrohopping.. but I've just hit 6 months using NixOS on all my PCs and laptops. I strongly recommend everyone give it a go.
Arch. Would love to find something better but I can't.
same. not having those big version updates and having control over everything i want from the start just feels so good
and how incredible stable it is
Ubuntu -> Pop!_OS -> EndeavourOS.
I'm quite happy here :)
Distros are tools for a job. I stick with the ones that have the most helpful communities and/or the best documentation. I avoid communities that tell you off for asking help or documentation that is obtuse.
Still successfully troubleshooting stuff through 10 year old Ubuntu forum threads. Meanwhile learning the most through the FreeBSD handbook and it's not even Linux. lol
Fedora ended that for me. It has mostly what I want and is just kinda comfy to use.
Same. But I went atomic, bluefin.
For a stable every day driver? It's gonna take a lot to get me to switch away.
Still Debian for my proxmox VMs though
At least we can distro-hop. Different needs, different preferences, and we can choose what works best for us. Heck, you can even go hardcore with Yocto and create your own distro!
Compare that to the poor sods on the Apple and Windows side of the fence. They have to cope with whatever some bigwig thought was best for them. A mediocre one size fits all solution, stuffed to the brim with whatever they fancy. Including ads, malware, and AI everywhere.
Linux mint and often LMDE.
is funny, I always end up back at mint.
It just good, it just works yet let's me customize.
Ubuntu -> Debian -> Linux Mint -> Fedora -> Arch -> Manjaro -> EndeavourOS -> SuSE Linux -> NixOS
I'm pretty happy on NixOS now...
I'm close to you, skipped a few intermediate steps though. Ubuntu -> Mint -> Manjaro -> CachyOS
I started on pop!_os and now 6 years later im on... pop!_os
Yeah, I didn't really do any distro hopping :p. Though I've tried a bunch of distros in VMs
Same with endeavour lol. VM test drives before “buying” ol’ reliable is the way to go ;)
Although I do use SteamOS on my deck, if that counts as a hop.
A side hop if anything :3 I wouldn't count secondary devices as distro hopping, especially something like the steamdeck, but I suppose someone might
Speaking of steamdecks tho, I've thought about picking one up. I just wish I travelled more to actually be able to justify the price lol. It's a cool piece of kit
Half my time on my deck is at home tbf. I use it for gaming from the couch/bed mostly and streaming my heavier games from my desktop. Quite nice that way imo!
Debian for the 72fth time.
Started with deb based distro, swicht later too arch based, now still on cachyOs
i liked using cachy for a while, but it broke plasma's login manager once so i gave up on it and went to base arch
though it did have snapper which i liked a lot, so i added it to my arch install too
I had the same experience a few years ago.
Now I'm just having trouble with SerialPort access; the Arch Bible didn't offer a solution.
With Parrot Home as an additional OS on an external SSD, I was able to use WebSerial on Linux.
CachyOS. Everytime I stray away from Arch, it always finds a way to pull me back in.
I have this handy little bash function, I think you should use it.
This gets it wrong for the seventy-secoth item.
The urge to downvote something you really shouldn't have never been so strong.
Gentoo will always be there when you want to settle down knowing exactly what you want.
Ubuntu, then Pop OS, and now still on Mint. It really just works and is still really easy to customize.
I'm thinking of trying Cachy OS though, but I'm not sure
artix has been my goto for older computers, void
in future maybe guix?
I started with like, nothing, linux 0.99 on 8 floppies and X11 on like 12 floppies... then some kind of LFS, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then MX with Xfce (since almost 10 years)
Can't tell if joking or old or both...?
Old coot here
I started using un*x on mainframe (aix, irix, hpux, etc). On a regular PC you could have SVR4, BSD, Minix, things like this, then linux came, in the 90s we had no CD, we downloaded the floppies images from ftp on the university server, then rushed to home to install linux on a 486, we did a lot of compile ourselves, no choice back in time. I used some distro after, like Mandrake (I'm French) but always liked the DIY thing, but it was more and more complicated and long... this is why I started using Debian in the days...
