Linux

Every couple of years I think to myself "You know, I can't actually remember why I don't like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I've got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they've had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?"

And then I download Ubuntu.

And then I remember.

Gentoo. No. Compiling all of the things was not for me.

Most of them.

• Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it's surprisingly bad at that.

• Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.

• Opensuse world - I've only tried it once, probably 15 years ago. Didn't really know my way around computers all that much at the time, but it didn't click and I've left it. Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.

• Arch - it was my daily for a year or two. Big fan. It still runs my email. At some point the size of packages started to annoy me, though. Still has the best wiki. I've never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with.

I've got the Gentoo bug now. For the first time I genuinely feel ~/. A lean, mean system of machines :)

I daily drive Fedora, but I’ve used Arch, OpenSUSE, Debian, and more. Once you get used to how Linux works, distro doesn’t really matter that much aside from edge case distros that operate totally differently like Nix. I chose Fedora because I like the dnf package manager.

The only distro I don’t like is Ubuntu. I had to setup a Linux VM at work so I figured Ubuntu would be a good choice for that. Firefox is painfully slow to open because of Snap, so I uninstall it and run “apt install firefox” which Ubuntu overrides and installs the Snap again.

Fuck. That. Deleted the VM and installed Debian instead.

All of them, so I'm still on Windows

Debian -- I just wasn't ready for it. Got told "oh you're using Mint? That's nice but you should try out Debian it's the Real Deal(tm)" but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn't understand anything. What do you mean I don't get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

As someone who hates Windows with a passion, once everyone recommend Linux Mint, I knew I had to try it.

I immediately had negative first impressions. I simply don't wanna use something with a desktop environment that reminds me of something that I hate. I get that it makes transitioning a lot easier for many, but for me it simply looks too similar to Windows.

NixOS… for now. I was on Fedora and was looking for something new. Thought I’d try these new „immutable” distros. Then realised I didn’t know enough about normal ones yet, so I switched to Arch instead. Plus, Nix’ docs are horrendous imo

Ubuntu, felt like I was being treated like a child with the lack of user customizability

then I chose to jump directly into Arch Linux🙃 and saw despair from analysis paralysis, somehow I learned Arch in just a month tho🤷‍♀️

Manjaro - used to love it. Now the only distro I actively advise against

Garuda - just too much ( I prefer Arch / EndeavourOS )

Elementary - wanted to love it - just too limited

Gentoo - realized I just don’t want to build everything

RHEL Workstation - everything too old

Bhodi - honestly do not remember - long ago

Ubuntu - ok, let’s expand…

These days, I dislike Snaps. Ubuntu just never hit the sweet spot for me though. I was already an experienced Linux user when it appeared and preferred RPM based distros at the tome. Ubuntu always seemed slow and fragile to me. Setting things up, like Apache with Mono back in the day, was “different” on Ubuntu and that annoyed me. For most of its history, it is what I would recommend to new users but I just never liked it myself.

Debian Stable - ok, let’s expand

I really like Debian. It was also a little “alien” when I was using Fedora / Mandrake and the like but it never bothered me like Ubuntu. I ran RHEL / Centos as servers so I did not need Debian stability. As a desktop, Debian packages were always just a little too old ( especially for dev ). The lack of non-free firmware made it a pain.

These days though, Debian has been growing on me. The move to include non-free firmware has made it much more practical. With Flatpaks and Distrobox, aging packages is much less of a problem too. I could see myself using Debian. I am strongly considering moving to VanillaOS ( immutable Debian ).

I basically do not run any RHEL servers anymore. At home, I have a fair bit running Debian already ( Proxmox, PiHole, PiVPN, and a Minecraft server ).

EndeavourOS is my primary desktop these days ( and I love it ) but it is mostly for the AUR. A Debian base with an Arch Distrobox might be perfect. Void seems quite nice as well.

I have been an Open Source advocate forever ( and used to say Free Software and FLOSS ). I have used Linux daily since the 0.99 kernels and I even installed 386BSD back in the day. Despite that, the biggest “not for me” distros right now are anything too closely associated with the politics of the GNU project. It has almost made me want to leave Linux and I have considered moving to FreeBSD. I would love to use Haiku. OCI containers and the huge software ecosystem keep me on Linux though.

The distribution that intrigues me the most right now is Chimera Linux. I run it with an Arch distrobox and it may become my daily driver. The pragmatism of projects like SerenityOS really attracts me. Who knows it may be what finally pulls me away after 30+ years of Linux.

Gentoo - too long compile time, especially on my dated CPU. I prefer my system to update quickly.

Linux Mint - don't like apt, some packages I installed refused to work properly (like Lutris), and the color scheme which is admittedly customizable but I prefer rolling with defaults except when using WM.

Void Linux - after installing it I realized how much I actually missed systemd, couldn't be arsed to symlink services manually. And yes, I realize that's the whole point.

NixOS - realized how much there is to learn with the flakes and separating home configurations and whatever, and just gave up

Manjaro - I tried it twice at the beginning of my Linux journey, and both times the nvidia driver shat itself and gave me different problems that I couldn't fix.

Maybe I've been spoiled by Arch though, as most of my problems probably boil down to "not the same packages", "not pacman", "need to learn new skills that weren't in Arch" and so on. Though admittedly, I did try to explore with an open mind to find a new "cool" distro, but I'd always go back.

I ditched Ubuntu LTS for my homelab virtual machines around 20.04 when they started to push snaps, netplan and cloud-init, meaning I would have to spend a significant amount of effort redoing my bootstrap scripts for no good reason and learning skills that are only applicable in the Ubuntu ecosystem. I went with debian stable instead, and was left wondering why I hadn't done that sooner. It's like Ubuntu without all the weirdness.

Get that downvote finger ready!

