What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?
I've been using Linux Mint since forever. I've never felt a reason to change. But I'm interested in what persuaded others to move.
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I've been using Linux Mint since forever. I've never felt a reason to change. But I'm interested in what persuaded others to move.
Every couple of years I think to myself "You know, I can't actually remember why I don't like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I've got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they've had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?"
And then I download Ubuntu.
And then I remember.
Admittedly, it's been a few years and I'm coming due, but let's see what I can remember...
You can dpkg -r the package you tried to install then apt won't complain about missing dependency packages for your app as it won't be marked for to be installed
There isn't a big global community repo per say like aur but anyone can host their own repos with PPAs, you just need to add them to your lists
Most apt quirks are there with Debian too, not just an Ubuntu thing. The rest of the things you mentioned are fair.
Well there is this one thing where ppas break updates.
In fairness it does have the PPA system which predates the AUR and does provide a good job of providing third party amd semi-third party software.
But you're right that Ubuntu has sold out on building snaps for software instead of ppas.
The PPAs weren't that useful. I mean they worked fine for the purpose, but if you used too many of them you'd eventually get your system into a dependency hell. That meant packages were stuck without updates and also blocking others from updating.
The other thing was that even if you kept clear of PPAs it was anybody's guess if you could upgrade to the next release. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't and you'd have to reinstall from scratch.
Put together it meant after a while you didn't bother upgrading period, or upgraded only major releases but by reinstalling from scratch every single time (and preserving /home). It was a chore and I resented it and kept putting it off.
That Ubuntu would install the snap version of certain apps when I installed them directly in the terminal was the main reason I left Ubuntu after a few years. So annoying!
What do you recommend for ubuntu alternative? I want to leave for something else, but I also want all my programs to install and work fine. If an app supports ubuntu, would it support debian as well?
You can start by trying Linux Mint, it's based directly on Ubuntu but with most problematic bits of Ubuntu removed. Mint comes in several sub-flavors that mostly change the way your desktop looks and acts, start with the Cinnamon edition as it's the safest bet.
Or just use Debian. Ubuntu is based off it
That was a couple of years ago, Vince has already forgotten.
Ubuntu sometimes gives me Windows vibes.
Try Ubuntu Mate, it's actually ok. I'm alot not the biggest fan of snaps. I try and get .debs or apt get, where I can. App Images seem a little odd to me, but Flatpack seems alright.
Try Ubuntu mate
'straya!!
I am happy on opensuse TW with only a window manager. So I am oke but dont like when i have to use ubuntu. Also gnome is not my thing.
When you login does it say "G'day!" ?
Recommending ubuntu to newbies is the product of either incompetence or malice when Mint, zorin and nobara exist
I wouldn't recommend Nobara, maybe in a few cases but otherwise it's not the best to enter into Linux with.
Totally agree, are difficult to do and require following complex instructions on their Discord server (that you have to pay attention to)
Would you mind to explain why? I have yet to try it, but the concept seems nice: predisposing a set of tools useful for linux gamers/creators for those who are not technical
While it has a bunch of patches that can boost gaming performance and such it's stability takes a hit in some areas. It's also not quite as user friendly as other options. It can be better for those looking for a fedora base if that's what they prefer, tho.
It's also extremely opinionated & while it's a great fit for those who have a matching use case, for general uses it's a bit too opinionated.
It's neither the worst, nor the best. It just highly depends on use case.
I've watched a few comparison videos, and the performance gains are negligible when compared to other common distros, so that's definitely not the point in installing it.
The good part about nobara is the set of tools that come preinstalled and the wecome program which lets you update the system, the drivers and the codecs.
Nothing you couldn't replicate in a few minutes on another distro of course
Can you expand on that? I've never used Linux as a daily driver, interacting with Ubuntu systems via SSH.
i don't like how Ubuntu feels (gui) so idk about cli issues
it's not a problem with Gnome btw, it's just the colours are yuck vomit and snap 🗿
Ah yeah, I've never used the GUI for long enough to care how it looks, and no snap in CLI.
Good to know if my company forces my work laptop to windows 11! (I will not use an OS without a side taskbar)
Gentoo. No. Compiling all of the things was not for me.
Use flags in
emergewas my breaking pointI daily drive Fedora, but I’ve used Arch, OpenSUSE, Debian, and more. Once you get used to how Linux works, distro doesn’t really matter that much aside from edge case distros that operate totally differently like Nix. I chose Fedora because I like the dnf package manager.
The only distro I don’t like is Ubuntu. I had to setup a Linux VM at work so I figured Ubuntu would be a good choice for that. Firefox is painfully slow to open because of Snap, so I uninstall it and run “apt install firefox” which Ubuntu overrides and installs the Snap again.
Fuck. That. Deleted the VM and installed Debian instead.
Yeah, over the years they've all become largely the same except for package management and the locations of some config files and system binaries (/bin,/sbin,/usr/local/sbin, etc..). Some attempt to be a one size fits all model and contain everything that you'd want, while others give you the bare minimum.
Most of them.
Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it's surprisingly bad at that.
Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.
Opensuse world - I've only tried it once, probably 15 years ago. Didn't really know my way around computers all that much at the time, but it didn't click and I've left it. Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.
Arch - it was my daily for a year or two. Big fan. It still runs my email. At some point the size of packages started to annoy me, though. Still has the best wiki. I've never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with.
I've got the Gentoo bug now. For the first time I genuinely feel
~/. A lean, mean system of machines :)I highly enjoy using EndeavourOS. But then again, I wouldn't classify it as a spinoff, it's pretty much vanilla Arch, but purple.
Now Manjaro on the other hand... Tried it and understood why so many people don't like it within the first week.
Mind to elaborate a little bit more about the Manjaro problem? I am driving it since a couple of years without any issue but I keep hearing this… now I am afraid :)
I hope it works for you forever. I am not going to get in an argument with the other Manjaro users here that will come to argue with you.
Just keep in mind that most of the people warning you away from Manjaro have a story that basically sums up as “I used to love Manjaro until, one day, it totally broke on me. Now I won’t touch it.” Sadly, this includes me. Will you join us one day? I hope not.
Most stories of people having manjaro break involve nvidia and not knowing how to build kernel entries.
Keep using it if it works for you.
Manjaro detractors are usually:
I am trying to think of how to respond to this without being a jerk.
Let me skip to the end. Until very recently, I thought of Manjaro users as innocents that just did not understand the risk. Like islanders living next to a volcano that had never erupted in their lifetime.
I still view most Manjaro users that way. Manjaro defenders though I now think of as dog owners whose animals have bitten multiple times. When told, the owner insists that “my dog would never do that” or “if it did, you must have done something wrong”. I am done arguing with those people. All I can do is warn others that this dog has bitten several of us and you may not want to enter that yard. If you do, who knows, the dog may be friendly. Or not. Again, all I can tell you is that many of us have scars. Use that information as you will.
Most “Manjaro detractors” I have encountered have years of experience with both Manjaro and other Arch distros. Their tales come from experience. When they share their cautionary tales, there are often Manjaro defenders whose best defence is just to deny that what the “detractors” are saying ( about their own experience ) is real.
My core question for the defenders would be, if it is our fault, why do we only encounter the problems on Manjaro?
Let’s go through the bullets above one by one:
I got in a lengthy back and forth with a Manjaro fan the other day where I repeatedly related the ways that Manjaro used to break on me and how that does not happen for me on vanilla Arch or EndeavourOS. They just kept coming back telling me that it could not have happened and, if I thought it could, that I did not understand how the AUR works. It was insane. Basically, this guy could not follow what I was saying to him. His response to his inability to understand the scenario that I was describing was to insult my intelligence and expertise.