I'd forgotten about LFS. Not sure if it should even count, for me at least, it's not like I actually used it to daily drive. But I did use the knowledge from it to make a mini bootable "rescue" distro that I would put on backup disks so they'd be self-sufficient.
Mint > Ubuntu > Lubuntu > Arch (desktop) / Debian (server)
I switched away from Canonical the first time I saw an ad when running
apt update & apt upgrade, fuck them forever.I'm sticking to Arch because its easier to install something myself than to rip apart something prepackaged.
I'm curious about trying Void.
Since when has apt had ads? That's horrendous. How have I never heard of this?!
Since at least 3 years and 9 months ago.
The message I recall was different though, it was advertising Ubuntu Pro for better security updates. All it did was make me feel like I'm using an insecure system.
That's exactly what I ended up with, Arch on my gaming laptop, Debian on the server.
It is weird not having a desktop computer, but the laptop plays all the games and the server does all the rest.
You might find Void too barebones but it's nice like that. When you finish void-installer for the first time, you get a system with 144 packages only.
I used Void for a bit. I wouldn't recommend using on your main system unless you really hate systemd for some reason. Try adding the CachyOS kernel and repos on your Arch system. It will be like having a newer better Arch. No reinstall required.
Ubuntu -> Mint -> Arch -> NixOS
Ubuntu really drove me away for some time. Only when I got to Mint, I felt that Linux could be a daily driver. Arch made me strangely reinstall it every few days. Not by not working but by having the feeling of dirtying the machine on use.
NixOS is really what I want to use the rest of my life. Very complicated on first use but definitly worth it (for me).
Yeah, I bounced off NixOS for a couple months before it stuck. I would switch again but it would have to be like Nix but better
No hopping. Debian.
ubuntu > fedora > manjaro > endeavor > arch > fedora > arch > nixos.
started in 2015 with ubuntu, started distrohopping in 2019 when i upgraded from laptop to desktop, but ended with nixos 3 years ago
What are the advantages of nixOS? I have a Ubuntu Server but plan to run Fedora KDE on my desktop when I build it.
Not the same dude, but I assume the Nix reproducible declarative build and deployment system. It's what interested me the most as a former Arch user, though the poor documentation threw me off at the time. Don't know if it improved or not.
as t4v0 said, the reprdoucable build system
i have a desktop, a trash laptop for work (construction) and a not as trash one for personal use. also a server
but all managed with one config, where with just one command i can get a program on all my devices, and i know i get a working system out of it, bcs it just refuses to build if just one component fails. then i tweak it until it builds properly, and never have a broken OS.
also, while still heavily underused, the nature of flakes and the ability to pull from non-github repos makes it in theory very decentralized. in theory. in praxis, microsoft is our package vendor :P
Do people actually do this serial distro hopping? When such a meme is posted even now most people say they switched only a few times at most
every now and again, I feel the urge to try another distro. I can't help it, it's in my DNA
Exactly! Whyvis everyone on hannah montana linux now? I must know
For reasons unknown even to myself, I hoard my old hardware and run it till it won't run anymore. All of my servers are my own old machines, corporate castoffs, and a few that were literally pulled out of a dumpster, so I have a lot of test subjects. I like to experiment with distros and will probably never stop. I like seeing all the cool stuff people make. And driver support has gotten good enough that it's not that painful to switch nowadays. I run through the installer and boot up, and everything more or less works. It's a good time to be a distrohopper.
For my main rig and "important" servers I generally stick with debian; if I need to fix something I don't want to be learning the guts of a new OS while I'm trying to figure out something else. Everything else is frolics.
I just really like exploring. I do also enjoy the feel of a fresh clean install. Getting to set things up again without all the cruft of gradual config tweaks.