Arch.

I know it's what all the cool kids are using, and I keep trying to like it, but I just can't get into it. I'm a slacker for life.

Ubuntu. It has become so shitty over time, it's oretty sad.

NixOS, this thing is written by wizards for wizards, not for mere mortals like me, I'ma stick to my gentoo, thank you very much

Most distributions are fine honestly. Ubuntu is clearly not my thing. Not a fan of Redhat-based distribution either. I wanted to appreciate OpenSuse as they've been supporters of KDE for a long time but wasn't comfortable with Yast.

Apart from that, Manjaro is awesome, Arch amazing, Debian brilliant, etc.

Manjaro. Because it blank screened in the first update after installation. Never touched it again.

I've been using Xubuntu LTS on my work laptop some 10 years now. All the customization I do is remove snaps and add flatpaks. It just works.

I have RHEL and derivatives on my work machines, where I spend most of my day. I don't like the RPM package system, which they tried to improve upon several times already. I don't like Gnome, is too opinionated for me.

I had a colleague who used Gentoo, to claim superiority. His laptop spent most of the day burning kilowatts with the fans blowing. Not for me. Having everyone build packages from source is very unneficient. "Oh, but the security of building your own binaries! " Well, did you look at the code you're building? No? Well then.

I end up always going back to the DEB ecosystem, with a XFCE desktop. Lately I've been using Manjaro with XFCE and Flatpaks, no AUR.

Mint, and anything else that requires PPAs. Last time I distrohopped, I had a rule that if I couldn't install Librewolf in under a minute or two, it wasn't worth the trouble.

Mind you, this was before flatpaks were big, but I also own a potato and don't want to waste space on flatpaks.

PopOS and Ubuntu - really just found that I don't like gnome. Nothing against it, I know some people love it but it is not for me. This would likely apply to any gnome distro, but those were the two I tried and immediately moved on.

Honorable mention: Manjaro because "it just breaks™" but it wasn't something I noticed immediately and initially liked the os...

Arch: I need reproducible setups. Also bleeding edge is not for me.

I have to give credit to their documentation though!

Honestly everything besides Debian and Arch after distro hopping for years.

Over the years I have tried most mainstream distros. I have never seen a reason to use anything other than Debian. Never had it break due to upgrading, I have never tried Nix, Alpine, Gentoo, or Slackware, not many other others I haven't tried since I started using Linux in 2000.

Ubuntu - Loved it in 2006-2012ish but I jumped ship when Amazon appeared in search. Great place to start my Linux journey at the time.

Manjaro - Only distro to ever break entirely on me. I didn't care enough to try and figure out why.

Tried endeavor and stock arch but they weren't my cup of tea. No real issues with them though.

Fedora - I liked for a few years but abandoned after the RHEL drama this summer. Seems to be going the way of Ubuntu. Maybe that's just my opinion.

I use and like Solus a lot but they didn't update anything for 2 years until this summer. I use it on my gaming PC and an old laptop for web browsing but nothing important. It's always been solid for me, I just worry about it going extinct. They do have an updated road map and seem re-energized though. I also think it's a good beginner distro because you don't have to dive into terminal much, and a good distro if you are a pro, but kind of bad if you are an intermediate user because there aren't a ton of resources on it that bigger distros have.

I mostly use Debian these days. Stable on my server. Testing on everything else. I don't see me abandoning it anytime soon.

Gentoo: I hated constantly compiling and configuring. It was incredibly time consuming. If I was compiling for uncommon cases it might make sense, but I am dealing with a pretty standard dev machine.

NixOS: The configuration is kind of a pain and never really got the extra features you get beyond package management working correctly.

Arch: Arch

Ubuntu (and downstreams): Canonical

Enjoying Fedora. Find Debian (and downstreams) pretty solid as well.

Arch. Rolling release is too much maintenance and AUR can be a pain. I do like the minimalist approach though.

For those of a similar opinion and aren't familiar with it, check out Void. Also a minimalist rolling release, but aims for more stable packages so less updating. Decent package selection in their repos as well.

Ubuntu Reason : Canonical

To all gentoo detractors.... 20 years ago compiling a browser would take 5 days (as in 24 x 5 hours...) So you are not allowed to complain TODAY about compile times ahahahaahaha ahahaha ahah haha aaaaaaaaah ಠ_ಠ

Ubuntu, after the third consecutive release that broke previously working hardware. That was a while ago and I haven't tried it recently, but given snap I'm not really inclined to.

Ubuntu, because snaps break shit and don't work right a lot of the time, also they left people hanging with 32 bit support which isn't great (for being a Legacy OS for weak computers it's not a great look for them, or all the Linux distros that followed them).

There were a lot of problems with Fedora and CentOS, none of them as bad as Ubuntu though. Most were either instability or software availability due to lacking RPM versions of the software I needed.

Arch itself hasn't given me many problems but it is ideologically problematic for a lot of reasons (mainly the elitism) and it is also a rolling release which isn't great if you don't like being a guinea pig and getting software before all the bugs have been ironed out.

NixOS. Every simple update (nixos rebuild switch) was just eating RAM & CPU. I managed to brick it when updating to 23.11 and couldn't find a way out of the mess I created (even with the saved snapshots) so I said adios.

One that might be controversial: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I still have a lot of respect for this distro and I really wanted to like it but it's just not for me. It's the fact that major updates could occur any day of the week, which could be time-consuming to install or they could change the features of the OS. It always presented a dilemma of whether to hold back updates which might include holding back critical updates.

So rolling distros aren't for me, everyone expects to run in to some occasional issues with Arch, but TW puts a lot of emphasis on testing and reliability, so I thought it might be for me. But the reality is I much prefer the release cycle and philosophy of Fedora, I think that strikes the best balance.