What did yall end up settling on?
Ubuntu -> Debian -> Linux Mint -> Fedora -> Arch -> Manjaro -> EndeavourOS -> SuSE Linux -> NixOS
I’m pretty happy on NixOS now…
I’m close to you, skipped a few intermediate steps though. Ubuntu -> Mint -> Manjaro -> CachyOS
On servers: Red Hat -> Debian (with a brief detour through Ubuntu Server for a couple of years).
On desktop: Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro.
Switched away from Red Hat around 2004 after RHL was discontinued and split into RHEL and Fedora. You may think Fedora would’ve been a more obvious choice but it was still new in 2004 while Debian had 10 years under its belt. We also migrated the servers at work to Debian around that time and I had used Debian at school in the '90s so it made a lot of sense to use it at home.
Ubuntu on desktop was a fucking revelation when it came out (on CDs shipped free to your home 😃) in 2004. Early days Ubuntu was soooo good that I stayed with it until 2020, long after the magic was gone.
I mean I would’ve probably left eventually anyway given the whole snap and privacy and so on debacles but what really put me off was how it would almost never upgrade cleanly once you’ve added a bunch of 3rd party repos (which you wanted to do all the time on a desktop PC). Eventually I got so sick of it that I was determined to find a rolling distro where upgrades would never be a problem.
Tried a bunch of them during stay at home during the pandemic and settled on Manjaro + XFCE on the desktop and a fresh install of Debian stable + Docker on the server as a happy medium between “hands off” and “up to date”. I’m at a point where I like my Linux machines to just work and to need zero maintenance so I can put the time into other things instead.
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit I got from a CD out of a magazine from barnes and noble and it blew my mind. I had so much fun learning everything about Linux and I think I even got oblivion running on WINE, which was a nightmare compared to how easy games run on proton nowadays.
Those were the glory years for sure. Now I run Arch and want a “just werks” experience. It’s why I use unRAID for my server.
How is Unraid? I’ve been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I’ve been wondering what I should install on it.
I’d like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they’d put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it’s not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn’t need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
Distro hopping sounds like too much work. I went from mint and was happy on that for years, then I went to Debian and I’m happy here. I’m curious about Fedora but not curious enough to be bothered with a new install.
I’ll live vicariously through others
So far my personal favourite is manjaro. I always liked Arch based distros and Manjaro has done a great job at pre configuring everything. Manjaro also came with zsh as the default shell and I really liked that.
TL;DR: LMDE. It works for me.
I’ve not hopped much, and from at least one viewpoint I’ve not hopped at all.
If you want to count distros I’ve used, some even at home, however briefly, then I tried Red Hat and SUSE (actually bought a copy!) way back in the '90s, Ubuntu, CentOS and… you know I don’t actually know what a few of the GUI-less ones were, at work from the '90s onwards.
I even tried PC-BSD for a very brief moment before conflicts with an unusual hardware setup sent me scurrying back to Windows.
But since I quit Microsoft Windows for good at home, I’ve been nothing but Mint. I switched to LMDE after using the original for a while, but I can see arguments each way for whether that’s a hop or not.
Frankly, it will take something drastic to make me want to hop to something else.
Went back to Ubuntu after laying off of it for a while. Now that I’m used to not using Windows, I feel like trying either Arch or Cachy though everyone keeps raving about Bazzite.
Man, I don’t miss windows. My laptop works better without it. Idk what the hell windows does but my internal wifi works better than it did with windows. A 750mbps USB adapter was needed and my 1200mbps internal wasn’t able to capture my 5G internet from 2 rooms away from the router.
I install Ubuntu and I can use my laptop in the shitter/3 rooms away for the router. All or most of the streaming is 720hd or 1080hd and it loads. IT ACTUALLY FUCKIN’ LOADS.
Started with deb based distro, later swicht too arch based, now still with cachyOs
i liked using cachy for a while, but it broke plasma’s login manager once so i gave up on it and went to base arch
though it did have snapper which i liked a lot, so i added it to my arch install too
I have this handy little bash function, I think you should use it.
get-english-ordinal-ending() { case "$1" in *11 | *12 | *13) printf 'th' ;; *1) printf 'st' ;; *2) printf 'nd' ;; *3) printf 'rd' ;; *) printf 'th' ;; esac }This gets it wrong for the seventy-secoth item.
The urge to downvote something you really shouldn’t have never been so strong.
Ubuntu, Manjaro, Endeavour.
Played a bit with others before I settled, but XFCE feels like home and not having to do a system update that breaks everything every year has been great.
I absolutely love the ecosystem that’s sprung around Arch over the years.
And ofc I wish the fans of the various Arch-based distros had a less antagonistic approach to each other. 🙄 I mean Arch’s main goal is to be flexible and having a diverse family of derived distros downstream is the ultimate confirmation of that goal.
It’s also very healthy for any distro to have a big “family tree” because the upstream benefits from contributions from a larger community that may not have vibed with the parent distro otherwise.
Arch Linux on laptop (needed some bleeding edge stuff), Fedora Linux on pc, looking forward for GNOME OS stable
Started with Mandrake, currently on Cachy
I was like this before I tried regular Arch. I probably would’ve settled on NixOS if I had tried that first. I feel like Linux Mint could be the end of the line because it just works on a lot of old machines & does so quickly.
I’ve only ever used Debian my entire life
Redhat > fedora > Debian > Ubuntu > mint > fedora. Been there for years now.
Ubuntu -> Mint -> Arch -> NixOS
Ubuntu really drove me away for some time. Only when I got to Mint, I felt that Linux could be a daily driver. Arch made me strangely reinstall it every few days. Not by not working but by having the feeling of dirtying the machine on use.
NixOS is really what I want to use the rest of my life. Very complicated on first use but definitly worth it (for me).
Yeah, I bounced off NixOS for a couple months before it stuck. I would switch again but it would have to be like Nix but better
