What is/was your distrohopping journey?

ChanSecodina , 26 days ago

Windows 95 OSR2.1 (with USB support!) -> RedHat 5.1 (from a CD included in a book at the local Barnes and Noble) -> Debian 2.1 (or so? apt was a fucking revelation. RH5.1 was pre-Yum) -> experimented with Gentoo in college for a couple months (doesn’t everyone?) -> Debian -> Ubuntu (maybe around 8.04?) -> (a bunch of cycles between Debian, Elementary and Ubuntu) -> back on Debian now and it feels like home :) (but I have Elementary, Haiku and Ubuntu on some old laptops I play with sometimes)

9488fcea02a9 , 26 days ago

You’ll always end up on debian. You just dont know it yet

rotopenguin , 26 days ago

Can confirm. I’ve used Dos, Windows, Dilinux over Windows, Redhat, more Windows, MacOS, Windows again, Ubuntu, and now I’m on Debian.

9488fcea02a9 , 26 days ago

Once people become familar with the basics of linux, they realize that almost anything that these niche distros offer can be accomplished in debian

dessalines , 26 days ago

Does a debian version upgrade require an OS reinstall?

9488fcea02a9 , 26 days ago (edited 26 days ago)

For me, no…

I’ve gone from debian 9 to debian 11 and now debian sid without reinstalling OS on my desktop

Same with my servers. Debian 8 -> 11 all upgrades in-place. Will have to upgrade to 12 soon…

The only time i messed up an upgrade is when accidentally used the codename “bookworm” in the sources file and skipped a major version. The system tried to fully upgrade 2 versions ahead and promptly borked itself… But it was an LXC container so i just rolled back my mistake. Lesson learned…

But yeah. Full re-installs have NEVER been a thing for me since going debian. It will even happily clone to a new SSD when you need to upgrade your hardware. (As long as your new hardware has in-kernel drivers, or at least some basic functionality to boot and fix the problem, if any)

jjlinux , 26 days ago

Agree to disagree. I keep trying Debian and Debian based distros, same with Arch based (looking at you, Endeavor), and always lend up back on Fedora or one of it’s spins.

F04118F , 25 days ago

Genuine question: what is it about Fedora that keeps you coming back? I have also used Debian based and Arch based distros, as well as Fedora.

jjlinux , 25 days ago

For one, I’m a sucker for bleeding edge, so the constant updates, including kernels, are a godsent. Then there’s my overall experience when compared to other bases. For example, I love PopOS, but even in my S76 Gazelle, it would break regularly (it could have something to do with all the tinkering I constantly do, but who knows), whereas with Fedora, since F37, I’ve barely had to tweak anything other than the DE and have yet to see it fail.

I also tried Arch (Endeavour actually), but I find managing it unnecessarily convoluted for my taste.

I’m sure my love for Fedora comes from my personal experience based on my use cases and the hardware I use. It’s not without it’s kinks though, I used to hate how slow DNF is when compared to APT, but DNF5 has been working flawlessly and fast for a couple of months now. And be aware, in terms of performance for some intensive graphical stuff, I feel Fedora falls a bit behind any Ubuntu/Devian based distro, but not noticeably enough for me to go back.

F04118F , 25 days ago

I get it, I actually use the exact same distros you mention: Pop!_OS, Endeavour and Fedora.

Had the same experience with Pop!_OS: those few things that did not “just work” but needed tinkering caused quite some issues. And yeah, somewhat more bleeding edge than Ubuntu LTS is nice: to use neovim on the 22.04 base, I’d need to use distrobox or build vim from source, but on Fedora and Arch, it “just works”.

I liked Endeavour, though I haven’t really used it with a DE, I went with Sway. So hard to compare, but the manual sysadmin intervention everyone keeps talking about has been minimal. AUR is amazing, pacman is fast and sane.

