For me it was:
Windows (for many years) -> Ubuntu (for a year) -> Arch Linux (for half a year) -> Void Linux (literally 2 days) -> Artix Linux with runit (a month) -> Gentoo Linux (another month) -> Debian (finally, I don’t plan on changing it).
Also, when trying to switch from Gentoo to Debian, I fucked up all my data with no backup.
What was your journey?
EDIT: Added Windows
You’ll always end up on debian. You just dont know it yet
Can confirm. I’ve used Dos, Windows, Dilinux over Windows, Redhat, more Windows, MacOS, Windows again, Ubuntu, and now I’m on Debian.
Once people become familar with the basics of linux, they realize that almost anything that these niche distros offer can be accomplished in debian
Does a debian version upgrade require an OS reinstall?
For me, no…
I’ve gone from debian 9 to debian 11 and now debian sid without reinstalling OS on my desktop
Same with my servers. Debian 8 -> 11 all upgrades in-place. Will have to upgrade to 12 soon…
The only time i messed up an upgrade is when accidentally used the codename “bookworm” in the sources file and skipped a major version. The system tried to fully upgrade 2 versions ahead and promptly borked itself… But it was an LXC container so i just rolled back my mistake. Lesson learned…
But yeah. Full re-installs have NEVER been a thing for me since going debian. It will even happily clone to a new SSD when you need to upgrade your hardware. (As long as your new hardware has in-kernel drivers, or at least some basic functionality to boot and fix the problem, if any)
Almost 10 years into my own Linux journey, I’m feeling the pull to Debian.
I’m just hanging out in denial right now on Pop OS.
Agree to disagree. I keep trying Debian and Debian based distros, same with Arch based (looking at you, Endeavor), and always end up back on Fedora or one of it’s spins.
Genuine question: what is it about Fedora that keeps you coming back? I have also used Debian based and Arch based distros, as well as Fedora.
For one, I’m a sucker for bleeding edge, so the constant updates, including kernels, are a godsent. Then there’s my overall experience when compared to other bases. For example, I love PopOS, but even in my S76 Gazelle, it would break regularly (it could have something to do with all the tinkering I constantly do, but who knows), whereas with Fedora, since F37, I’ve barely had to tweak anything other than the DE and have yet to see it fail.
I also tried Arch (Endeavour actually), but I find managing it unnecessarily convoluted for my taste.
I’m sure my love for Fedora comes from my personal experience based on my use cases and the hardware I use. It’s not without it’s kinks though, I used to hate how slow DNF is when compared to APT, but DNF5 has been working flawlessly and fast for a couple of months now. And be aware, in terms of performance for some intensive graphical stuff, I feel Fedora falls a bit behind any Ubuntu/Devian based distro, but not noticeably enough for me to go back.
I get it, I actually use the exact same distros you mention: Pop!_OS, Endeavour and Fedora.
Had the same experience with Pop!_OS: those few things that did not “just work” but needed tinkering caused quite some issues. And yeah, somewhat more bleeding edge than Ubuntu LTS is nice: to use neovim on the 22.04 base, I’d need to use distrobox or build vim from source, but on Fedora and Arch, it “just works”.
I liked Endeavour, though I haven’t really used it with a DE, I went with Sway. So hard to compare, but the manual sysadmin intervention everyone keeps talking about has been minimal. AUR is amazing, pacman is fast and sane.
I went to Fedora because it is bleeding edge enough, but seems better tested and more stable than Arch. Also wanted to see how BTRFS is setup on there and test the rollbacks. The codec stuff has been terrible though. Even after enabling RPMFusion and installing a bunch of them, the Fedora source Firefox still refuses to do video calls in MS Teams. I’m using Flatpak browsers now but downloading flatpak updates is way slower than even the worst package manager for “native” binaries. Feels a bit odd to have to use a Flatpak for the browser.
If I had to install a new pc today, I’d go EndeavourOS with KDE (which I’m using on Fedora now), BTRFS and systemd-boot. I got to know systemd-boot in Pop!_OS and have tried a different boot manager (rEFInd), but systemd-boot is amazing.