It's rly only for ppl who REALLY care about the install process or just have the 'grass is always greener'
Or both
Probably going to get hate for this and reveal my age a bit, but i've been on Ubuntu since 2006 back when they'd actually mail you CDs for free. My desktop's hardware has been a ship of theseus since then, and no dist-upgrade really ever broke things, and I think the last time I did a full OS reinstall was in like ~2011 when I got an SSD that was a smaller side than my old HDD, so I couldn't just clone the drive with
dd. Everything works well for what I need it for, and don't need the bleeding edge.I'm a gamer who recently switched to Cachy and honnestly it is by far my favourite yet. It runs so smoothly without feeling bloated and it's perfect for someone like me who feels too noob to try pure Arch.
Pure arch is fine, don't let internet idiots scare you. Just archinstall it, you don't have to do a manual install. I reckon have a crack at a manual install for learning purposes if your curious.
I had a look at cachy in a VM it seems very similar to me. I used that Shelly gui thing I kind of like it but every now and then I like to manually install the vulnerabilities directly from AUR and npm.
On servers: Red Hat -> Debian (with a brief detour through Ubuntu Server for a couple of years).
On desktop: Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro.
Switched away from Red Hat around 2004 after RHL was discontinued and split into RHEL and Fedora. You may think Fedora would've been a more obvious choice but it was still new in 2004 while Debian had 10 years under its belt. We also migrated the servers at work to Debian around that time and I had used Debian at school in the '90s so it made a lot of sense to use it at home.
Ubuntu on desktop was a fucking revelation when it came out (on CDs shipped free to your home 😃) in 2004. Early days Ubuntu was soooo good that I stayed with it until 2020, long after the magic was gone.
I mean I would've probably left eventually anyway given the whole snap and privacy and so on debacles but what really put me off was how it would almost never upgrade cleanly once you've added a bunch of 3rd party repos (which you wanted to do all the time on a desktop PC). Eventually I got so sick of it that I was determined to find a rolling distro where upgrades would never be a problem.
Tried a bunch of them during stay at home during the pandemic and settled on Manjaro + XFCE on the desktop and a fresh install of Debian stable + Docker on the server as a happy medium between "hands off" and "up to date". I'm at a point where I like my Linux machines to just work and to need zero maintenance so I can put the time into other things instead.
I didn't realize WHAT the problem was, assumed it was just Linux in general. But that's my experience with Ubuntu, too.
Been with it since the beginning, it was one of my earlier introductions to Linux. But I could NEVER upgrade cleanly. I was always reinstalling. And yeah there are easier ways to do that too but for a noob I struggled.
That kept me dual booting Windows, or for a good number of years running mainly Windows.
But last year I went atomic fedora bluefin on my new laptop, and I love it. Slightly more restricted, and a couple issues with flatpaks, but the stability is top tier.
I still run Debian on my prox VMs, and I keep a win 10 ltsc VM on there too for the rare program that doesn't play nice, but otherwise I'm all Linux now.
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit I got from a CD out of a magazine from barnes and noble and it blew my mind. I had so much fun learning everything about Linux and I think I even got oblivion running on WINE, which was a nightmare compared to how easy games run on proton nowadays.
Those were the glory years for sure. Now I run Arch and want a "just werks" experience. It's why I use unRAID for my server.
How is Unraid? I've been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I've been wondering what I should install on it.
