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.
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.
The arch breaks were always related to keys. I would run an update and there would always be an error related to the keys. Never had a breakage due to confs.
I used to distro-hop until 2017 when I started using Gentoo as my main distro. I did not have the same experiences as you with Arch but I tended to avoid the AUR. Ultimately Gentoo has kept my attention by being more flexible rather than having negative experiences with Arch.
I suppose I still distro-hop a little bit on an old laptop I’ve got but that one alternates between Debian and OpenBSD; also its primary use is a terminal for SSH’ing into my Gentoo desktop from the sofa.
Probably the only distro I’ve had a truly bad experience with is Manjaro. The additional repo that it comes bundled with creates more problems than it solves. Also - although this never affected me personally - the story about developers asking their users to reset their system clocks to accept an expired PGP key is an absolute scandal.
Ubuntu. Started out great but every release got worse with time.
I’ve always used KDE, so always was on kubuntu, or mint, but my latest kubuntu install managed to piss me off badly with its systemd taking over. A simple 10 seconds port=number config in sshd_config change now requires 20 minutes of searches, documentation readup, cursing, and jumping systemd hoops
FUCK systemd
Also FUCK SNAP. Absolute horrid garbage.
My next distro will be debian or some derivative, bye bye Ubuntu
I’ve learned to like systemd over time, but not snaps and how Canonical handles things.
Debian also uses systemd nowadays, maybe you can try devuan (I think that’s how it’s called,) which is debian based but without systemd. I only tried it once on a server but came back to debian.
Yet color management seems to have negative priority for Wayland while the Wayland push is strong at present. Shit or not, at least X11 has basic color management via ICC profiles; Wayland be like ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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
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.
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.
Debian => stale packages (Really solid distro though but dated version of Gnome)
Did you try using the testing or unstable versions of Debian? Testing is still more stable than some other distros. Packages need to be in unstable with no major bug reports for 10 days before they migrate to testing.
Try Debian sid (unstable), from my experience it’s actually more stable than testing because it gets updates even more often.
And ditch Gnome. There is no way to be happy with it as it craps out very often and is a maintenance burden for maintainers, therefore the quality differs so much.
you have to spend an insane amount of time updating
How slow is your internet connection?
or it will reach EOL in no time
Sure you don’t confuse Fedora with non-LTS Ubuntu releases? According to docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/ each release is supported for 13 months which isn’t 10 years of LTS but hardly “in no time” either.
I don’t mean downloading updates I mean manually updating your configuration to adapt to new versions of the software. That’s what takes time. I know 13 months is already quite high but it feels too low for me. I’m running servers over longer periods than that
Fedora annoys me (even though I’ve been using it for like 2.5 years on my work laptop) because a lot of packages that would be in extra in something like the Ubuntu (and it’s derivatives) or Arch (and it’s derivatives) is in a separate repository that you have to add.
I 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.
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.
The great thing about Debian is; it has a gear-shifter.
Whether stable or sid, it’s still debian but you can go from “rock solid, reliable” to “most recent with several updates per day” in the same ecosystem and just by changing the repositories, apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, done.
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.
One that might be controversial: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I still have a lot of respect for this distro and I really wanted to like it but it’s just not for me. It’s the fact that major updates could occur any day of the week, which could be time-consuming to install or they could change the features of the OS. It always presented a dilemma of whether to hold back updates which might include holding back critical updates.
So rolling distros aren’t for me, everyone expects to run in to some occasional issues with Arch, but TW puts a lot of emphasis on testing and reliability, so I thought it might be for me. But the reality is I much prefer the release cycle and philosophy of Fedora, I think that strikes the best balance.
Like SD cards suddenly being read only, then, as mysteriously as it started, they’re read/write again (sometimes while mid-operation)? Yeah. I have that.
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
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!
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