Look loser. I don’t care if you believe me that your dog bites. I will continue to warn people and they can decide if they want to risk it or not.
Isn't it funny how none of the people who claim that Manjaro "just broke" on them can recall what the problem was? They can't point at a bug report. It's nothing they did, naturally (they're "experienced" users, after all). It just broke.
Meanwhile, it never broke for me or others, in years of use, with dozens of AUR packages installed. So yeah. I think I'll stick to concrete evidence like a rational person, thanks.
I see this a lot and nobody really ever explains, properly, why.
I have used Linux off and on for many years (mainly server OS such as RHEL and CentOS). I have now migrated from Windows desktop to Manjaro KDE. Using it for a year. Had one issue (wouldn't boot after a kernel update), which I sorted quickly. Other than that it's been rock solid.
But this isn't a 'I have a great experience so you're all just haters' post.
I know the stuff about it being a week or behind Arch. I remember something about the maintainers (can't remember specifics) but they seem to be minor niggles that don't affect most people.
Genuine question.
Why do you dislike Manjaro? I also know it's a common theme to dislike it, so any other insight there?
Not the guy you asked, but my 2 main gripes are:
Based
What does
basedmean?Never saw this?
https://manjarno.pages.dev/
Wow, they haven't fucked up for more than a year? Is this some kind of record?
I am responding too much but this question seems genuine so I hope this answer helps.
1 - I, at least, do not “dislike” Manjaro. I think it is very good looking. I loved the out of the box experience. I liked it a lot.
2 - Manjaro broke on me multiple times. I now consider it “unsafe”. That is not really “dislike”.
Why unsafe?
1 - the project has governance issues. You can say we should get over them but they have been repetitive. Once bitten, twice shy as they say.
2 - more systemically, using the AUR is less safe than on other Arch distros
Why? Well, primarily because the Manjaro repos “hold back” packages for something like 2 - 4 weeks ( I honestly cannot remember but the number is not the issue ). Manjaro does not curate the AUR itself though so the AUR is “current” compared to other Arch distros.
I will not run through all the ways this can break things. I will point out though that when Manjaro defenders say that “it all syncs up again in a couple of weeks”, they are wrong.
It is not about delaying updates ( sorry if I am insulting your intelligence to say this but Manjaro defenders often insist on thinking this is “the problem” that people have with Manjaro ). This cannot be the problem. Different users update at different times. I do it frequently. Some people wait months.
You can manually delay updates on any Arch distro. EndeavourOS even includes a utility ( eos-update ) to specify a specific delay on package updates.
In short, the problems stem from the lack of repo sync at INSTALL time. Manjaro differs from every other Arch distro in terms of what packages are available when you install software from the AUR.
You can believe that this matters, as I have learned, or you can believe that it does not. I hope it works out for you. I really do.
Which is completely irrelevant because AUR "packages" are only very loosely related to Arch binaries. Your average AUR is just a source package developed by someone who most likely doesn't use Arch, plus a thin wrapper script that says "it needs these packages to compile and these packages to run".
As users of source based distros like Nix and Gentoo will show you, you can get a well-made source package to compile and run on an extremely wide variety of system states (and also distros, architectures etc.)
The fact that binaries on Manjaro are a few weeks late is completely irrelevant for something compiled from source from a reasonably recent source package.
You seem to be under the impression that AUR packagers perform extensive testing. They don't. They run it once, if it works for them they publish. They did that weeks or months or in some cases years ago compared to the time you install. By which time the relevance of that test to Arch or Manjaro or any Arch distro is tenuous at best.
There is one case where an AUR package can fail installing, and that's if the packager has requested a dependency in a version that for some reason isn't available on your system. This can happen to Manjaro due to the delay but also to any other Arch distro depending on whether the user is willing and able get that version at that particular time. Not everybody is willing to drop everything and update three times a day.
The other thing that people can't seem to get through their head is that AUR packages will break eventually as the system binaries are updated. You have to recompile AUR packages when they break. This is the same for all Arch distros.
I've used EndeavourOS but thought it was fugly enough not to use it hah
Well damn, federation took its sweet time to show me your reply
A few years ago I wanted to get away from Ubuntu on my desktop PC so I sat down and considered about a dozen of the most recommended Linux distros install images.
My requirements were:
Guess which distro ticked absolutely every single box.
You are trolling us.
If you want stable, the answer is not Manjaro. If you do not have time for debugging, the answer is for sure not Manjaro.
Suit yourself. I'm telling you that you're sleeping on one of the most user-friendly, up to date, gaming-ready, stable and generally hassle free distros out there, and it's coming from someone who actually tried all the popular ones.
In exchange you just have to stick to a LTS kernel and not replace critical system components from AUR. Which I think you'll agree are reasonable conditions for all Arch distros, heck, all distros.
Try it, don't try it, up to you.
I disbelive the debian answer here. Sounds like a case of frankendebian https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian
Been usig Debian for home and work and on hundreds of servers for 2 decades and it have been near flawless. Any issues i have had have always been my own fault.
While debian is the least offensive, I did explicitly say world. Add your buntus, mints, whathaveyou into the mix and shit hits the fan very quickly. Yes, real world runs that bollocks in prod. No, I do not agree with it.
Doesn't debian also suffer from apt's pitfall
It does, but apt is the only package manager on Debian.
Ah yes, when Microsoft looked for a contractor to develop FOSS implementations of some Windows technologies to meet demands by the EU and Mark Shullteworth made a big fuss of it until making deals with Microsoft himself...
What about that time Suse supported Microsoft's claim that Linux infringes on their patents? Ms got enough grounds to sue everyone even marginally related to Linux for over a decade, Suse got a contract to sell licences that prevent Ms from suing companies for using Linux.
The wider company, that included Novell at that time, entered some cross patent licensing deal. It happens all the time. Didn't kill Linux as we can comfortably say these days.
With enough sophistry anything can seem insignificant. The Linux we use today has developed within the constraints of Microsoft threatening to sue anyone and everyone. The only reason they could do that was due to suse, as the longest running commercial distro, publicly saying that Linux infringes on those patents.
No, it was the "don't sue us and we'll testify in your favour while you're suing our competition".
Considering that the competition is alive and well today, I think it's fair to assume that this claim didn't come true.
Whoosh.
Gentoo all the way since 20 years, on all kind of devices, going strong and never looked back.
Ubuntu, I hate you. A messy complex windows-esque caricature in the Linux world, where "somebody else" knows better than me and shoves it down my gully.
So there you go, my best and worst distros choice.
I've only got a few years on Gentoo - how has your journey been? You must've started with stage 1!
Well, yes, stage3 has been a revolution. But I don't remember using stage1 directly. I started with Linux way earlier than gentoo... On 386.
I need to try Gentoo again. The installer used to be absolute garbage and required a ton of work to get the a usable system if you deviated too far from a normal computer setup.
There is no installer as such. You copy an archive, extract it and rebuild @world. Anything beyond that is up to you. I'm sticking to openrc - haven't had any issues since libxcrypt news item. Can't even recall what it was.
That’s interesting! I’ll have to give it a shot!
It is that deal from 2006(?) or so. Agreeing to not be sued for an exchange of money is dodgy. Add the competition which was not offered the same deal; add in the environment which was drastically different; it was a shit thing to do. Purely a business decision. I understand why the shareholders wanted that, but that doesn't make it right nor desirable for me.
Granted, nothing came out of it in the end and Linux managed to get itself established in a way where one could argue is close to impossible to get rid of it, but I feel like this deal is similar to getting stabbed - the one being stabbed will always bear a scar and remember, while others will forget over time. People growing up after this deal will never have experienced the mood and environment of that time which only makes it more difficult to understand why it was a big deal.