I'd like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they'd put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it's not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn't need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
I love it for ease of use. It's very straightforward, has given me few (if any) problems over the years on the OS level. The only real issues I ran into were specific to individual docker images. I like that I can open a web UI and jump right into the shell if needed. It's very easy to install docker images and VMs
However, there is a caveat about how it stores data I suppose. Your use case of mirroring drives is not possible on unRAID. Instead, it uses one drive for parity and redundancy, or you can do dual parity if you're really concerned about data loss. Basically how this works is your largest drive stores all the information about all the other drives to rebuild the data in case of drive failure, including the parity drive itself can be rebuilt if it fails. So say you had a 12 TB parity drive and a dozen or so other drives for the array. All of those drives can be literally anything so long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity. They can be 12 TB, 8 TB, 500 MB, old drives you shucked out of external storage cases, whatever. And you can add / remove these at will. The parity does not count to your max amount of storage, think of it like a mirror but for every other drive
Dual parity is an extra level of redundancy. It's basically like say you had a drive fail, and in those couple days where you order a new one or whatever, or when the data is rebuilding itself, if another drive fails, your data is still in tact. I don't bother because this would be such a rare occurrence. I do know data rebuilds are very high read/writes for days on a drive so it can be high stress on the drive so that's why the extra protection exists, but I still think it's overkill unless it's like irreplaceable data you can't lose (remember 3-2-1 backups in those cases)
Redhat > fedora > Debian > Ubuntu > mint > fedora. Been there for years now.
Went back to Ubuntu after laying off of it for a while. Now that I'm used to not using Windows, I feel like trying either Arch or Cachy though everyone keeps raving about Bazzite.
Man, I don't miss windows. My laptop works better without it. Idk what the hell windows does but my internal wifi works better than it did with windows. A 750mbps USB adapter was needed and my 1200mbps internal wasn't able to capture my 5G internet from 2 rooms away from the router.
I install Ubuntu and I can use my laptop in the shitter/3 rooms away for the router. All or most of the streaming is 720hd or 1080hd and it loads. IT ACTUALLY FUCKIN' LOADS.
Distro hopping sounds like too much work. I went from mint and was happy on that for years, then I went to Debian and I'm happy here. I'm curious about Fedora but not curious enough to be bothered with a new install.
I'll live vicariously through others
Debian (for 2 days because I broke it) -> Mint -> Arch (for an hour) -> CachyOS. I like Cachy and it has been half a year. With the package optimization I don't really see myself switching to anything else.
So far my personal favourite is manjaro. I always liked Arch based distros and Manjaro has done a great job at pre configuring everything. Manjaro also came with zsh as the default shell and I really liked that.
Fedora - arch - nixos - arch - Debian - arch - debian
i've never used a distro other than arch
Why settle? Software is a continually evolving ecosystem and grafting yourself to a certain distribution model or distribution team doesn't really make sense when you consider that. Some distribution might have the best things for you, today. Tomorrow, another may come along and do it better, or your current distribution may shift to not be to your liking anymore. Be flexible, but don't change for the sake of change. Change for a good reason.
No one?? Really?
72nd* time!
TIL it's actually 72st
Haha, I was about to be mad I was wrong somehow
Open SUSE tumbleweed, KDE plasma.
The update/revert stuff isolated to the os partition is sooooo good. If I hop again it's going to be to another one with similar functionality.
Snapper is available on most distros, I have it installed on endeavour, and I've installed it on gentoo
Sweet.
I keep coming back to Fedora and Fedora-derivatives. Loving Nobara, personally.
The more that "just works" out of the box, the happier I am.
Customizations are gonna be the same no matter what.
Kde is kde. Sway is sway. Ketchup/Catsup.
*72nd
Seventyseconth is a perfectly cromulent number.
I went from Windows to Mint and have been using that for almost a year now. Haven’t run into any issues that would make me want to switch: it does what I want it to now.
same but I am using Mint Debian edition and so far I've liked it okay but I think I probably should go with a distro that gets newer kernel updates sooner hmm
Started with Arch, landed on Artix ☺️
What are your thoughts on systemD and wayland?
Systemd: no particular thoughts. It's a PID1 and process manager? 😅 If I'd had to say something, then perhaps it "hampers" my Linux learning, since instead of having to write config files and scripts and learning to work with symlinks (for instance between config and whatnot templates in
/usr/share/and things you actually apply in/etc/), it has a lot of automation built in with all its-ctlcommands.Wayland: never used. It looks fancy? 😅
Sorry for boring answers. 🫣
That's the truth. The problem with systemd is that it's too good.
