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?
“We now added AI to the kernel”
This would be 100% valid
Weird Al: Kernel Drivers
A parody kernel of Linux USB Support
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.
Well one day I heard about NixOS… And that’s all it took
Sell it to me, please
When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)
A whim, usually.
I used ubuntu for 10+ yr and switched because of firefox snap. To fedora. Wow it is so much better here
I am
- Glad you had the courage to try something new
- Impressed you had your limit and stuck to it
- Relieved as a former security person that you’re improving package validation and will reap the rewards even if you don’t notice
- Disappointed it wasn’t before some seriously sketchy shit has gone down with RH and trickled down to fedora.
Finally 5. Overjoyed as fuck if it seemed like an easy switch, but please correct me there.
Could you elaborate on the sketchy shit? I am literally about to switch from openSUSE to Fedora, is there anything I should be aware of? Thanks for your time.
id like to know too
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.
Saturday for some
The ability to wake up the laptop from sleep.
Damn, do I regret going with Fedora. Anything newer than kernel 6.10 (which I salvaged from Fedora 39) and my laptop doesn’t wake up from sleep anymore.
But changing distros is a hassle and idiot me went with a single partition for system and data, so migrating to another distro requires me to actually backup everything, so I haven’t done it yet.
Other than massive breakage, I’m not sure. Completely reinstalling and reconfiguring my setup is a pain in the ass, in part because of my slow internet connection. But damn if Ubuntu isn’t trying to find out.
Just use Mint.
How exactly am I going to do that without completely reinstalling?
Ship of Theseus challenge: https://lemmy.ml/post/27387345
I’m not a masochist.
Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can’t fix.
I’ve changed distro’s a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.
Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.
The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).
Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.
Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.
Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.
Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.
Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.
I really appreciate this well detailed response! 30 years of changing distros is pretty amazing you must know a lot
Was a Ubuntu user from 9.10 until 20.04; snap shittyness caused me to hop around for a while. Settled on Mint a few years ago.
It’s stable, gets out of my way and lets me get my work done.
It has been a really long time (20? years) since I’ve been on nix. Kind of torn by Mint and Deb. I want the ease ootb but the flexibility of Deb.
Similar here. Left Red Hat for Ubuntu Warty because reviews suggested it was great (it was). Left Ubuntu for Debian because of snaps (not so great). Left Debian for Fedora because immutable sounded like less system admin and more using apps (it is).
Eh, probably if Guix becomes significantly better I’ll switch to it (from NixOS). I really like how seriously they take user freedom, bootstrapping (only 357 bytes of binary to bootstrap everything else from source!) and consistent user interfaces (scheme everywhere). But unfortunately the package repo is just not big and mature enough yet, and declarative configuration options are not as good as they are with NixOS. My job is also Nix-related, and that’s another major reason I’m staying for now.
Nix-related job - do tell!
I’m doing Nix consulting-type jobs - it can mean anything from simply packaging some stuff for Nix and making a devShell to refactoring existing Nix-based infra (which can be hundreds of thousands of SLOC) to building entirely new developer UX, CI/CD and even production deployments on Nix/NixOS. I’ve also been paid to implement some cool features into Nix itself, fix bugs, etc. I’m really quite happy with the job, even though it could probably pay more :)
Cool! Thanks for sharing.