I went to Fedora because it is bleeding edge enough, but seems better tested and more stable than Arch. Also wanted to see how BTRFS is setup on there and test the rollbacks. The codec stuff has been terrible though. Even after enabling RPMFusion and installing a bunch of them, the Fedora source Firefox still refuses to do video calls in MS Teams. I’m using Flatpak browsers now but downloading flatpak updates is way slower than even the worst package manager for “native” binaries. Feels a bit odd to have to use a Flatpak for the browser.

If I had to install a new pc today, I’d go EndeavourOS with KDE (which I’m using on Fedora now), BTRFS and systemd-boot. I got to know systemd-boot in Pop!_OS and have tried a different boot manager (rEFInd), but systemd-boot is amazing.

jjlinux , 25 days ago

At the end of the day, it’ll be a matter of taste and how much anyone’s willing to “play around”. For example, my 9 years old son started with Zorin when he was 6, and has never looked back,whereas my 11 years old daughter started with Zorin at 8, saw me on PopOS and a couple of months later moved to that. Then we gave her an old HP X360 for school when she needs a laptop, and she went with Nobara, and my wife finally dropped Windows about a month or 2 ago, and chose Fedora because that’s what I use and she figures I can resolve anything quickly for her since that’s also what I use.

Yes, My house is now spyware free on all PCs and Laptops 🥰

F04118F , 25 days ago

That’s amazing!

jjlinux , 25 days ago

When your kids tell you “why do people use Windows? I can’t understand why it always popping stuff up”, you know you’re doing a good job as a parent.

marlowe221 , 26 days ago

Almost 10 years into my own Linux journey, I’m feeling the pull to Debian.

I’m just hanging out in denial right now on Pop OS.

The_Zen_Cow_Says_Mu , 26 days ago

DOS -> slack ware Linux -> win 3 -> os/2 warp -> win 98 -> win XP -> osx (several years on Mac) -> win 10 -> Ubuntu 14, 16, 18, 20 -> fedora 34, 35, 36 ,37, 38 -> Debian 12 --> fedora silverblue 40.

knolord , 26 days ago

My journey was very uneven:

Windows (for many years) -> Ubuntu (for 2 months, dual-boot) -> Windows (for about 6 years, because of some very specific software + pre-Proton gaming) -> Linux Mint (for about a month) -> popOS (for almost a year) -> endeavourOS (now, but always on the look-out for new stuff)

But in between the “main” journey, there was always some stuff trying out, like Void (on an old PC), Arch (inside a VM, now use that VM as a lightweight environment for testing some stuff out)

Asudox , 26 days ago

I first tried a linux distro in 2020. At that time, I honestly just wanted the customizations I’ve seen in unixporn and mindlessly tried arch because of the memes. I followed some youtube tutorial to manually install it and of course fucked up my boot partition that also had my windows boot stuff. After installing arch, I tried booting windows to move things to an external drive but windows would not boot up. I paniced and searched for hours on the web trying to fix it before giving up and just wiping the drive entirely. I was pretty much a noob and didn’t know anything at all about linux at that time. Then I tried installing arch again tomorrow, this time I got everything right and I didn’t need to deal with dual booting as windows was no more on my drive. The system was pretty stable for a few weeks before I guess I tried customizing KDE or something and completely broke my system. Of course the dumbass me again just wiped off the whole drive all my files gone. After that I installed windows again and no longer try to install any linux distro again until last year where I instead read the arch wiki and I had more knowledge in general about these things, so in 2023 I wanted to try installing a linux distro yet again. This time I went with ubuntu. It looked nice and stable but it honestly just sucked. Snaps indeed were problematic and I never got myself to like them, even today. So I tried pop. This one was nice and I actually used it for a few months. GNOME wasn’t the best DE for me but it just worked. I wanted to go a little deeper into linux at some point and I, you guessed it, tried installing arch. Everything went smoothly and I also installed it manually without any yt videos but just the arch wiki. I had some problems understanding some stuff in it but I eventually got it to work. And until today, everything still works fine for me in arch. I can fix some issues I encounter without the help of the internet. So I’ve been using arch for a year now. Windows is also no longer installed. I migrated everything to arch. I don’t really use any professional tools at least like adobe so I have no problem with using arch. All of the games I played on windows function either better or the same on linux thanks to proton. Some games also have native versions so yeah.

crazyCat , 26 days ago

I’m tired, boss. Paragraph breaks please, can’t climb wall of text.

