What is/was your distrohopping journey?

CrabAndBroom , 1 month ago

Mine was/is/will be:

• Windows
• Some ancient version of Corel Linux that came on a CD that was free with a magazine that I could never get to work properly
• Some version of SUSE that I bought from a computer store impulsively, that also never worked properly
• Ubuntu 6.something that finally worked!
• Several more years of Ubuntu, gradually drifting over to Kubuntu/KDE Neon as I realised I liked KDE more than GNOME/Unity
• Manjaro as an awkward transitional phase to becoming an Arch person
• A split between full Arch (btw) for my laptop which is the tinkering machine that I’m allowed to break, and Pop!OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use that has to actually work all the time
• The distant call of NixOS, which I’m currently fiddling with in a VM and is trying to tempt me into nuking my laptop once again.

pastermil , 1 month ago

• Windows XP
  • Ubuntu Studio
  • Mandriva (I think)
  • Zenwalk
• Windows 7
• Mac OS X
  • Arch Linux
  • LFS
• Fedora 20
• Gentoo & Debian
  • Linux Mint

ItsPlasmaSir , 1 month ago

My journey went Ubuntu (2012) -> Kubuntu (2018) -> Manjaro (2020) -> Fedora KDE (2022)

Most computers I had were used and low-end so Linux was always my preferred OS, but I always dualbooted with the version of Windows or MacOS the machine came with when I could.

My current computers have been Linux only for a couple years now, thanks to Windows being a headache and MacOS being inflexible.

bigmclargehuge , 1 month ago

Ubuntu, Manjaro, Endeavour, Arch, Arch/Debian

299792458ms , 1 month 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.

Asudox , 1 month 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 , 1 month ago

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

knolord , 1 month 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)

ChanSecodina , 1 month 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)

IuseArchbtw , 1 month ago

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

mynamesnotrick , 1 month ago

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.

akwd169 , 1 month ago

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

KindaABigDyl , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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

SolarPunker , 1 month ago

Starting with Ubuntu I’ve tried a lot of distro, here the ones I used the more: Mageia -> Chakra -> Manjaro -> Void -> Arch

SeikoAlpinist , 27 days ago

• MS-DOS 6.22 / Windows for Workgroups 3.11
• Red Hat Linux 5.2
• Slackware Linux 3.5
• FreeBSD 3.2 -> FreeBSD 6.0
• Kubuntu 6.06
• Linux Mint Darnya
• Arch Linux with KDEmod and oss4, later with awesome window manager
• Fedora Leonidas, Constantine
• Microsoft Windows 7
• Fedora Goddard, Lovelock (this time with KDE)
• OpenBSD 4.9 -> OpenBSD 7.0
• Debian stable (buster, then bullseye, now bookworm)

I left OpenBSD reluctantly when I found that it wasn’t meeting my needs anymore. I needed an iPad Pro and an iPhone to fill in the missing functionality and they don’t play nice with OpenBSD for things like transferring files, photos, etc.

I’ve since converted the family to Debian stable. Backports and flatpak make it incredibly reliable. We can do everything from here and its well documented for every use case. Video chats, zoom conference calls, file sync/sharing, bluetooth music through Spotify, etc. Started with buster when it was the stable distro; jumped early to bullseye during the freeze; and now holding onto bookworm.

DeltaWingDragon , 27 days ago

• Started on a Windows Vista machine, but I dual-booted Mint on it when it started to run slow.
• The software broke or got corrupted, so I installed Lubuntu.
• Lubuntu started to freeze, so I installed Mint again.

The hardware was really outdated at this point, so I got a new machine. Windows 8.1.

Got a different new computer with Windows 10. Started trying out lots of distros of VMs.

• Switched out the drive and installed… OpenSUSE, I think?
• Catastrophic system error during an update, left the system corrupted. I installed Debian.
• Another system error (which may have been caused by me) led me to install FreeBSD.
• FreeBSD was usable, but not super usable. I installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
• Catastrophic system error during an update, left the system corrupted. I installed Debian (again).

tldr: Windows Vista -> Mint -> Lubuntu -> Mint again -> Windows 8.1 (new computer) -> Windows 10 (new computer) -> OpenSUSE Leap -> Debian -> FreeBSD -> OpenSUSE Tumbleweed -> Debian again

wasabi , 29 days ago

Windows for until 8 => various Ubuntu Flavours for a while => Manjaro for a couple Weeks maybe => Arch for 5+ Yeats => fedora since maybe 2 months