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
I’ve been in Pop!_OS for a lot of years now; and Ubuntu/Mint before that. The lack of updates in Pop!_OS (not Cosmic!) is starting to wear me thin; the U22.04 basis is starting to get a bit threadbare and their App Store has always been broken— but now it seems even more brokener.
The Cosmic Alphas don’t work well on my machine, Wayland is still pretty unstable and some of the apps I have to use just don’t work with it at all. I’ve got way too much to do to go and try to debug it or hack it or even give up and go try another distro. When they take Cosmic out of beta, if it doesn’t work for me I’m just going to drop and go back to hopping. Or worse, I may just go back to MacOS 100% except for when I’m working on some server-side shit.
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.
Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can’t fix.
Well one day I heard about NixOS… And that’s all it took
Sell it to me, please
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.
When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)
The distro I’m on getting worse would be one. Linux Mint has been pretty stable and enjoyable though. I admit, setting up a new distro can be fun, but it comes with many annoyances too.
I have been tempted to try KDE and Wayland though. The last time that I installed a new DE, I had all kinds of little reminders of the previous DE that would pop up. (E.g. file selector dialogue boxes.) Finding all the little config options I needed to change to make the switch completely was tricky. At this point, I’m tempted to day that it’s better just to install a distro with the DE that you want, but maybe I should try it again.
I got the impression Mint isn’t best for KDE. For the reasons you mentioned, I guess, because it’s not been set up with all those options right for KDE.
I’m also on Mint, and happy to stick with it for some time, but sometimes I’ve wondered about going back to OpenSUSE, or even trying KDE’s own distro. But by then I start thinking about Nix and Guix also, as well as old faithful Arch. Then it’s too much choice and I remember how nicely Mint works for me and the family!
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.
Stickning to Ubuntu instead of ripping the bandaid? Still not a masochist?
Ok :)
I was just thinking about that post.
What a legend. So, it’s technically possible, but not recommended.
You don’t.
But when you eventually reinstall, because Ubuntu crossed the line, Mint is just Ubuntu without the bullshit.
Meh. Mint does remove most of Ubuntu’s corporate crap, but its update system is still based on Ubuntu’s sources but just far enough removed to cause new issues. I’d rather switch to Debian. I actually already have Debian installed in parallel, it’s just that actually configuring it with all the non-default bits and pieces of my Ubuntu install is a pain in the ass.
There is a Debian-based Mint edition: https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
I know.
Probably nothing. I’m currently in the process of starting to distrohop a lot. I want to try out lots of distros, for fun and in order to recommend distros to other people. I will probably eventually settle on arch or nixos though, the customization seams really awesome.
Saturday for some
A whim, usually.
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
Not sure… I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I’d rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool… but I really don’t want to use a weird language for making packages, I’m just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.
I half the point of package managers was so you could easily uninstall them. Do package managers usually not fully uninstall?
From what I understand the package managers remove files they themselves created but not files created by the application itself like config files and other stuff
Nix becomes extremely easy once you get the hang of the language. Much more straightforward then some cryptic bash
