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What is/was your distrohopping journey?

For me it was:

Windows (for many years) -> Ubuntu (for a year) -> Arch Linux (for half a year) -> Void Linux (literally 2 days) -> Artix Linux with runit (a month) -> Gentoo Linux (another month) -> Debian (finally, I don’t plan on changing it).

Also, when trying to switch from Gentoo to Debian, I fucked up all my data with no backup.

What was your journey?

EDIT: Added Windows

MyNameIsRichard ,
@MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml avatar

I started with Corel Linux, moved to Mandrake and then began an 18 year distro-hopping journey. To keep it interesting, I rolled a d100 on distrowatch.com and installed whatever I landed on. About 6 years ago I landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed and haven’t hopped since if you don’t count a brief dalliance with endeavour on my laptop.

Frederic , (edited )

CP/M, GCOS, DOS, Windows, BeOS, Debian a few years, Ubuntu (a lotttttt of years), Mint (~3 years), MX (6 years now).

I played/installed with a couple of distro like Mandrake, LFS, CentOS, Arch, etc and basically all distro in the 90s were a bunch of floppies for the kernel and gnu utils, a bunch for X, that we downloaded from university usenet.

LFS was nightmarish, so is Arch a little bit when you install everything from basically scratch, now I prefer something that is working fine, MX AHS is a really good distro.

I also always prefered simple window system, coming from mwm/twm. Cinnamon was pretty but in the end I hated it, Xfce is my DE of choice now.

Successful_Try543 , (edited )

Windows -> Ubuntu 10.04 … 11.10, -> Kubuntu 12.04 -> Debian 7 (stable)… 8 (testing… stable) … 12

KindaABigDyl , (edited )
@KindaABigDyl@programming.dev avatar

Back when I was a kid, I was using Ubuntu. Ubtunu 14 and 16.

At some point I got really into Elementary OS and Pantheon

Then I rejected clone distros and embraced the mother distro, Debian.

In college, I experimented a bit, like most people. I tried various DEs and WMs on Debian. I tried Arch. I tried Pop_OS!. I tried Gentoo. Man, Gentoo is the WORST. Compiling stuff takes WAY too long and even after using it for 6 months it never got better. Worst distro on the planet. No one should ever use it. Eventually I settled on Arch.

I stayed an Arch i3 guy for 3.5 years, but eventually I got fed up with it.

I then finally gave Fedora a try, and I thought it was great. It was up to date like Arch but unbreakable. At the time I was also looking into BTRFS and immutability and making my own distro, and Fedora is great for that bc of CoreOS and Kinoite and all that stuff.

While on Fedora I did a lot of weird things in search of my goals. Like I figured out how to install Pacman and get AUR applications working on Fedora, notably archiso which I was using to build my own immutable, declarative OS that would be AppImage-based and utilizing an AppImage package manager and store front I wrote myself.

But then, about a year in, I discovered NixOS. It’s the best thing ever. It solves all the problems I had with other distros that I thought I’d solve on Fedora or Arch with programming. It’s everything I could want in a distro and then some. I’ve now been on it longer than I was on Fedora, and there’s no sign of switching to anything else.

Parallel to all this is various tool hopping. For instance, trying GNOME/KDE/Xfce/i3/Sway/Hyprland/etc at various times with various setups as well. Or bash vs zsh. Etc

Currently, I’m on NixOS with Hyprland, and it’s great. I’ve also used it with i3 and with GNOME + Pop Shell 2 for tiling which are both solid as well.

Now, that’s my daily driver and gaming machine. I use other OSs on other computers.

I have a computer for music production that got Fedoraized when I was a Fedora fanboy for a year. I don’t change it bc it doesn’t need to change. It just needs to run Ardour, yabridge, etc and maintain my system audio configurations that I don’t remember how to set up now. If it ever gets messed up, I’ll switch to a fork of my NixOS configuration and refigure out my audio settings and put them in a configuration.

I have a home nextcloud server as well. It also was once Fedoraized, but I gave up on that and went to Ubuntu bc that’s the only thing that should ever run a Nextcloud server. It just does not work correctly if it’s not on Ubuntu, at least that’s my experience. I’ve tried hosting on Arch, Fedora, Debian, Pop_OS! and more, but only Ubuntu works well for Nextcloud, so Ubuntu it stays.

Windows -> RedHat -> Windows -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu -> RHEL -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch

LucidDaemon ,

15 years Windows -> dualboot everything -> Ubuntu -> Fedora -> Ubuntu -> opensuse -> arch -> popOS -> arch -> fedora -> arch -> -> popOS -> arch -> nixos

I’m sure there’s a ton more hopping around in the middle that I can’t remember, but this is a good summary.