Wayland is neat and may reach feature parity with X11 just in time for it to be replaced by the next thing!
Not really. It took a while but it's been solid for a long time. Much as I resent their "our way or the highway" policy, but Ubuntu pulling support for X11 is probably for the best. Solves the adoption problem.
I tend to use macOS on the desktop (I know, booo) so I’ve landed on Alpine Linux for just about everything else.
I love that you can be on the bleeding edge but also not have tons of baggage everywhere. The downside is of course a lot of times I find myself doing things from scratch.
I started with Mint. My next and last stop was Alpine. I started trying to host my own website on a Raspberry Pi and ended up switching my laptop over to Alpine so that I could consistently learn on one operating system
I also found a side hobby in making POSIX portable scripts which goes nicely with self-hosting. It's great having a lean and customized desktop just for myself even if it took a long time to learn how to make it all work
Yes! I’ve found myself doing this both personally and professionally. At work we’re using Docker and Kubernetes but the old way of thinking is assuming everything is Debian or Ubuntu so a lot of Bash scripts just break on Alpine-based containers.
But even for those scripts we execute primarily on macOS, I’ve taken the liberty of making them POSIX compliant because you never know who’s using Bash, zsh, sh or what have you.
I do like the challenge of POSIX scripts.
I've remade a handful of GNU extensions as POSIX scripts/functions. I also just enjoy trying to be as minimal as possible and building my own tools. It helps me understand how operating systems in the process too
Most of my work is on codeberg
It can be a challenge though since all searches default to bash/GNU extensions
Ubuntu wayy back in the day, started on mint, then nobara, then bazzite on my laptop and steam deck, then nobara to cachy os on my desktop, and I quickly switched the laptop and steam deck to cachy because I liked it so much
Install gentoo
In 3 years:
Mint > OpenSUSE Tumbleweed > Fedora
Very happy with Fedora right now. If I ever had to switch again, maybe CachyOS. But not worth wiping and reconfiguring everything just for that. If RedHat pulls a Canonical though, definitely.
started in 99.
red hat, slackware, debian, ubuntu, arch, manjaro, nix, cachyos
And tomorrow will be the seventy-thirth distro.
Sls-> redhat -> debian (potato) around year 2000 ish. Been running debian since.
Have you moved the same install around and upgraded along the way? If not, how often do you decide to reinstall fresh?
I used to go fresh every 12 months or so on Windows. Only recently started to use Linux as a desktop so wondering what others do.
Windows need a regular reinstall. Not so much on linux.
My daily driver at work is the same install from 2000. I was so impressed with debians abillity to do a major upgrade, that it kind of became a game, to see how long i could upgrade it. A fresh install and copy over /home would have been more sane ;) Also with lvm you can migrate your running install to a new os drive while working. So hardware swap is a 5 min process. Boot new hw on old disk, with usb adapter. pvmove the install to the new drive. Install grub.
I do fresh installs on many other machines tho. My daily driver at home and the emergency laptop is installed when they are aquired, and upgraded as long as the hardware functions.
Thanks for the insight. Truly grateful you replied as I checked your comment history and there were months between comments so I thought I'd never get one :)
I'll refrain from doing a fresh install on this, see how it goes 😄
Really? I must not have much to say ;)
Read the debian release docs about the major upgrade when that time comes. They sometime contain important adaptations to make your upgraded install similar to a fresh one.
TL;DR: LMDE. It works for me.
I've not hopped much, and from at least one viewpoint I've not hopped at all.
If you want to count distros I've used, some even at home, however briefly, then I tried Red Hat and SUSE (actually bought a copy!) way back in the '90s, Ubuntu, CentOS and... you know I don't actually know what a few of the GUI-less ones were, at work from the '90s onwards.