CarbonScored , 26 days ago

Windows -> Fedora

Been almost 10 years and no thoughts of changing. What can I say? I lucked out first time.

yala , 26 days ago

Windows ->

Fedora Kinoite: A relatively mature atomic/immutable distro combined with excellent security standards and that resembles Windows’ workflow. Unfortunately, it broke almost immediately. Though, to be fair, it was a known issue with the ISO back then. As a newb, however, I couldn’t be bothered with it. ->

Fedora Silverblue: Well…, I didn’t have much of a choice 😜. Or I had to forego Fedora Atomic altogether. However, I actually really enjoyed GNOME’s workflow. I used this as my main system for about year. Until I found a related project… ->

Arch: The memes got me 😅. In all honesty, though, it was mostly curiosity. Still, I didn’t intend to throw away my working Silverblue installation for the sake of quenching my thirst for experiencing Arch. So, as dual boot, I tried to install it. This was pre archinstall, so it took a couple of tries before I booted into GNOME. However, I guess I did mess up something as I don’t recall ever booting back into that system 😅. So, what if I want Arch, but don’t want to spend more time with the installation… ->

EndeavourOS: Yup. I actually enjoyed it. I also took the opportunity to install another DE; KDE. Tried out the hardened kernel. Was able to make Davinci Resolve work, which just caused a lot of trouble on Silverblue. Access to AUR. It was cool, really. And, for some time, I was actually pondering to dismiss Silverblue altogether in favor of EndeavourOS. But, I started to miss the ‘stability’ that I was used to from Silverblue. Though, I don’t exactly recall if it was the fault of being based on Arch, or rather linked/attributed to KDE instead. Regardless, I noticed that (over time) I spend more and more time on Silverblue. At some point, booting into EndeavourOS didn’t work any more. It had broken. I did engage in some troubleshooting efforts, but to no avail… ->

Zorin OS lite: On backup laptop; the poor thing couldn’t run Windows but (even today) it’s still kicking on Linux ->

Nobara: So, I guess I did miss some of the functionality provided by EndeavourOS; running Davinci Resolve being the primary one. But, I didn’t want to pass out of the opportunity to try something else. Back then, Nobara was released relatively recently and was received very positively by the community. And had even a special guide/tutorial to make Davinci Resolve work on AMD devices. Nobara was cool. But, it didn’t feel very special. I actually enjoyed EndeavourOS a lot more. It was mostly utilized for Davinci Resolve and for gaming if Silverblue wasn’t fit for the job (for whatever reason). Unfortunately, even this one broke at some point 😅. I could still boot into it. But, the system just didn’t do what it’s supposed to do. I tried troubleshooting. But, once again, to no avail. ->

uBlue; Silverblue image: Through all that was previously mentioned, I had stability in Fedora Silverblue. It was reliable. I could trust it. Well…, most of the time 😅. Decisions related to mesa or video acceleration in browsers definitely felt more like misses rather than hits. I can’t blame Fedora as they’re legally restricted. But, shouldn’t we be able to do better? Enter uBlue. It seemed like some black magic shenanigans. The earlier issues would have never occurred (nor did they occur) on uBlue. This ‘managed’ aspect of uBlue was clearly, at least for me, the reason to consider it over regular Silverblue. And so, I parted with regular Silverblue and started using the Silverblue image provided by uBlue. Not long after, I even had my own (hardened) custom image. But, eventually (to be more precise; about half a year after switching to uBlue), keeping up with hardening took up too much effort for me to bear. But, thankfully, I had already found the perfect solution… ->

secureblue (based on the Silverblue image): This was Silverblue hardened by someone that actually knows their shit. And, thankfully, I didn’t have to maintain this myself. I used this for a couple of months until the next best thing… ->

secureblue (based on the Bluefin image): Currently on this for I think half a year now. It has just been a lovely experience through and through. Everything I could have asked is provided.