LunarLoony ,
@LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Windows 95 -> 98 -> SuSE …9? -> XP -> Ubuntu 10 -> Windows 7 -> Windows 10 (alongside a bunch of Debian servers) -> MX Linux -> Debian

Also went Windows 10 -> Kubuntu -> VanillaOS -> Kinoite on my laptop for what it’s worth.

akwd169 ,

Win XP > vista > win7 > win 10 then

Linux Mint xfce > KDE neon > (aurora)[getaurora.dev]

Tried many distros in between like ubuntu, mint cinnamon, mint mate, debian, and a few others I only vaguely recall

mynamesnotrick ,

Ubuntu, Pop!_os, KDE… Currently on fedora. It’s been solid. I honestly think I like pop the most but I was having weird gpu issues which haven’t showed up over on fedora.

boredsquirrel , (edited )
  1. (Some years, Childhood), Windows XP laptop with games on it, Windows 7 on some Minecraft PC lol. (3 years) Windows 10 on a Thinkpad T430, really nice laptop, but the OS was boring and kinda bad
  2. (3 days) Linux Mint, secondary drive. Had random blackout crashes that were not hardware related (still use that SSD today). Also wasnt impressed by the UI, but a very interesting experience of “the Linux”
  3. (Few weeks) Manjaro, awesome KDE experience and theme, really really nice. But had a bad reputation, so went looking for other KDE Distros
  4. (Few months) MX Linux, damn Distrowatch rankings. Got an error and my University IT people told me my Nextcloud client was too old, but the conky manager was awesome.
  5. (Half a year) Kubuntu, with Backports, then switched to KDE Neon. Began nice, then went more and more unstable and broke
  6. (Few weeks) Fedora KDE, finally dared the move to a “less known OS”, but it broke too. I guess that Plasma 5.2x phase was just messy
  7. (Over a year) Fedora Kinoite, uBlue, secureblue, Aurora. Tried the Kinoite prerelease for Plasma 6 and now for 6.1, finding some bugs.

Now happy part of the Fedora Community, rpm-ostree is just so good and makes Linux usable for me.

Also experimenting with GNOME, COSMIC, Kinoite-prerelease and CentOS-Stream in VMs or external drives. Also experimenting with minimal, bloat-free KDE Plasma, as it is actually really light and simply the best supported modular desktop environment.

rand_alpha19 ,

Windows from 1999 until December 2023. Debian since then!

statue7559 ,

Windows (2015-2021) --> Manjaro (2 Weeks) --> Arch (2021-today)

INeedMana ,
@INeedMana@lemmy.world avatar

Windows (~6 years) -> Mandriva (Mandrake? For I think 2-3 years) -> Ubuntu (1 day) -> Suse (2 days) -> Slackware (2-3 years) -> Gentoo unstable (2-3 years) -> Gentoo stable (2-3 years) -> Arch (9 years and counting)

The only span I’m sure about is the last one. When I started a job I decided I don’t have the time to compile the world anymore. But the values after Windows sum up to 21, should be 20, so it’s all more or less correct

TranquilTurbulence ,

I’ve never had gentoo before, but what I’ve heard from other people might explain that part of your journey. You went from unstable to stable to Arch, which says something.

INeedMana ,
@INeedMana@lemmy.world avatar

Gentoo unstable was a little bit tiring in the long run. The bleeding edge, but often I needed to downgrade because the rest of the libraries were not ready

Gentoo stable was really great. Back then pulseaudio was quite buggy. Having a system where I could tell all applications and libraries to not even link to it (so no need to have it installed at all) made avoiding its problems really easy
But when my hardware got older and compilation of libreoffice started to take 4h, I remembered how nice it was on Slackware where you just install package you broke and you’re done

Arch looked like a nice middle-ground. Most of the things in packages, big focus on pure Linux configurability (pure /etc files, no Ubuntu(or SUSE?) “you need working X.org to open distro-specific graphics card settings”) and AUR for things there are no official packages for. Turned out it was a match :)

blitzed ,
@blitzed@noauthority.social avatar

@INeedMana @TranquilTurbulence

I never had the nerve to install Gentoo and bring my humble CPU to it's knees LOL

INeedMana ,
@INeedMana@lemmy.world avatar

It was a great adventure. But yeah, that setup was on 24/7. Not because of compilation, but it definitely made a lot of this more feasible

REdOG ,
@REdOG@lemmy.world avatar

98-02 Slackware

02-24 Gentoo

Im currently fixated on nixos and it’s likely to get gentoo’s spot when I need to replace this workstation

IuseArchbtw ,

Despite my username, I ditched EndeavourOS a few days ago because an update broke it and installed fedora

turbowafflz , (edited )

Ubuntu -> OpenSuse -> Arch -> OpenSuse

I used ubuntu from when I got my first computer until like 2021 and then I realized I had no idea why I was using it because I didn’t like it

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