Just curious to know if anyone has been using the same distro for multiple years/decades and what or if you have it takes for you to want to switch to a different distro?
I ditched FreeBSD and Slackware when I got tired of installing everything from scratch on every major release. Compiling stuff from source was interesting for learning and seeing how amazing open source can be, but it wasn’t fun long term.
Then I ditched Ubuntu because there was always something not working on laptops, usually related to hibernation/sleep and/or webcam/wireless. I was frustrated with how little care was put into making sure such basic things would simply work.
I’m currently very satisfied with Mint. Everything just works out of the box and Mint X is a lovely theme for old folks like me, who appreciate a proper good looking desktop and can’t understand what all the hype is with dark/flat themed UIs these days.
This is an image someone else posted here. Asking if there was a desktop environment that looked like that. There wasn’t really.
For the record, I run Linux Mint Xfce with Chicago95. Honestly it was a mistake, the vibes of the UI are nice but it still feels kinda Linuxy (as in, held together with duct tape) and I keep roling up Firefox by mistake. SerenityOS or FreeBSD, something Unix-like, may be more what I’m looking for.
If your looking for a diffrent desktop experiance the OS doesnt matter outside of if it has packages or not. You might want to try KDE plasma with custom themes if your not a fan of the way xfce works. Although xfce is also extreamly customizable in the way it works too if you take some time to read the docs
Yeah XFCE is great ! I tried KDE 6 to give it a try and compare but I guess I spent to much time in the CLI to bother about all the GUI knobs KDE provides !!!
Last time I did, it was thanks to canonical pushing snaps and other things no one asked for.
Same here. I had been sticking to Ubuntu flavours for over 15 years.
I stuck with Ubuntu over a decade, but eventually Arch had several packages I was interested in that Ubuntu did not, plus the Arch wiki. I wanted to use Sway with several rofi/dmenu type utils, and Arch had a lot more of those packaged.
Same. I had been using Ubuntu for over a decade for all of my Desktops, but had used CENTOS/Rocky for servers. Now I switched to Fedora for desktop which simplifies things since now only my Raspberry Pis use deb vs rpm.
Snap is super frustrating and the gate-keeping of updates and features behind the Pro subscription is annoying. I don’t want to have an account if I dint have to. It’s just one more privacy violation waiting to happen with no real benefit to me even if it is free for personal use.
When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)
“We now added AI to the kernel”
This would be 100% valid
Weird Al: Kernel Drivers
A parody kernel of Linux USB Support
Other than massive breakage, I’m not sure. Completely reinstalling and reconfiguring my setup is a pain in the ass, in part because of my slow internet connection. But damn if Ubuntu isn’t trying to find out.
Just use Mint.
How exactly am I going to do that without completely reinstalling?
Ship of Theseus challenge: https://lemmy.ml/post/27387345
I’m not a masochist.
Stickning to Ubuntu instead of ripping the bandaid? Still not a masochist?
Ok :)
I was just thinking about that post.
What a legend. So, it’s technically possible, but not recommended.
You don’t.
But when you eventually reinstall, because Ubuntu crossed the line, Mint is just Ubuntu without the bullshit.
Meh. Mint does remove most of Ubuntu’s corporate crap, but its update system is still based on Ubuntu’s sources but just far enough removed to cause new issues. I’d rather switch to Debian. I actually already have Debian installed in parallel, it’s just that actually configuring it with all the non-default bits and pieces of my Ubuntu install is a pain in the ass.
There is a Debian-based Mint edition: https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
I know.
I’ve changed distro’s a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.
Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.
The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).
Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.
Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.
Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.
Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.
Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.
I really appreciate this well detailed response! 30 years of changing distros is pretty amazing you must know a lot
I’ve been using openSuSe Tumbleweed on one device or another for quite a while now. Recently I switched my last device, so I’m officially 100% Tumbleweed. NGL, feels pretty good. I would, however, switch under a few circumstances:
- openSuSe releases Tumbleweed clone with systemD alternative (like runit). I’ve tried Void repeatedly, but unfortunately never really fell in live with it.
- openSuSe releases NixOS style immutable distro (not the current aeon or kalpa) based on Tumbleweed.
Honestly, Tumbleweed is nearly perfect for me. It’s just that I’ve tasted what life without systemD can be like, and I goddamn miss it… I’m totally hooked on openSuSe products though.
Out of curiosity how is life without systemd better? What does it taste like?
Boot times. I am the kind of person who shuts my computer (may it be a laptop or desktop) down, whenever I’m not using it. With systemD, boot times are generally kind of annoying; runit, however, completely changes this. It really feels amazing to turn a Void Linux system on, and have it boot in seconds, with just one screen of logs. On top of that, if you’re doing a arch-style install (like the Void Linux minimal install), runit is just much nicer and more ergonomic. The main point is really boot time though, which I think is improved due to adhering to the Unix philosophy and having much less bloat. Using a runit system reminds you of how bloated and slow (and kinda convoluted) systemD is.
I’m also the kinda guy who spends hours optimizing my neovim config (~80 plugins, including LSP) for 20 millisecond start-up times. In the end, I still use Tumbleweed though.
Boot times.
I love how you chose one of the prime advertised features of The Cancer – and my rhel6 could boot faster than rhel7 every day.
By comparison, Systemd feels like jumping on the back of a charging gazelle and hitting it with a salmon in the hopes it’ll go the other way, all the while it’s bleating and emitting and defecating from its regular port and a whole new journald port of its own choosing. And often tripping.
Runit has been solid and fast. I’ve seen it on several projects - I want to say alpine and proton/vm and gitlab’s own weird setup - and it’s never let me down. I wish rh could have seen that instead like I wish they picked James over Mike for automation.
I wait and let everyone figure out what the least broken Linux distro is.
Debian is stable. Stable is good, for an operating system; because I actually want to use my computer.
Not play with the operating system for 4-6 hours per day.
I tried so hard to get Debian working on my new build. Problem being: it’s a new build. Debian’s glacial pacing meant my hardware won’t see support for a while. I might try again when Trixie finally releases, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
So I guess my answer is… I’ll distro hop when stability & support reach equal levels.
Trixie is usable right now. My server is running it. The final release is expected this summer.
Well one day I heard about NixOS… And that’s all it took
Sell it to me, please
I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.
I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?
I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.
I love my Tumbleweed install. It is rolling and new while also being rock solid. But I do have the itch to try new stuff which j do sometimes
Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.
I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high
Love me some tumbleweed. Snapper ready to go on on top of everything is also very nice to have.
would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained
I saw too much while turning the corpse they kicked over the fence into a unitedLinux we could ship and support.
The horrors.
If the entire company died and absolutely new people made a new company by the same name with none of the former staff or principals involved, then I would consider suse. The taint goes so deep I would not consider even a new source drop with the same staff.
I’m not familiar with any of what you’re saying. Would you care to expand on it a little bit? Also, which distro do you use instead?
Same scenario as mine.
Similar to other users - repos go down or corporate stuff starts to creep in.
As long as I get to maintain agency over my system I’m pretty content.
Saturday for some
The ability to wake up the laptop from sleep.
Damn, do I regret going with Fedora. Anything newer than kernel 6.10 (which I salvaged from Fedora 39) and my laptop doesn’t wake up from sleep anymore.
But changing distros is a hassle and idiot me went with a single partition for system and data, so migrating to another distro requires me to actually backup everything, so I haven’t done it yet.