I even tried PC-BSD for a very brief moment before conflicts with an unusual hardware setup sent me scurrying back to Windows.
But since I quit Microsoft Windows for good at home, I've been nothing but Mint. I switched to LMDE after using the original for a while, but I can see arguments each way for whether that's a hop or not.
Frankly, it will take something drastic to make me want to hop to something else.
I settled on Solus but I broke the laptop itself somehow. Now I'm back to using NixOS with my new thinkpad with trackpoint disabled...
Interesting, I was also using solus on my main machine for a couple of years before switching to NixOS. Good choices.
distros i have been distrohopping on so far:
TailsOS (somewhat for the LuLs,multiple times),Linux Mint(twice, i think),NixOS,Arch (twice),CachyOS (or Distros based on ARCH),OpenSUSE(Twice)
i stuck to CachyOS
After all the distribution hopping stuff. I settled with Debian Sid. Feels like home
I use arch rn but i've been messing with debian sid too, have you ever had issues dailing it?
The only issue I've encountered is with the apt updates as It throws gpg handshake error (i forgot the whole error called) happened last year. And for now no big/small issues so far
Used Manjaro for a while, gave EndeavourOS a try and have been happy there for a few years now. Before that it was Ubuntu, Mint and Debian. Also had OpenBSD on my servers for many years.
I am trying to set up like 50 Surface Pro 5s to give away so I wanted something that felt as close to Windows/Mac as possible while still allowing me to enable all the Surface Pro features.
Settled on ZorinOS as of now. (Actually, I did some experiments and even got the CAC reader working and CAC login working on it in the event that they want to use them in a student environment.)
Have you gotten the touch screen to work perfectly? I have tried all sorts of stuff, but I just cannot get it work well enough for drawing, even with the surface pro kernel.
Haven't tried drawing on it ever… it does work well enough to use for tapping buttons and such, but if you installed the Surface Pro kernel you've done everything I've done.
Ah... Figured as much, thanks for the answer. I got the pressure to work, yeah, but it was greatly reduced, and too laggy to actually use with the pen. I am now stuck with Windows 10, as I cannot get enough functionality from Linux distros, and there is no way I will deal with the dumpster fire Windows 11 is. Unfortunately, there are no other proper, portable computer + display good enough to draw -combinations on the market than SPs, still. At least ones I could afford...
Could I get one? My old toshiba laptop is bout to collapse
My timeline of the last 16 years
Ubuntu > Kubuntu > Neon > Debian (KDE) > Garuda Dragonized > Garuda + custom Hyprland
Holy shit thats a great combo that will definitely break soon, but kudos for the originality if tru
You would think so but no...
This is my daily driver and it's so stable I have been using it for work for the last 16 months or so.
When Hyprland upgraded to 0.56 it broke some of my config. I was still able to launch apps so no panic, but it took me a couple of hours to read the new documentation and fix everything.
I would not recommend this particular combo for a newbie, but honestly it is a lot more stable than people seem to think
Edit:
Posting a pic as soft proof
🫡
The katakana is sending me, I'm omega-jealous
I went with the Garuda catpuccin Mokka KDE plasma after using the Garuda i3 (computer upgrade prompted the change, not breakage) Been solid for me for about 3-4 years now.
Curious how the custom Hyprland is?
Garuda has a pretty good Hyprland install as well but it's too "neon lights puked all over me" for my taste
I installed one of those pre-packaged Hyprland dot files which was awesome but a lot more than I wanted (which made it harder to change). It did serve to help me understand things better; so I installed Garuda Dragnonized (which is what we had before but I wanted a fresh start after years of tinkering and modding), installed hyprland and started from scratch with my own, very basic, config
Off and on with Linux since 2003 until I went full conversion in 2018. I know red hat, ubuntu and mint were all in there as well as others that I can't remember. In 2018 I went through EndeavourOS, and Manjaro then settled with simple wonderful Arch like 5 years ago.
