Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
Debian for everything.
Yes ! I don’t get why debian always seems to be forgotten outside of its server use. I have been running it for 2 years now (homelab, laptop and desktop).
Beyond none of its branches actually satisfying my preferences, I feel like the way it handles major version upgrades is way too involved. I suppose it makes sense; it’s paying back the accumulated debt of a couple years worth of bliss…
Having said that, my experience on Fedora Atomic is (almost) equally blissful without requiring any of that whenever a major version update strikes.
Don’t get me wrong; I definitely do believe Debian has its uses on desktop Linux. But I can’t shake off the feeling that they’re definitely more niche compared to say Fedora.
I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it’s installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.
First one is that it doesn’t have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren’t for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven’t been updated since Debian Buster days!
A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.
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Debian is nice & boring, but I have had issues with how old its kernel and software versions are. 6.12 isn’t too bad for Trixie, but previously it was really terrible. When I was running Bookworm, I ran into plenty of situations where software I was compiling or getting from outside the repos (for niche software), wasn’t backwards compatible to the library versions Debian provided.
No hate for Debian, but it just doesn’t work for a lot of people. However, these days I would go for Debian over Ubuntu 10 times out of 10.
That is a release engineering issue on the developers side in my opinion though no less real. Developers targeting Linux should target the current version of big LTS releases like debian and Redhat enterprise if they are serious about compatibility beyond “works on my system”
For the vast majority of computer users I’d says debian is fine since most users hardly step out of the browser these days.
Staying compatible with LTS releases should absolutely be the goal, but that takes work from both sides.
If Debian is applying backported patches to old software (I think the oldest version I saw was 6 years out of support) that generates a nightmare to support for package maintainers. If there are features which are not supported since the version is so old, but there are backported security patches which change the API, the developers would essentially have to maintain a specific version for each LTS distro’s specific set of patches, and the number of versions you have to maintain and the length of time you need to maintain them for quickly becomes impossible to manage.
Stable is nice, but you can have stability without being criminally outdated, as Trixie shows. The ideal is to have a stable and up to date distribution.
And yes, most users would be fine due to just being in the browser, but thats true of literally any OS or distro, not specific to this.
I don’t think back ported security patches should be changing public APIs, are you speaking from actual experience or is that some kind of theoretical problem that might not actually exist or at least isn’t the norm?
debian always seems to be forgotten outside of its server use
Nah, not even for servers. SLSA and ISO27002. Validation in the other distros is better, and that’s night-and-day for server sector.
I worked Unix in 99-06 and there’s a reason their Linux offering wasn’t debian: that validation hole.
Debian for everything I need to not fall over, CachyOS for computers I want to fiddle with.
I have been on this Linux jam since 1996 with a CD copy of Red Hat that came with a magazine (Byte, maybe?). In 2018 I made the jump to Debian based distros specifically because I got tired of the surprises. Now my lab runs LMDE. The only thing more stable and boring is Debian Stable itself.
Like you said, I want to focus on my projects, not have the OS be my project.
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That is strange.
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I had Debian stable on my T480 for some time (maybe 3 years) and had no trouble at all. I was running XFCE at that time.
Stable doesn’t necessarily means there aren’t any bugs, it just means it doesn’t change or changes are minor. Of course most bugs shouldn’t be a show stopper, though annoying they should have a way to bypass them or simply not have that great a impact.
I recall when using and regularly updating Arch, a library update borked a software dependent on it — a software required for a Uni class mind you — and while I managed to get it working afterwards, I had to stay awake through the night. That’s the difference between stable and rolling release, that wouldn’t happen as easily on Debian stable.
For most users a rolling release model is fine, for servers, it’s not.
Depends on what value of most “users” we are talking. Most users rarely stray outside the browser and I’d say rolling release with the risk of breakage it entails would not suit your average user very well at all.
Power users that are trying to eek out every drop of performance sure.
It’s a compromise. Of course you wouldn’t install a rolling release model OS on your grandma’s PC, but it can be necessary to have the latest drivers and software, and you don’t need to be a power user when the only thing you want is either compatible hardware or software. I concur that Arch is mostly for power users, though its derivatives don’t have to be.
At the same time, Ubuntu is so dumbed down thst certain things are impossible via the UI. I spent a whole day and 5 reinstalls to be able to install an encrypted OS next to another partition. This used to be trivial though the infstaller.
My first Linux distro was Red Hat 6 around 1996 I would suspect. It came with a Linux book that I bought.
I am pretty sure I started with either Halloween or Mother’s Day because Red Hat Linux for Dummies came with Red Hat 2.1 which I am pretty sure came out in 96 or 97. I know Red Hat 6 was released in 1999, because I was neck deep in Y2K work at the time I installed it on my Compaq laptop.
I found the O’Reilly Red Hat 6 book online and it came out in August 1999. I would have pegged it earlier than that but I guess not.
CachyOS anyone?
For gaming, oh yes. And enable snapshots so you can rollback to a working version if the latest update shits the bed.
My partner isn’t IT-literate but loves her CachyOS since it means not having to deal with Windows
Went from OpenSUSE way back then, moved to Ubuntu for a while, then when I decided to finally switch totally to Linux, I went with Arch. Last December I migrated to CachyOS and I really like it. I remove a bunch of stuff on installation and I install no DE/WM as I prefer to bring my own config, but as a base, it’s solid and has some stuff already configured that I don’t have to do, like btrfs snapshots for example.