All of them, so I'm still on Windows
Yes officer, this heretic right here.
She turned me into a newt!
How dare you!
We've found a witch, sire. May we burn her?
Basic, but Ubuntu. It's got snaps which are slow and generally suck, plus Canonical
I think you are referring to gnome more than debian. I've been trying debian with kde and so far I haven't found that many problems.
Debian with Gnome is also pretty alright. I've been using that for a long time now. I guess it depends a bit where you come from. If you want something like Windows, it's probably a big deal for you. If you're used to Android or MacOS, you might enjoy the Gnome experience.
The Whisker menu in XFCE and Cinnamon start menus are GODSENDS to new users.
I needed them so badly when I was first getting started in Linux because I didn't even know what programs I had installed.
It's how I feel about Debian's website. I'm never ready for their website.
As someone who hates Windows with a passion, once everyone recommend Linux Mint, I knew I had to try it.
I immediately had negative first impressions. I simply don't wanna use something with a desktop environment that reminds me of something that I hate. I get that it makes transitioning a lot easier for many, but for me it simply looks too similar to Windows.
I'm sure you know it by now, but Mint is the "I Can't Believe It's Not Windows!" distro very much on purpose, haha.
As a person who doesn't want to fiddle with my OS or the terminal, yeah, I love me some Mint.
It's good for those that want it, but some would rather just having a completely new user experience.
Swapping out KDE/Plasma for Gnome or anything else is dead simple most of the time. The DE isn't locked to the distro, you can have multiple DEs and windowing systems (X and Wayland) installed at once. You can select them from your login manager.
I wish I knew about this sooner.
Manjaro - used to love it. Now the only distro I actively advise against
Garuda - just too much ( I prefer Arch / EndeavourOS )
Elementary - wanted to love it - just too limited
Gentoo - realized I just don’t want to build everything
RHEL Workstation - everything too old
Bhodi - honestly do not remember - long ago
Ubuntu - ok, let’s expand…
These days, I dislike Snaps. Ubuntu just never hit the sweet spot for me though. I was already an experienced Linux user when it appeared and preferred RPM based distros at the tome. Ubuntu always seemed slow and fragile to me. Setting things up, like Apache with Mono back in the day, was “different” on Ubuntu and that annoyed me. For most of its history, it is what I would recommend to new users but I just never liked it myself.
Debian Stable - ok, let’s expand
I really like Debian. It was also a little “alien” when I was using Fedora / Mandrake and the like but it never bothered me like Ubuntu. I ran RHEL / Centos as servers so I did not need Debian stability. As a desktop, Debian packages were always just a little too old ( especially for dev ). The lack of non-free firmware made it a pain.
These days though, Debian has been growing on me. The move to include non-free firmware has made it much more practical. With Flatpaks and Distrobox, aging packages is much less of a problem too. I could see myself using Debian. I am strongly considering moving to VanillaOS ( immutable Debian ).
I basically do not run any RHEL servers anymore. At home, I have a fair bit running Debian already ( Proxmox, PiHole, PiVPN, and a Minecraft server ).
EndeavourOS is my primary desktop these days ( and I love it ) but it is mostly for the AUR. A Debian base with an Arch Distrobox might be perfect. Void seems quite nice as well.
I have been an Open Source advocate forever ( and used to say Free Software and FLOSS ). I have used Linux daily since the 0.99 kernels and I even installed 386BSD back in the day. Despite that, the biggest “not for me” distros right now are anything too closely associated with the politics of the GNU project. It has almost made me want to leave Linux and I have considered moving to FreeBSD. I would love to use Haiku. OCI containers and the huge software ecosystem keep me on Linux though.
The distribution that intrigues me the most right now is Chimera Linux. I run it with an Arch distrobox and it may become my daily driver. The pragmatism of projects like SerenityOS really attracts me. Who knows it may be what finally pulls me away after 30+ years of Linux.
What was your problem with Manjaro?
Apparently there's a lot of hate for the devs/packaging team, people say updates break their systems all the time. I've used it on and off for a while years ago, personally and have had no issues. I put it on my parent's computer over two years ago and they haven't had any issues either.
Yep there seems to be a lot of hate for stupid reasons ("omg they forgot to renew the SSL cert of the archived forum"). I've been using it for 4+ years now and had zero major problems. I have even installed some exotic software from the AUR and am using them without any issues.
NixOS… for now. I was on Fedora and was looking for something new. Thought I’d try these new „immutable” distros. Then realised I didn’t know enough about normal ones yet, so I switched to Arch instead. Plus, Nix’ docs are horrendous imo
I’ve been learning Nix recently and I can 100% agree on this. Their community forum is excellent though.
Gentoo - too long compile time, especially on my dated CPU. I prefer my system to update quickly.
Linux Mint - don't like apt, some packages I installed refused to work properly (like Lutris), and the color scheme which is admittedly customizable but I prefer rolling with defaults except when using WM.
Void Linux - after installing it I realized how much I actually missed systemd, couldn't be arsed to symlink services manually. And yes, I realize that's the whole point.
NixOS - realized how much there is to learn with the flakes and separating home configurations and whatever, and just gave up
Manjaro - I tried it twice at the beginning of my Linux journey, and both times the nvidia driver shat itself and gave me different problems that I couldn't fix.
Maybe I've been spoiled by Arch though, as most of my problems probably boil down to "not the same packages", "not pacman", "need to learn new skills that weren't in Arch" and so on. Though admittedly, I did try to explore with an open mind to find a new "cool" distro, but I'd always go back.
Doesn't Void have a tool that does the symlinking for you?
skill issue, skill issue, skill issue, skill.....
/s
Ubuntu, felt like I was being treated like a child with the lack of user customizability
then I chose to jump directly into Arch Linux🙃 and saw despair from analysis paralysis, somehow I learned Arch in just a month tho🤷♀️
I ditched Ubuntu LTS for my homelab virtual machines around 20.04 when they started to push snaps, netplan and cloud-init, meaning I would have to spend a significant amount of effort redoing my bootstrap scripts for no good reason and learning skills that are only applicable in the Ubuntu ecosystem. I went with debian stable instead, and was left wondering why I hadn't done that sooner. It's like Ubuntu without all the weirdness.
I've been using Xubuntu LTS on my work laptop some 10 years now. All the customization I do is remove snaps and add flatpaks. It just works.
I have RHEL and derivatives on my work machines, where I spend most of my day. I don't like the RPM package system, which they tried to improve upon several times already. I don't like Gnome, is too opinionated for me.
I had a colleague who used Gentoo, to claim superiority. His laptop spent most of the day burning kilowatts with the fans blowing. Not for me. Having everyone build packages from source is very unneficient. "Oh, but the security of building your own binaries! " Well, did you look at the code you're building? No? Well then.
I end up always going back to the DEB ecosystem, with a XFCE desktop. Lately I've been using Manjaro with XFCE and Flatpaks, no AUR.
What's the benefits of using Flatpacks over Docker shit?
As far as I know, docker for services, flatpak for desktop applications.
Couldn't I simply use docker for both and eliminate redundancy?
Docker is not optimized for desktop and Flatpaks aren't optimized for running services. You'll spend more time & effort making both of them work and still end up with sub-optimal experiences.
Thank you for this info!
One cold argue that "desktop" is merely a kind of a service
To everyone's detriment
Ubuntu. It has become so shitty over time, it's oretty sad.
Get that downvote finger ready!
Arch.
I know it's what all the cool kids are using, and I keep trying to like it, but I just can't get into it. I'm a slacker for life.
No downvote here my friend. I love arch, but that doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. Plug-and-play distros are great too, they just have different strong points.