Ubuntu til KDE 5, then Kubuntu since
Arch Linux on laptop (needed some bleeding edge stuff), Fedora Linux on pc, looking forward for GNOME OS stable
Ubuntu, Manjaro, Endeavour.
Played a bit with others before I settled, but XFCE feels like home and not having to do a system update that breaks everything every year has been great.
I absolutely love the ecosystem that's sprung around Arch over the years.
And ofc I wish the fans of the various Arch-based distros had a less antagonistic approach to each other. 🙄 I mean Arch's main goal is to be flexible and having a diverse family of derived distros downstream is the ultimate confirmation of that goal.
It's also very healthy for any distro to have a big "family tree" because the upstream benefits from contributions from a larger community that may not have vibed with the parent distro otherwise.
Mint -> Manjaro -> Arch
I also have absolutely broken Mint install that I'll probably keep using until it stops booting. I thought it would be simpler to put Mint on a headless computer and use GUI over VNC.
Then come issues with permissions/dbus or whatever is going on.
Couple days ago I tried to do version upgrade, but couldn't use GUI anymore due to broken permissions. One of the python scripts that do the upgrade managed to at least partially work (GUI wouldn't run as root), by which I mean the GUI package manager complaining about "corrupted" repo list or something like that. But at least it updated the repo names, and what is Linux OS other than a bunch of packages, so I just rolled with it and ran
apt upgrade.I mean, it's running Linux mint, but the main method of connection is SSH and in case things go bad, serial port. This is already cursed.
I am just too used to Arch. I have no idea what versions even do aside from keeping major package versions separate (which sounds like I should be able to just change version name in sources list).
But I do cursed things often. I also have a laptop with Proxmox that I put KDE Plasma on, and pass windows from VMs using Waypipe. Yeah, similar to Qubes OS, but also unstable and less secure.
Desktop: Mint -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Manjaro -> Ubuntu - > Fedora
Server: Debian -> CentOS -> Rocky
At least use Alma. Rocky is toxic to the ecosystem while Alma contributes to the ecosystem.
Can you elaborate? When I first chose between them back when they first forked, Alma was not as mature as Rocky and Rocky was run by the founder of CENTOS, so I chose that one, but I have no real attachment to either. It would take a lot to switch, but if Alma is better in that way, I'd be happy to migrate as I upgrade.
Sure. Red Hat moved CentOS where it belonged, upstream, in between Fedora and RHEL. That generally upset people who wanted a bug for bug free version of RHEL. Rocky and Alma were both born out of that era. Alma actually works with Red Hat, created its own SIGs and contributes upstream to Fedora. Rocky on the other hand is backed by CIQ. Does not contribute anything upstream, bends/breaks licensing to get source from Red Hat to get as close as they can to that bug for bug code without doing any engineering themselves. Then CIQ poaches Red Hat employees and customers by offering way cheaper support because they don't pay for any of that pesky engineering.
Honestly at home there really isn't a reason not to just use CentOS Stream imo. It is ABI compatible with RHEL. There is a misconception that it is a "rolling distro" but it only rolls through minor releases in that it doesn't even have minor releases. Alma is something in the middle. Actively contributing, ABI compatible, and offers minor versions.
Hell, even Oracle at least adds their own twist to OEL instead of straight up ripping off RHEL.
Setlled on bazzite out of laziness, preferred cachyos
I bought a secondhand Steam Deck and was convinced by using it docked with kbm that Linux is ready to be my one and only.
From there, my 2015 laptop moved from Windows 10 to PopOS -> Cinnamon Mint -> CachyOS -> Cinnamon Mint. I plan to build a desktop sometime between now and the release of PlayStation 6, and I'll probably go with CachyOS for that. I would just buy a Steam Machine, but I can't justify the price vs performance when I don't really care about console comforts like CEC. I'd rather pay the cost of the higher Steam Machine to get PS6 level performance.
