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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Heh, no problem, never too late to learn. If you’re coming from Windows or OS X it’s easy to think that the WM/DE is tied to the OS but due to the way Linux is written, the entire GUI stack is separate from the base system. I use SDDM as my login manager and in the upper left-hand corner there is a drop-down to choose the DE and Windowing System.
Heh, no problem, never too late to learn. If you’re coming from Windows or OS X it’s easy to think that the WM/DE is tied to the OS but due to the way Linux is written, the entire GUI stack is separate from the base system. You can have both the old school X Windowing system and the new Wayland installed at the same time, along with many different Desktop Environments and Window Managers. I use SDDM as my login manager and in the upper left-hand corner there is a drop-down to choose the DE and Windowing System.
No one ever said learning something completely new was gonna be quick and easy. Take it piece by piece and follow tutorials. Installing Arch Linux will give you a good idea how everything fits together instead of just “click, click, click, reboot” and it’s installed. You don’t learn anything that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, I worded that poorly. I meant that a lot of software not in the repos (usually proprietary apps) provide a .deb download tailered for Ubuntu rather than base Debian.
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.
Ubuntu’s package managers won’t stop fighting with each other so I can’t complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don’t feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don’t like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
openSUSE is great, but the package managers won’t stop fighting with each other and it’s lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
Debian’s packages are too old.
Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
The packages I want aren’t in Solus. Is this distro even still around?
And for distros I won’t consider trying:
Gentoo is too much work.
Qubes is too much work and I can’t play games on it.
I don’t like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.
The main package I was thinking of was the kernel. I saw the recent Linux Experiment video by Nick and they were using a kernel version (6.1?) that was no longer supported nor an LTS.
This is good to know. I’m more into rolling releases like Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE anyway, so the latest Ubuntu’s packages tend to be a bit old for me anyway.
Marinix. It’s aimed at mariners & sailors. Small and fast but not full featured and it uses a weird kernel implementation. It does however have customized Muplex which I ripped off for the next dristro which I love :
Navigatrix - OpenCPN, zyGrib. SSB / HAM control, tidal info, radar and AIS overlay. RTL-SDR AIS, PACTOR 2 soft modrm, and so much more. It runs my main navigation computer
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