Haha, I've been daily driving slackware since the late 90s. I like to tinker and install a lot of stuff. I seem to break anything with an automated package manager and dependency resolution.
Oops, I seem to have misread you. Haha, ok, wow I am a total linux noob compared to you.
Nah, I'm just a hobbyist. I'm a n00b compared to all the regulars in the slackware channel on IRC. But I love tinkering and learning. I'd need your help to install vanilla arch, just like you'd probably need mine to get started on slackware. (The slackware install is actually super easy).
I've been trying to distrohop the past couple months, see what else is out there. I wasn't paying attention installing Garuda and borked my EFI partition. I did manage to chroot into my still working slackware partition, but I couldn't figure out how to re-install grub. So I formatted and did a fresh slackware install.
I am ok with that. If you would consider keeping the baby after ditching the bath water, maybe give EndeavourOS a try.
That's actually next on my list to check out.
A wild slacker appears.
Are you your own dependency manager too?
Some day I'm going to get someone in one of these "what distro should I try?" posts to install slackware and fall in love with it.
Sbopkg has a slackbuild queue generator
sqgwhich builds the dependencies for applications in it for you. apart from that I'm trying to package ROCm.Holy crap, how did I forget that existed? I would use that for complex stuff like vlc back in the day.
I've not heard of ROCm, but I think I get the gist. It's something like Cuda for AMD?
Are you going to upload and maintain it if you get it working?
Its easy to forget it cause the name is forgettable lol.
yeah basically. Its annoying af to build from source.
yeah i would like to do that but baby steps it needs to build and work.
Come say hi at ##seven on libera.chat if you are so inclined. We're a group of wild slackers who all met on the main irc channel.
For sure.. And come drop in at #slackware:matrix.org if you use matrix. Its an unofficial room btw.
Anything arch, basically. Maybe I'm just a too lower tier power user, but I have always returned to Mint. Rock solid daily driver working out of the box. I don't really want to have to tinker with the os, I admit. It should just work.
Fully agree. I once wanted to try it. I took a look at the documentation for partitioning and realized that I needed 2 full days for a working installation and constant access to another PC to be able to read the documentation.. No thanks, I don't care about the hate, Debian/Ubuntu is up and running in 30 mins and gets out of the way...
My personal PC and work PC are windows. I also just accidently removed a lot of my game files, so I figure it's about time to start over. I'm going for kubuntu this time. I figure it's going to be easier to get set up and running quickly without much fuss.
That said, I also run endeavor os on a little netbook tablet I have, so I'm dipping a toe there as well.
Honestly everything besides Debian and Arch after distro hopping for years.
Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn't install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn't worth the trouble.
Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don't want to waste space on flatpaks.
NixOS. If I’m going to invest that much effort to configure a system I don’t want to have to put up with systemd.
Most distributions are fine honestly. Ubuntu is clearly not my thing. Not a fan of Redhat-based distribution either. I wanted to appreciate OpenSuse as they've been supporters of KDE for a long time but wasn't comfortable with Yast.
Apart from that, Manjaro is awesome, Arch amazing, Debian brilliant, etc.
You don't need yast for anything.
I don't even remember how many years it's been when Yast was actually needed. It's optional since quite some time. Even installing the OS itself could technically be done through Calamares but I don't think that's worth the effort.
Good to hear, my impression of OpenSuse was from 10+ years ago, I should have said so.
Arch: I need reproducible setups. Also bleeding edge is not for me.
I have to give credit to their documentation though!
NixOS. Every simple update (nixos rebuild switch) was just eating RAM & CPU. I managed to brick it when updating to 23.11 and couldn't find a way out of the mess I created (even with the saved snapshots) so I said adios.
Ubuntu - Loved it in 2006-2012ish but I jumped ship when Amazon appeared in search. Great place to start my Linux journey at the time.
Manjaro - Only distro to ever break entirely on me. I didn't care enough to try and figure out why.
Tried endeavor and stock arch but they weren't my cup of tea. No real issues with them though.
Fedora - I liked for a few years but abandoned after the RHEL drama this summer. Seems to be going the way of Ubuntu. Maybe that's just my opinion.
I use and like Solus a lot but they didn't update anything for 2 years until this summer. I use it on my gaming PC and an old laptop for web browsing but nothing important. It's always been solid for me, I just worry about it going extinct. They do have an updated road map and seem re-energized though. I also think it's a good beginner distro because you don't have to dive into terminal much, and a good distro if you are a pro, but kind of bad if you are an intermediate user because there aren't a ton of resources on it that bigger distros have.
I mostly use Debian these days. Stable on my server. Testing on everything else. I don't see me abandoning it anytime soon.
PopOS and Ubuntu - really just found that I don't like gnome. Nothing against it, I know some people love it but it is not for me. This would likely apply to any gnome distro, but those were the two I tried and immediately moved on.
Honorable mention: Manjaro because "it just breaks™" but it wasn't something I noticed immediately and initially liked the os...
Manjaro. Because it blank screened in the first update after installation. Never touched it again.
I've been using Debian since 1.3. Haven't really ever needed anything else.
I did "experiment" a bit when the decision to go with systemd was taken, but in the end, most distros went with it and it really isn't that big deal for me.
So it's just Debian. I need a computer that works.
I miss Debian sometimes, but systemD irks me.
Arch: Arch
Ubuntu (and downstreams): Canonical
Enjoying Fedora. Find Debian (and downstreams) pretty solid as well.
Over the years I have tried most mainstream distros. I have never seen a reason to use anything other than Debian. Never had it break due to upgrading, I have never tried Nix, Alpine, Gentoo, or Slackware, not many other others I haven't tried since I started using Linux in 2000.
They must have swapped roles at some point, Elementary lets you minimize windows the last time I checked (use toolbar or gesture), and GNOME doesn't 😂
I honestly don't mind lack of visual customization as long as the design language makes sense, is clear, is consistent, and applies to all the system apps and default utilities. In the case of Elementary and GNOME this is OK IMO because they are ridiculously consistent, and share some similarities
You can't minimize windows in eOS?
WTF?
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. It all makes sense now.
Just another one of gnome's ridiculous design decisions, lol.
Part of me thinks they're being paid by Apple and Microsoft just to keep the Linux desktop shit.
Gnome is amazing, without it I probably wouldn't bother with Linux. Honestly nothing comes close UX-wise for me. I don't want yet another Windows clone.
Minimising is a misuse of the gnome workflow, ideally you'd move a window to another desktop. Better than hiding it in some dock IMO.
Maximising I literally never used the button for anyway. I double clicked the title bar, dragged the program to the top, or pressed Super+Up. Aiming for a relatively small button just feels worse than all of those. It's literally a pointless button and I feel like the only reason anybody has it it just because they're used to seeing it/having a Windows UX.
It's fine that you want your UX to work like Microsoft's, but that doesn't mean others are bad.
E: people get really upset when you point out that their Windows clones are windows clones lol. It's not an insult.
Ubuntu Reason : Canonical
"Not exactly Linux", but FreeBSD. Gave it a couple tries but gave up when I realized its minimalism is a placebo at best and its "super security features" can (also) be achieved on any other standard Linux distribution.
Got any alternatives to setup OPNsense without using FBSD then?
Alpine + terminal :D
Gentoo: I hated constantly compiling and configuring. It was incredibly time consuming. If I was compiling for uncommon cases it might make sense, but I am dealing with a pretty standard dev machine.
NixOS: The configuration is kind of a pain and never really got the extra features you get beyond package management working correctly.