My wife moved her laptop from Windows 10 to Cinnamon Mint. She has to have a Windows partition for proctored exam spyware for online classes, but she's now only using Windows for that one thing. She's much more comfortable with Mint.
Pop!_OS on my laptop and CachyOS on my desktop.
Arch for many many years. Then Bazzite for round about 8 months. Now CachyOS for 9 months. Super happy with it. Additionally, I am running Debian on my Thinkpad and server.
Arch->Elementary OS
I had experienced other distros before (not on my pc, at least), but as a joke my cousin suggested Arch, while I had some trouble setting it up, the documentation was so good I stayed for a while. Though I've always liked MacOS, so when upgrading my notebook, I took chance to install Elementary OS 8. Overall, it's ubuntu based, so I can't complain.
ublue/fedora bootc derivatives
I've run most non KDE distros now I just install Debian or Ubuntu depending on the computer
Started with Mandrake, currently on Cachy
It's a journey and I tested a lot of distros but these are the ones I actually used in 20 years:
Pardus >> Ubuntu >> Crunchbang >> Bunsenlabs >> Manjaro >> EndeavourOS >> Void
I also used MeeGo on my netbook when its prime time. Crunchbang will always have a special place for me. The OG Pardus was fun too.
Today I'm using Chimera, but KaOS, Arix or perhaps some unholy install of Alpine with DINIT are tempting me. Seems a persistent kernel panic on wake from sleep has been fixed, so I'm not super tempted to hop ATM.
nd*
Ubuntu -> SteamOS (Steam Deck as PC convinced me to change my main PC) -> Endeavour OS -> Mint -> Kubuntu -> Zorin OS -> OpenSUSE (first one that stuck longterm) -> CachyOS (PC permanently now) + Debian (home server) + Bazzite (lounge console)
Early on I went from mandrake to gentoo, been on gentoo forever but decided as I was building my docker swarm that I wanted to go easy so I went with Ubuntu server on my 2 additional nodes, and then for my wife’s machine I went Linux mint. When windows is no longer needed for anything I think I will probably do gentoo on my primary machine. The programmer in me likes seeing compiles
Slackware -> rhl(4) -> rhel -> centos -> rocky
High SLSA, high iso27002.
Hmmm. My hopping stared long ago. I think it was something like:
MINIX > Slackware > RedHat > Gentoo > LFS > RedHat > Ubuntu > Bazzite
MINIX isn't technically Linux, but I'm including it for fun. And Ubuntu was by far the longest stretch. Probably close to 15 years on that one.
Ubuntu (like 100 years ago) > Debian > Mint (for several years) > a bunch of things > Kubuntu > PikaOS (GNOME)
Cinnamon Mint is almost perfect as a daily driver, but had hangups in gaming (frame stutter, controller disconnects, etc...)
Tried PopOS! for a hot minute, Cosmic is pretty but very clearly still WIP
Rode the plasma train for a little while on Kubuntu, but everything felt a little half-baked and games crashed pretty regularly.
I've settled on PikaOS GNOME for now as my daily driver. Things seem generally solid, but I've only been using it for a few weeks, TBD on the long-term stability, but I'll probably hang here at least until whenever Mint reaches stable Wayland support, at which point I'll give that a go.
I'm a distro hoe 😔
I go to the distro nightclub and become a distro whore
Currently arching for Arch
Ubuntu -> Debian -> arch (6 years) -> Garuda (3-4 years)
Still use Debian on some machines but Garuda is just smooth and more just-works than Arch.
at this point just pick a fucking main branch and install the rest of the shit on top. It's all just fucking linux + package manager + DE.
Fedora, Arch, Debian, Suse, Slack, Gentoo. Pick one. KDE, LXQT, Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon, or one of those newfangled WM only DEs.
Fucking done.
If you keep jerking off that hard drive , it'll get hairy.