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’ve been in Pop!_OS for a lot of years now; and Ubuntu/Mint before that. The lack of updates in Pop!_OS (not Cosmic!) is starting to wear me thin; the U22.04 basis is starting to get a bit threadbare and their App Store has always been broken— but now it seems even more brokener.
The Cosmic Alphas don’t work well on my machine, Wayland is still pretty unstable and some of the apps I have to use just don’t work with it at all. I’ve got way too much to do to go and try to debug it or hack it or even give up and go try another distro. When they take Cosmic out of beta, if it doesn’t work for me I’m just going to drop and go back to hopping. Or worse, I may just go back to MacOS 100% except for when I’m working on some server-side shit.
“We now added AI to the kernel”
This would be 100% valid
Weird Al: Kernel Drivers
A parody kernel of Linux USB Support
Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can’t fix.
The distro I’m on getting worse would be one. Linux Mint has been pretty stable and enjoyable though. I admit, setting up a new distro can be fun, but it comes with many annoyances too.
I have been tempted to try KDE and Wayland though. The last time that I installed a new DE, I had all kinds of little reminders of the previous DE that would pop up. (E.g. file selector dialogue boxes.) Finding all the little config options I needed to change to make the switch completely was tricky. At this point, I’m tempted to day that it’s better just to install a distro with the DE that you want, but maybe I should try it again.
I got the impression Mint isn’t best for KDE. For the reasons you mentioned, I guess, because it’s not been set up with all those options right for KDE.
I’m also on Mint, and happy to stick with it for some time, but sometimes I’ve wondered about going back to OpenSUSE, or even trying KDE’s own distro. But by then I start thinking about Nix and Guix also, as well as old faithful Arch. Then it’s too much choice and I remember how nicely Mint works for me and the family!
I’ve been settling on Linux Mint more and more as my generic workhorse distro. I have the least amount of issues with it out of the box compared to any other desktop distro.
It’s clean, relatively low bloat, includes codecs and drivers for basically everything I’ve ever needed to use/do, and Cinnamon’s only crime as a DE is looking kind of boring. But it’s easy to select a new theme, so not really a huge issue either.
I use a bunch of different distros for different purposes, but if you held a gun to my head and made me pick a distro I had to use exclusively for the rest of my life, it would be Mint with Cinnamon.
If something was to replace it, it would have to be even cleaner, simpler to setup, and have even better general stability and compatibility.
Well one day I heard about NixOS… And that’s all it took
Sell it to me, please
Probably nothing. I’m currently in the process of starting to distrohop a lot. I want to try out lots of distros, for fun and in order to recommend distros to other people. I will probably eventually settle on arch or nixos though, the customization seams really awesome.
If gentoo stopped being maintained, I guess I’d find something else.
I’m on Bazzite, so I may be tempted to switch to SteamOS on at least one of my devices, but Bazzite covers pretty much all my bases currently, both for gaming and work. I have a laptop with EndeavourOS and I love it, been using it for about 2-3 years there, but I’m switching laptops soon to a framework so I’ll also go with Bazzite there for consistency and due to the official support it has with framework laptops.
Honestly the experience I’ve had with these distros so far leaves me wishing for nothing more, and now with immutability and distro box I kinda don’t see the point in changing to anything else unless Bazzite development dies out or they make a painfully stupid decision, which doesn’t seem to be the case so far!
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.
I usually try out a couple of new distros whenever I am either setting up a new computer, or something happens with my current machine that requires a fresh OS anyway.
I’ve been married to Pop!_OS for a couple of years now. however, for the past couple of months I’ve been booting exclusively into KDE Plasma on my desktop computer; almost everything works really well for me in that environment, except the built-in Pop!_OS stuff itself, such as the pop shop, does not work very well. so I might end up switching to a distribution that’s built around KDE, such as KDE Neon.
I’m also pretty curious about the Nix package manager and the concept of immutable desktop systems, so I guess I might try NixOS at some point? I don’t know much about it yet.
Nothing could get me to switch off gentoo at this point. It’s so flexible that you can use package managers from other distros (if you’re crazy and like to create problems for yourself). Creating your own packages is very easy with their ebuild system. In terms of the packages they offer the USE flags are an absolute killer feature that let you install only the parts of the program you want. They even have binary versions of larger programs like firefox or rust that you can install if you don’t want to compile them.
Well technically with compilers like Rust, you need a Rust compiler to actually compile Rust for you. That’s likely why they give binaries for such a thing.
Firefox though is a nice convenience.
I thought the rustc package bootstrapped itself like gcc does?
When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)
Not sure… I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I’d rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool… but I really don’t want to use a weird language for making packages, I’m just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.
I half the point of package managers was so you could easily uninstall them. Do package managers usually not fully uninstall?
From what I understand the package managers remove files they themselves created but not files created by the application itself like config files and other stuff
Nix becomes extremely easy once you get the hang of the language. Much more straightforward then some cryptic bash