To all gentoo detractors.... 20 years ago compiling a browser would take 5 days (as in 24 x 5 hours...) So you are not allowed to complain TODAY about compile times ahahahaahaha ahahaha ahah haha aaaaaaaaah ಠ_ಠ
Ubuntu, after the third consecutive release that broke previously working hardware. That was a while ago and I haven't tried it recently, but given snap I'm not really inclined to.
Ubuntu, because snaps break shit and don't work right a lot of the time, also they left people hanging with 32 bit support which isn't great (for being a Legacy OS for weak computers it's not a great look for them, or all the Linux distros that followed them).
There were a lot of problems with Fedora and CentOS, none of them as bad as Ubuntu though. Most were either instability or software availability due to lacking RPM versions of the software I needed.
Arch itself hasn't given me many problems but it is ideologically problematic for a lot of reasons (mainly the elitism) and it is also a rolling release which isn't great if you don't like being a guinea pig and getting software before all the bugs have been ironed out.
NixOS .. loved the idea but doing configuration all the time for every little thing became too much of a headache.
Fedora. Just feels like I'd be moving to the dnf ecosystem for no reason.
Ubuntu
Alpine. It’s powerful and fills a need in a specific use case. Just not my need, nor my use case, and that’s OK.
My docker usage is mostly testing and validation that when I run the code on the actual hardware, it will work as expected. I tend to want the container to match the target environment.
Alpine. I actually really like it, but it just doesn't fit any of my use cases.
I tried arch btw.
But didn't like it.
ZorinOS. I tried to install it on my spouse's computer with all modern, well-supported AMD hardware. Had nothing but problems, to the point that the computer was barely usable. WiFi broken, GUI was laggy, repositories were buggy. When I finally got the system somewhat stable, I didn't like the interface at all. Styles were bland, icons dull, everything just seemed clunky and awkward.
For a distro advertised as a beginner-friendly and pay-for-polish system, I was very dissapointed.
Might have been a fluke, I don't think my experience is standard for Zorin, but it was a really terrible first impression and I never suggest it to Linux-curious folks. Mint or Vanilla Fedora are my go-to for newbs.
Ubuntu, tried to install vim 8 when it released, too bad they only update major package versions once every 2 years. Find myself some random dudes repo, great it's vim 8, too bad it was compiled w/o python support... Installed Manjaro (arch based) and never looked back.
elementary os. Installed it, and noped right out of there the same day. On paper, it should be great. Maybe the execution was flawless for macfans, but it was not for me. I do appreciate how they tried to make an easy transitional Linux for macfans, though, and I do not regret the donation because of that fact.
NixOS.
Cool package manager but constantly breaking compatibility with none nix package managers really annoyed me. (Ghcup, mason, etc...)
Also how difficult they made compiling software from source. I could live with nix packages if I could also compile the programs I need from source.
Great server os. I don't understand how people use it as a daily driver
Its not for everyone imho as a NixOS user
Wdym "not for everyone"
All but Arch. Find commands much easier to remember and me having dyslexia and ADHD my memory is shocking.
I put commands in a bash script, with a parameter for each one, and it lists them all if I don't give a parameter. So for example it goes "arch upgrade" instead of having to remember "pacman -Syuu".
i do similar too, also found ble.sh helps alot especially with navigating my system. i also expand on the bashrc by adding custom commands like
its apt as i forget witch packages i have installed
I use paru and the default is "paru" with no parameter for the upgrade. But I am on your team here: I have to Google every single time the -Q params for all the queries and I have been using arch for almost 2 decades now: "who owns this file?" "what are the deps of this package?" "Which packages are installed?" "Which packages I explicitly installed vs dependencies?" Not a single one of them is intuitive to query with the pacman command line for some reason.
Ubuntu. It's just macOS but not as polished
How do you mean?
Fedora. Dont get me wrong it is a great Distro but i did not really felt at home when using it.
Windows 🤣
Daad, please stop
Linux Mint. There was just too much crap on the desktop
RHEL, SELinux sucks and I hate it.
I get it. It does have a learning curve. This being said, I would argue that without selinux Linux can’t really be meaningfully secure. It’s worth learning. Seljnux exits elsewhere too. I deploy Debian with selinux and it works well there as well.
The problem with SELinux is that everyone rushed to push it out, alongside packages affected by it without support for it. So it was a crapshoot whether or not you'd have something working each time. That is better now, but was initially a colossal pain in the ass for about five years or so.
What put me off selinux is that the officially documented way of generating a new policy is to run a service unconfined, and then generating the policy from its behaviour. This is backwards on so many levels... In contrast policy-based admission control in kubernetes is a delight to use, and creating new policies is actually doable outside of a lab.
You could preemptively write the policy if you know the context and policies you want to apply. I just don’t think it’s worth the time when you can generate a policy with two commands.
Fair. But audit2allow makes it really easy to add support for apps without policies. For custom in-house apps I use this to spit out some nice policies that can be rolled out.
Any distro that uses apt. I'm ok with Fedora and Arch.
Suse, every time I've tried it I've just been like yeah, nah after running into some weird issue.
The first time I installed Debian on my desktop I didn't do my homework properly. This was a long time ago. It didn't take long for me to realize just how out of date many packages were and that was a deal breaker. I have since used Debian successfully in different contexts, because I knew what to expect. I still wouldn't install Debian stable on my desktop because I prefer to have a more up to date environment. Might try Debian sid one of these days though. But yeah, Debian, great distro, but you need to know what you're getting in to.
I use debian now for the first time in years. But the new version just released, so we'll see how long it lasts
I have liked Ubuntu based distros until they release a major update. They are aimed at beginners and they work fine for that. If you use one to the end of support, the updater will say that your software is up to date because there are no new updates.
You have to check the website to find out you've reached the end of support, and to get instructions on how to update.
That is an awful user expierence for beginnners, and a great way to have users using vulnerable software without knowing about it.
I've switched to rolling releases for this exact reason.
Mint, Endeavor, Zorin, Ubuntu, probably more I'm forgetting. Landed on Pop!_OS and am mostly happy so far.
pop!_os That's what I run for desktop I like flatpak better than snap and it has some other nice enhancement over Ubuntu. For my servers I still use Ubuntu.
Debian, don't like apt.
Arch, breaks too much.
NixOs, just don't need the tools it provides.
Any fork of a mainline distro because it's never as good as the root.
I used arch for a while, but got sick of running repairs every few weeks. I use Gentoo now, it's stable and good. I have a fuck ton of ram and a good cpu, I also take advantage of binary packages from time to time. I don't really need to install new things that much after having done the initial install.
Never tried regular Arch after trying Black Arch, so not sure if they're the same feel, but after realizing the work it would take just to be given the capability to resize windows in the UI instead of just coming with drag and resize out of the box, Black Arch was a huge no go for me... Which kept me from wanting to touch regular Arch, lol. That being said, I go nope to Ubuntu the most. Gentoo is my favorite and is what my server has been running for the past decade without any kind of issue, but for laptop and daily use, I use Mint. Been on that one for about a decade now too... Used to use Peppermint (that still a thing?) and Suse the most before those.
I find this reply kind of confusing, you're comfortable with Gentoo on a server but installing a DE with pacman was too much? Black arch slim comes with xfce, that should definitely allow you to resize windows lol.
My comment on arch is just related to the use of black arch for a regular desktop or laptop machine, not my server (no desktop environment for the server). Was mostly trying it to compare it with Kali, actually.
Black arch does come with xfce by default indeed, but resizing windows isn't available right away. At least it wasn't when I tried it a couple of years ago. It required changing a bunch of configurations manually for whatever reason.
Oh I see... I haven't used black arch personally, that seems so strange they'd go out of their way to disable that. For whatever is worth vanilla Arch + Xfce + i3 has been super great for my desktop, really brought new life to the hardware
Arch\Endeavor, I more preferred the polished experience of Fedora Silverblue and Debian\Mint.