299792458ms , 26 days ago

My full journey was Ubuntu, Manjaro, Debian, Arch. I would still consider myself a noob but know I don’t break stuff as often.

starman , 26 days ago

Ubuntu Server (for school) -> Fedora (daily driver for a month) -> Arch (same as fedora) -> NixOS (it’s almost a year and I think that I’ll stay with NixOS)

astroturds , 26 days ago

90s was Mandrake, early 2000s was all about Ubuntu.

Since then I’ve tried just about everything including BSDs. It’s all pretty much the same thing, as long as you like the package manager and release schedule. I don’t like snap or flatpak so avoid distros that use them a lot.

These days I mainly just use opensuse leap, although I love arch etc but it’s just too much work for me now.

I only really need a terminal, firefox and emacs and I’m happy.

TranquilTurbulence , 26 days ago

I don’t even remember all of them, let alone the correct sequence. I’ve also had multiple computers at one time (still do), and usually they have different distributions (still true).

First experiment: Mandrake

First serious use: Ubuntu edgy eft or something

Spiraling out of control: kubuntu, xubuntu, lubuntu, debian, kaos, mint, easypeasy, fedora, korora, rox, manjaro, openmediavault, rockstor, + many niche distributions

Current: arch and debian

Before you ask, no, I’m not a diagnosed psychopath.

fin , 26 days ago (edited 26 days ago)

MacOS (old one like around 2012 or so) -> Windows 8 -> Windows 10 -> Several Linux on VM(Kali, Ubuntu(s), Fedora…) -> WSL1(Kali, Ubuntu) -> MacOS (with a newer OS) -> NixOS -> Void Linux ->

Now I’m currently using Void Linux, Windows 11, MacOS Sonoma.

I’m planning to put Fedora Debian (because it’s well supported by linux-surface community) on my Surface Laptop 1st gen which I’m not using right now.

erwan , 26 days ago

• In the 90’s: Slackware, then RedHat, then Debian, then Progeny (Debian based), then shortly Mandrake (RedHat based)
• Early 2000’s: RedHat Japanese edition, TurboLinux (because I was in Japan and Japanese IME was almost impossible to get working on non-Japanese distributions)
• Then I had fun with Gentoo looking at my terminal compiling stuff everyday and fixing broken package because I followed advices to activate crazy compilation flags
• 2004: Ubuntu, that I used for nearly 20 years
• Last year: switched to Fedora

0x0 , 26 days ago

What happened last year?

zero_spelled_with_an_ecks , 26 days ago

The Shakahola Forest Incident, for one thing.

erwan , 26 days ago

Nothing in particular, for the past few years I didn’t like the direction Ubuntu was taking but I stayed because I was too lazy to switch and it didn’t feel that bad.

So I’m not sure exactly what was the last straw, maybe part of it was me getting a Steam Deck, discovering flatpak and understanding how bad snap was compared to it.

sfera , 26 days ago

I just realized that I used Ubuntu for 20 years. I might be interested in switching to Fedora. How ist your experience so far?

erwan , 26 days ago

It just works, just like Ubuntu before they started pushing snap down everyone’s throat (which is what made me switch eventually.)

I had a bad image of RedHat/Fedora’s package management from the time deb was much superior, but no they caught up and are on the same level (I know, it’s probably been a while).

I also like how they mostly package upstream without too many changes. When Ubuntu started upstream was a bit lacking so making changes was necessary to get something that looks like a consistent OS rather than a patchwork of packages, but now it’s no longer needed. Ubuntu is no longer the only distribution with that level of polish.

thedeadwalking4242 , 26 days ago

Mint->arch->nixos

bigmclargehuge , 26 days ago

Ubuntu, Manjaro, Endeavour, Arch, Arch/Debian