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.
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.
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.
“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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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