Manjaro. Probably because I tried it with GNOME which isn't for me either.
Every single one of them until I hit arch. It just seemed to click and I enjoy the rolling release.
I literally liked parrotOS, but I had other priorities and abandoned it forever
KDE. Not a distro, but I can't get on with it. Too much screen real estate used by flashy things, and everything moves. I want instant transitions not a shwoosh. It's probably all toggleable, but I don't want to fiddle with it for every install or release.
Void Linux with musl. I wanted to try setting up a distro with Musl, but many things I use daily simply don't work with it, and the hassle of troubleshooting everything was a bit too much. I went back to Fedora Workstation, and I'll likely stay on it for my workstation (though I'll switch to Fedora Kinoite when Fedora 40 releases). I also use Fedora Server for my personal server, since it's very familiar to me, and there's not a huge point in switching to CentOS anymore with the recent changes, so I'll probably just stick to it.
I use Void Linux glibc, I wouldn't daily drive musl either, although there are ways to run glibc apps.
Out of curiosity, what doesn't work? And do you mean with
muslor Void in general?I'm talking mostly about musl, but Void with glibc still requires more work than a "just works" distro. As such, I didn't see a point in trying Void with glibc, because the biggest benefit I saw to switching was for musl. It's great for some, but not for me, just as I wouldn't use Gentoo. There were a lot of things that didn't run, I don't have a full list. I know for a fact that Steam (or any Steam games) wouldn't run, I'm fairly confident that the OnlyOffice suite wouldn't work, I believe that EasyEffects wouldn't run which was a big problem, since I use that for system wide equalization, and for my microphone filters. I probably could have figured out how to set everything up with bare PipeWire, but it's basically the same story for everything: it just requires way more work. My VPN (Mullvad) isn't compiled for musl, nor was the Nextcloud client, and many things I use every day. Those are just the things I remember having issues with off the top of my head, and it may not have only been musl that was the problem, but it's very likely it was.
Vanilla OS. I loved the idea of having access to so many packaging formats and package managers at my fingertips but maintaining the system, managing everything and keeping in mind all the things that I'm doing was just too much work for me when I just wanted a system that I can use without any hassle. I know immutable distros are quite the buzz these days but it just isn't for me. That was also the time when I was trying to find an Ubuntu based vanilla GNOME distro
I've tried both LMDE and Debian itself, but I think I just ended up frustrated at the age of software in the repos and how much stuff relies on Ubuntu specific stuff.
Way back in the day I was an Ubuntu user, but then everyone simultaneously decided that gnome 2 was too old and that touch interfaces were the priority. So I now use Mint and Cinnamon.
Ubuntu. I hated not being able to customize certain things and it had some interesting bugs on my hardware. Switching to a different distro solved those issues
I attempted to try Garuda Linux (cinnamon) on a mini PC (Ryzen 5800H based APU), but graphic artefacting was a constant issue as soon as the install started.
After several tries I had to abandon ship and wait till a new release to maybe try again, if I remember. Not exactly "Nope, this one's not for me" as I had yet to properly try it.
Otherwise, I tried Crunchbangplusplus and just gave up for being a bit too minimalist or not yet ready for prime time as I kept geting issues after issues and did not have the patience to wrangle the whole OS for everything from getting network working to audio and screen issues on my system.
Anyways, it is always fun to try new systems/apps/protocols and see where thing are headed towards.
Wow I forgot about #! . That was a neat distro.
NIXOS is definitely not for me. The documentation sucks and there are less cumbersome ways to restore a system.
Anything that isn't debian-like. I'm just very used to It and can't make myself learn anything else.
Wasn't a fan of Ubuntu, RedHat, Debían...
I guess I'm just a Fedora person? I'm on KDE right now, usually Xfce. Idk I'm enjoying my KDE experience.
Mint was pretty smooth. No complaints.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed--coming from Arch, it just felt so refined and ready to go right out of the box. Then I started installing programs and ran into dependency hell--now on EndeavourOS with the AUR which is great
Additionally, the combination of terminal + GUI to do things just felt wrong
I am curious how you ended in dependency hell on TW. I switched from arch to TW about a year ago. I love it so far.
One program that comes to mind is Protonmail Bridge. I first tried installing the RPM via Discover, and it silently failed every time. Next, installed it from the terminal and got an error about missing DejaVu fonts--no problem, I'll just install them from here, but unfortunately I was getting the same error. I tried to "install anyway" ignoring dependencies--failed again!
Another issue trying to install the linux-surface kernel. The GUI package failed to install (again, silently), and command line packages kept failing since the linux-surface kernel was on 6.6.6 and the rolling release kernel was on 6.6.7--eventually I chrooted in from a live USB, removed the kernel, and replaced it with the linux-surface kernel, but the fact that it kept failing with a "success" message was confusing! Then I had to compile iptsd--on Arch I'd 'pacman -S git meson ninja gcc etc.', and searching and selecting package groups via YAST (and hoping my compilation worked) just felt clunky.
I did manage to get everything up and running eventually (save Protonmail), but at that point I'd messed up my installation to the point where I had to start over, and I just loaded up EndeavourOS instead.
I'm sure a lot of these issues stem from a lack of understanding of Tumbleweed itself, and when I get another desktop I'll be happy to try again. I did love the setup process though--super polished KDE Plasma, and everything that was possible with the stock kernel (even autorotate!) worked out of the box!
I had a huge problem with Arch because of the rolling release deal. I just can't handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day, even with automation.
When I install an operating system, I want it to just work, and I want their repositories to have lots and lots of software. Most distros do this, but none do it as well as one of the major Debian-family distros like Ubuntu or Mint. Fedora is quite nice as well, and I could probably daily drive it without issue, I just see no reason to change over to it since Ubuntu has me totally covered. And it is basically like this for me with every other distro: I have to think, "why would I switch? What benefit would it provide me over what I have right now." The answer is always "nothing important," so I stick with Ubuntu.
I considered using Guix because its package manager is truly a revolutionary new technology. But using it as a package manager, I can see a lot of the packages and default configurations just aren't quite to the point of "just works" yet. Still, I hope someday to switch to Guix as my daily driver.
Then don't. You can just as well choose to update once per week or whenever.
Every day is something of an exaggeration, but if you don't keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break. And this gets to be a problem, especially if I don't keep a computer always on, or if I keep postponing updates because my laptop is not connected to the Internet at the schedule time. There are a dozens reasons why I miss regular updates, but the point is, it should not bork my system if I do miss updates for a while.
Those are packaging bugs then. With proper packaging everything updates seamslessly. Outside of SteamOS I'm not a user of Arch-derived distributions but I am a user of openSUSE TW which is a rolling release and I have one old notebook for a specific task I need to do maybe twice a year and updating was never a problem and installing a package triggers updating all affected dependencies.
Now I can see why people like openSUSE.
Yeah, I have definitely run across lots of Arch packaging bugs. They seem to give up making packages backward compatible after some length of time, that or their testing procedures are not as thorough as that of openSUSE. It is understandable, making a rolling release backward compatible for long periods of time can be fairly challenging. Although Nix OS and Guix OS have solved this problem.
Why do you think you need to update packages on Arch every single day?
It was just a bit of hyperbole regarding the amount of mental effort it takes to keep your system up to date, I don't actually mean every single day. I mean if you don't keep Arch up-to-date on a regular basis, packages tend to break, and then you need to re-install the OS or jump through a few hoops to repair the broken packages and their dependencies. Diligent regular updates is not a terrible mental burden, but a burden none-the-less, so using point release OS like Mint or Ubuntu are just easier.