What is it with everyone going to Fedora? New Ubuntu apparently.
Fedora is solid these days, well the last few years. It’s been so easy and everything is up to date, not lagging behind lke Ubuntu.
Ubuntu been awful since the beginning, always buggy always needing to be rinstalled at some point.
It lives on hype alone. I would choose anything over Ubuntu.
Fedora recently provided some exciting developments in the Linux world, and it’s genuinely interesting to follow.
It’s also reasonably new and reasonably stable, which is often so much of a pain point to balance.
Also, I mean, it is the distro Linus himself prefers.
Linus liking something doesn’t mean anything. He has some other strange opinions too.
Sure, and it’s not about liking. It’s about being damn sure Fedora will keep up with Linux development.
Linus is not the one to distro-hop, and you can be sure that his workstation will be perfectly operational and up to date with Linux development. And therefore, yours can probably be too.
I always had too many bugs on Ubuntu. Fedora has been solid from the beginning. Only ever had two issues with it in 4 years. I never had such stable experience before.
I just swapped over yesterday to Fedora from Ubuntu. It’s been a good experience so far! Except for installing nvidia drivers, still working on that
“i use arch”
btw
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Debian on my severs and workstation. My laptop is also Debian, though I have a Haiku partition that has been a lot of fun to play around with. It’s way, way better than the last time I tried it.
Agreed. Fedora is great. Although I do prefer gnome.
Isn’t gnome the default DE on Fedora?
Yes, in one of their two main releases. The other default is KDE Plasma.
What makes you prefer Gnome? To me, it always felt too simple, as if they’re treating the user like a child learning how a computer works. I have the same issue with MacOS too
I could make any de do what I want, but gnome is closest to what I’d build out of the box. And that’s a very simple interface. I particularly like the finger gestures on my laptop touchpad. Once you train your brain, you zoom between desktops and programs on a single screen laptop equivalent to multiple monitors.
Additionally, I’ve found a few simple extensions that I’m sure have kde equivalents, but I’m a creature of habit. Grid is awesome, makes window tiling and snapping awesome. Caffeine for keeping things alive. And a few others. Mostly though it’s just speed of use - especially on the laptop.
One thing though I hate about gnome though is its high dpi monitor scaling support with Wayland when gaming. There’s four or five really dumb things it does. Sometimes it’s easiest to just change the resolution to what you want prior to launching the game.
I also settled on fedora with kde but the fans in my laptop keep spinning up every few seconds, even when locked. It’s very annoying.
I get the opposite with any Linux distribution I’ve tried on my HP laptop. Windows, fans never shut up but with Linux just pure silence!
I sometimes dual boot into windows on the same laptop and it also hits the fans hard, especially after booting up, but it doesn’t suffer the periodic fan problem. Not that I’m shilling for windows. I hate windows and use Linux on my server.
Apparently I lied. My laptop is running windows with the lid closed and the fans are occasionally firing up for a second. Strange.
Back to Fedora myself.
My path so far: Manjaro -> Arch -> Mint -> Fedora -> EndeavourOS -> OpenSUSE Tumbleweed -> Bazzite -> Fedora.
All distros on the list are brilliant in their own right, they just failed on my hardware in all variety of odd ways, or were simply too limited for what I want to do. Of all of them, Fedora was the least problematic in the long run, and with the snapshot experience I gained from OpenSUSE, I think I can manage it well now.
P.S. Seems like the article author also got inspiration for btrfs after using OpenSUSE, and I don’t think it’s random. Folks there made a truly perfect integration. If you want to know what btrfs can truly offer, look no further, this is the best use of this filesystem anywhere on Linux.
Speaking of Fedora, my experience of installation was nothing similar. It was rough all the way. From the installer literally not launching, to borked nvidia drivers, it all caused me some pain. But after I’ve set everything up, it was a breeze.
This is the way.
I’m on bazzite
I’ve stuck with Debian on my server and EndeavourOS (Arch, btw) on my PC. Both have been rock solid.
I’ve recently had some issues with Fedora (KDE). After I install any update it tells me to restart to finish installing. So I restart and it still tells me the same thing. Probably time I distrohop again.
With the usual restriction of “either upstream or Mint, otherwise you’re doing it wrong”. There are 6 options. Ubuntu is obviously out. Arch is not my cup of tea. Fedora is already ruled out. Debian/Mint aren’t as secure as Fedora/OpenSUSE. That leaves me with going back to OpenSUSE Leap.
But the proprietary media codecs on OpenSUSE come from the AUR … looks like I’m out of options.
I got fed up with Discover’s whole reboot-to-update thing and just disabled it.
Eventually, I ended up just disabling updates through discover altogether, I’d rather just use my little bash script anyways.
With LUKS the whole “reboot to update” thing is 1000 times as inconvenient. I set it to install updates immediately, and even automatically, but the update process just isn’t going great for me in a bunch of ways.
Yeah, LUKS or multiboot make things much more complicated. I think it’s well intentioned, but I’ve never had any stability issues skipping it, so it seems unnecessary for most folks. Also, snapper-boot is just a better solution to the upgrade stability problem.
Why distro-hop when you could jump in on the bug tracker or forge or the matrix channels and get involved with the community to find the root cause of the issue and make the distro you’re on better?
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