I used Ubuntu for a few years, and always felt that it works well and was super easy to set up. But it also seemed to use a lot of disk space. This was of course not ubuntu‘s fault, but my inexperience. But I never had to look under the hood, so I didn’t, and I ended up installing a bunch pf bloat, some of which ended up causing minor issues eventually.
I decided to try arch, and get more into configuration and learning linux. It was quite a ride, and I am happy to have gone through with it. I’m still learning, but I have so much more knowledge & control over what the PC does and how it does it. I also have a lot more room for games and such.
After using Arch based distros for more than a year when I use any Debian/Ubuntu based distro it really feels like they aren't for me, at least when it comes to daily driving. I still have a laptop with PopOS that I use for school, stable distro is a better option in my oppinion for that usecase because I use it twice a week (unless it's summer or winter in which case I don't use it at all).
Manjaro. I had previously already used Antergos and Ubuntu, but after Antergos stopped I needed something like it. So I installed Manjaro in my secondary PC (with old components). I constantly got into trouble with the manual kernel version selection thingy. I was used to kernel updates being part of the normal update process, and suddenly I had to manually pick the new one. I constantly ran into incompatibility issues with older or newer kernels, vague update deadlocks where I couldn't update things because they depended in each other, and I absolutely hated having to use a separate program for updating the kernel. Now the PC runs Fedora and I'm liking that a lot more so far...
Manjaro ships with a LTS kernel, which is marked "recommended" in the kernel selection tool. By default you don't have to do anything, don't ever need to use the kernel selection, and you won't experience any problems, it works like any other distro.
The issues you described are caused by selecting one of the non-recommended kernel versions. It's assumed you know what you're doing if you do that.
Exactly I really don't get the argument there. Manjaro's handling of kernel selection is brilliant. Multiple LTS kernels, a recommended one, bleeding hedge and experimental ones. There's something for everyone and it's super easy to use.
It's not so much an argument, it's my personal experience. My experience was just not great. Maybe I did something wrong, but I've had a way better experience with Antergos, Arch, Fedora, and Ubuntu.
Idk what was wrong then, but I constantly had issues with packages being out of date due to the kernel and not wanting to update. Dependencies were constantly a mess. I'd rather just have normal Arch or Antergos/Endeavor
Fedora Core. It had so many problems updating. That would have been in the mid 2000s so it may have improved since then.
Mint, actually. I tried it and found it too similar to windows and not customisable enough for my liking.
Ubuntu. I just don't like how they do things. I cant even maintain a repo for the machines i host without putting aside multiple terabytes of space. So to me they cant even make it reasonably easy for me to help them and be self reliant on their ecosystem.
PopOS and Manjaro are two I never liked.
It pains me to say this, but voidlinux, though I'm still not in the stage of "this one is not for me", it has potential and hopefully I can sort all the issues I've encountered so far.
I've tried multiple distros, and also used artix for a while so I'm used to not using systemd but man void is really another thing, this isn't the first time I've used it, I tried it a year ago and gave up, recently I decided that I'm up for the challenge and began using it again, here's what has happened so far:
Well right now I'm dealing with the pc freezing when quitting the user session, for some reason I need to exit i3 before logging out, otherwise the system freezes.
Also I wasn't able to get a clean boot screen even though I had the typical kernel parameters quiet, loglevel, etc, it even prints info on the login prompt where I should be putting my username, though I managed to mitigate this a lot by passing a kernel parameter that tells it to use another tty for the boot messages.
file-roller is broken, I can't compress some directories to 7zip, the weird thing is that it only happens to some directories and not all.
Though the very good news is that they fix issues very fast, puddletag was broken and they fixed it in like 2 hours after I reported the issue.
Edit: It is not just file-roller that is broken, it is all of 7zip on void, I can't compress with xarchiver either
Ubuntu
In 2007 I tried Ubuntu and it was weird, then again in 2008, no! In 2009 I found Mint and was really happy, until they stopped supporting KDE. Then I tried a ton of distros, Xfce, no. Lxde, no. open suse, no. fedora, no, lots of others, no. I finally found Kubuntu and I have been on it ever since. Even tested Neon lately but hated it.
Kubuntu does what I want it to do.
Linux always seems scary at first, but once you learn enough, it's super easy.
Yeah, did you find mint easy to use? I'm in Ubuntu and thinking about switching. I just worry about driver support, cause everything works on Ubuntu for me. I try and apt get everything I can TBH.
I really liked Mint at the time, but only the KDE version, and would never have left if they hadn't stopped supporting it. They had great nVidia support. I no longer have nVidia on any of my computers because it's just annoying to fight with that mess.
Plus Linux as a whole has better driver support than it used to.
Gentoo. But it took a few years
Literally all of them have shite color management and fractional scaling that blurs everything. It's an eyesore.
I really, really want to use Linux for multimedia consumption but I can't.
I have tried a bunch of them: Manjaro, Fedora, Opensuse Tumbleweed, Mx Linux, EndeavourOS, Arcolinux, Debian, currently LMDE. But Fedora, the spin with XFCE not the default one, never convinced me enough to keep it., is the one that never convinced me enough to keep it.
I’ve messed with a decent amount, listed in my post. Most distros weren’t customized the way that I wanted them to be or I didn’t like the looks so I prefer Debian and Arch for simplicity’s sake depending on the use case and going from there.
Pop os. I just couldn't use their desktop (even though I think it's good, it's just not for me)
Honestly, depending on whether you count it or not, LFS. I have not tried Gentoo yet, though I want to one day, for the learning experience, and yet I already know that compiling everything is not something I enjoy.
I can get by with OpenSUSE and Void (kinda), I've used Debian for a few weeks, I've used Fedora for a month or so, I've used Ubuntu for a bit, I've tried PopOS for a week or two, I've used NixOS for a few months, and I've used Arch for most of my time on Linux.
Currently I'm on Arch, but I don't like rolling releases that much. At the same time, I am also not a fan of immutability, as there are some programs I need that cannot be installed on an immutable distro, so that's why I'm on Arch. Why am I only using these 2? Because they are the only distros that have all the packages I need (excluding the specialist software that I need for university). By the time I discovered Distrobox (which would solve this problem), I was already on Arch. I've also done some changes to my setup and as such, I'll need to wait for some new features to make their way into program releases and into the NixOS Stable repo with the following release. Until then, I'm on Arch.
Gentoo is useless for learning how things work. Back in the 00s when I still had time to hang out at events it was always quite ridiculous at what kind of basic stuff the gentoo crowd got stuck at - and with the tooling 15+ years more polished now I'd expect what is actually going on is way more hidden than back then.
If you do want to understand how things work just build a minimal system - either on spare hardware, or qemu/kvm. Don't go with systemd, or other fat userland options - that just makes you compile a lot of dependencies not adding value for learning.
Use some lean init (or just write one yourself), and some lean shell.
How would you recommend I go about building a system? Should I start with LFS as a base/inspiration?
I'd just start from very simple kernel and static init, and work my way up to adding more functionality. I'd use kvm with rootfs on p9fs - that allows playing with it without having to build images. I can throw together the initial invocation, if you're interested.
Then start building simple core elements in a language allowing easy static linking - I'd use C with dietlibc or go. Start adding core userland programs, explore initramfs (without using something like dracut), add dynamic libraries and explore the dynamic linker, ... - if you're interested we could set up a matrix channel for questions (typically with some lag, though), and do a github repo to follow along.
LFS iirc goes for full desktop - the high level userland is very complex, but easy to understand when you know the basics. You pretty much learn how to compile lots of libraries - which has limited use. A full LFS style desktop I'd no longer recommend nowadays - it's just too many dependencies to deal with. I used to build my own system (not following LFS) until the Xorg fork made it sigificantly more complicated - and things got just worse since then, and I never was using a complicated UI stack.
edit: I had a few minutes, so I've thrown this together https://github.com/bwachter/lll - you should easily get a kernel with a custom init running, and have enough to start experimenting. If you or anyone else is interested to go deeper I'll set up a matrix channel for guidance.
Ubuntu when they first switched to Unity. I had been running Ubuntu for 2 or 3 years at that point, but I was already thinking about switching to Debian at the time. I hobbled along for a few weeks on that first version of Unity, but I didn't like what I was seeing. I took the plunge into Debian, thinking, "If I'm going to have to learn something new anyways, I might as well try switching."
Ubuntu gnome. Wanted to install a gnome add on (hibernation button), searched how to do it and learned there's a section in the gui store but couldn't find it. Searched for that and turns out they removed the add ons section from the store in the latest version and I need to use a browser. Tried to install it from a browser and it still didn't work. Tried the other browser and failed again. Searching for that discovered that the pre-installed browsers are snap packages and can't interact with anything else 🤦
Instantly switched to kubuntu. It had the hibernation button out of the box
Fedora, as someone who uses mostly Arch and the AUR, I couldn't get used copr, flatpak, and dnf. I rather just use yay.
I feel like I'm a chronic distro-hopper sometimes, but no matter how many times I try, I just can't settle into OpenSUSE for whatever reason. The OBS feels a bit more of a wild west than the AUR.
Any distro that's based on an existing one but changes or adds very little to it. There are so many dead Ubuntu and Debian reskins
Gentoo because while it was fun to try I sure as hell won't be waiting around for my stuff to compile.
Puppy Linux
AntiX
I used Linux Mint for about 1.5 years before transitioning to Arch Linux. For me, the transition was to learn more about Linux and to try something new. Thus far, I'm really liking Arch. There have been a few issues that have popped up here and there, like getting Bluetooth devices to connect properly, but the Arch Wiki and forums often have the solution. You just have to spend time reading the articles or the forum responses.
As for other distros, I've tried Zorin, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pop OS, and KDE Neon before settling on Linux Mint.
PopOS!
It's supposed to be good for gaming, but a lot of its packages (including the video drivers) are outdated af because it's based on Ubuntu, so you may have to wait months for a mesa patch that makes a game playable while on Arch I can just install mesa-git and play.
I also don't like the Gnome interface and the fact that it casually encourages installing proprietary software, but that's not relevant given its target audience.
Yeah, I get it, it's a distro for novices so obviously it won't go all freetard on you for installing nvidia drivers, but the fact that it's so outdated is absolutely inexcusable and can drive users away because games that are marked as playable on steam may not even launch.
i run arch on my surface
my dell runs kubuntu, but i plan to move it to arch as well (after i back up my data)
i liked it for a while and suddenly had tons of issues with snap, especially with firefox, and webusb breaking constantly on chromium (i use android flash tool a lot)
Void, and I really wanted to like it on account of not relying on systemd, but its package repos are too barren for me.
Like, Void's repos are even more barren than EL's stock repos before you add RPMFusion and EPEL among other third-party repos into it, and its AUR equivalent don't help matters.
And Void's musl port is even more limited than the glibc version because it doesn't support multilib, so you can't have Steam or WINE on Void musl, for example, while you could on the glibc version that supports multilib.
I hopped to many distros and found Ubuntu to be my home.
Opensuse. Did absolutely nothing wrong but I just didn't vibe with it. Went to fedora and I vibe hard with it
MicroOS. I didn't switch from losedows to still have my PC restart on me while I was working. Also, it kinda broke and was annoying to configure, and had way too little documentation.
I game a lot, so I need the latest drivers. So anything with a slower release schedule than Manjaro is a no go for me.
Garuda. I tried it because it's supposed to be "gamer" oriented. I thought it meant it would make it easier/smoother for gaming. What they actually meant was it felt like being locked inside a gaming PC with flashing and spinning RGB lights everywhere. No fucking thanks.
Zorin OS, which was the second distro I ever tried, I hated how outdated their repos were since they were using an older Ubuntu LTS repository for packages. It was quite painful to install software that would otherwise have worked out-of-the-box on Ubuntu. I hope this is no longer the case today.
Its a meme at this point, but I tried to install arch. Ran into display issues during install and couldn't progress. Gave up and did Ubuntu instead.
I know there's supposed to be some helper stuff out there now to make it go smoothly, but don't think I am motivated enough to retry ever.
GNU Guix. Need to do an Ayahuasca ceremony sometimes and try again with a much more radiant mind.
Not too ick someone's yum, and this ventures outside of Linux.
I dislike the BSDs. Great for getting pf, and not being a homogeneous shop, but just different enough to be difficult outside of one specific use case.
Gentoo was similar. It may be different now, but a pain on the Xbox.
Mint was too dumbed down and ugly.
Ubuntu is useful, but likely harmful with it's constant pushes to commercialize everything.
Redhat is needed for work, but the commercialization drives worse quality. Documentation seems purposely bad to drive training courses.
(Yes, I like Debian.)
Void linux.
I used arch for a couple years, then crux for over 10 years, so I though Void would be a great distro when the systemd drama occured. Tried that, and noped the hell out of it...
manjaro.
anything with GNOME or xfce. modern cinnamon is ok ig but KDE plasma just makes anything bearable for me
Fedora. Fedora is solid, but coming from arch I felt it was lacking so much in the way of the package repos and doing things like secure boot was more effort than it was worth.
Ubuntu. The whole interface paradigm puts me off.
tails
The first distro I tried to daily drive on my desktop was Pop!_OS because everyone told me it's the distro you "need" if you have an Nvidia card.
I'm sure it works fine for most people but I just had A LOT of issue, weird audio issues I had to fix every other time I turned on my system, some games refusing to load properly unless I forced them into borderless fullscreen.
Then one day it just refused to boot, even tho I had booted into it that morning and did nothing more than go on Youtube for an hour before work, Timeshift didn't work even tho I had manually made a handful of backups.
Went back to Windows for about 2 months before trying EndeavourOS and despite peoples warning that Arch systems will break if you look at them the wrong way, I've found it way more stable on my system and any issues I have ran into have been easy fixes.
Linux mint waaaaaaay back when it first launched.
Anything that's not Ubuntu, because it's the "mainstream Linux", so guaranteed I'll find anything I need there.
All of them except arch. It just strikes the perfect balance between being easy to pick up after a bit of reading and keeping its simplicity. Paired with vanilla gnome its uwu gang. I also looked at manjaro and stayed well clear of that, vanilla is so much simpler as I don't have to worry about conflicts caused by man jar roe randomly holding back packages for no reason.
Garuda. Looked pretty and tried it for a day or two and noped out. Went back to Manjaro before I figured out how to install Arch without the installer
OpenSuse. I found the installer to be a pain in the ass and weird, and the package manager was slow as molasses.
And I'll use Debian as a server, but any distro that requires me to add PPAs as a daily driver can just go away. Fedora has a huge software library, and Arch has the AUR, which has it's own security issues but at least I can read the PKGBUILDs before I install. PPAs are just a security nightmare to my way of thinking, I can't go around keeping track of each one and the current status of whoever owns that domain these days.
Gentooo, the only reason I' use it is so I could bring up systems on old architectures. Besides that it really isn't worth it.
EndeavourOS - I have tried Arch as well but EndeavourOS is just nicer out of the box. The AUR is awesome, and I generally find answers for any problem more easily than I did for any other distro.
tails
After Debian removed wifi, bluetooth, mouse and added lags after simple “sudo apt upgrade”, it became not for me