At the end of the day, it’ll be a matter of taste and how much anyone’s willing to “play around”. For example, my 9 years old son started with Zorin when he was 6, and has never looked back,whereas my 11 years old daughter started with Zorin at 8, saw me on PopOS and a couple of months later moved to that. Then we gave her an old HP X360 for school when she needs a laptop, and she went with Nobara, and my wife finally dropped Windows about a month or 2 ago, and chose Fedora because that’s what I use and she figures I can resolve anything quickly for her since that’s also what I use.
Yes, My house is now spyware free on all PCs and Laptops 🥰
That’s amazing!
When your kids tell you “why do people use Windows? I can’t understand why it always popping stuff up”, you know you’re doing a good job as a parent.
o Windows 10 | o Linux Mint | |\__ | \ | o Manjaro KDE | | o Fedora KDE | |\__ | | \ x | o Windows 11 | o Windows 11 + Arch Linux | | o Arch Linux | | | | | o Windows 11 + Debian KDE | |hopefully it renders well on your client :D
Man, a monospace fixed size array would be really nice for ASCII art eh? Kinda like a text image. I suppose you could take a screenshot, but then there’s image hosting issues in the future.
Sorry, random idea.
Screenshot woulda been better just so everyone sees the same thing lol. I wasn’t sure what it would look like because on browser it highlighted some things green, and on Voyager it seems to highlight 4+ space indented as gray. No clue what is going on there :D
vim with
:set virtualedit=allgets pretty close being able to “paint” text anywhere… unfortunately i was on my phone and didn’t think to use itYou can also do code block with plain:
```plain Stuff here
Looks great! ~ Jerboa 0.0.67 on LOS 20 (Android 13)
Copying this from another thread that was basically the same question, but didn’t get much attention
Started on Arch Linux for some reason back in 2016, I just decided to throw out my Windows and install it (Don’t really remember what was going through my head, or why I wanted to install Linux, other than I was reading the r/linux subreddit wiki at the time). I was trapped in a TTY trying to install the thing for maybe a week, and after 9 reinstallations, I got Arch working and got a Weston compositor session running under Wayland. After realizing Weston was more a tech-demo than something I was actually supposed to use, I installed X11 and Gnome, which was cool for approximately 3 minutes before I decided to replace it with some minimal window manager instead. Can’t remember if it was i3wm or something else, but i3wm sounds right; and later I messed around with some tilers like StumpWM, ratpoison, and HerbstluftWM.
After about 3 months, something in Arch broke (systemd was not reaping processes properly was what I concluded at the time, no idea what the actual problem was but I ended up with a bunch of zombie processes), and I decided to install Gentoo as my second Linux distribution. After installing Gentoo, I entered a stage which is colloquially know as “config hell” where I overconfigured everything to the point of breaking something, and could never figure out what I actually broke because everything was so overconfigured. After recompiling the whole system, everything was still broken, so I reinstalled Gentoo, this time less overconfigured, but still somewhat overconfigured (It didn’t help I was also running a full self-made custom kernel config with 3 months of Linux experience, I surprised the thing booted at all).
I lived in Gentoo for around a year using HerbstluftWM, but eventually I grew tired of how much maintenance Gentoo required and just wanted some sane defaults. This led me to installing OpenBSD, which I guess was the right decision for me because I’m still using it to this day (7 years!), and is where I gained the majority of my knowledge about using Unix thanks to the wonderful documentation. Initially I didn’t like the ports system because it didn’t have as many knobs as Gentoo’s portage did (Gentoo’s portage is more modeled after FreeBSD’s ports than OpenBSD’s ports it seems), but I came around to enjoying hacking ports with my own patches instead of using preconfigured knobs. Eventually my porting skills got good enough that I now officially mantain a couple OpenBSD ports (games/stone-soup, www/pipe-viewer), and that list is likely to grow. I switched between some other window managers (ratpoison, JWM, FVWM2) before settling on OpenBSD’s in-house cwm. I purchased a VPS also running OpenBSD, and self host various things like email, git, ZNC, web/http, and IPsec/VPN. Eventually, I grew tired of not having games to play (OpenBSD doesn’t support WINE), so I bought a Steam Deck that I use as both my gaming desktop and handheld. I also bought a Pinephone from Pine64 which currently uses PostmarketOS (I hope to run OpenBSD on it some day though).
tl;dr Use Arch as your first Linux distribution and you’ll end up as an OpenBSD ports maintainer I guess
It takes a special person to jump into a complicated task struggle and then pick up and even more complicated task and end up succeeding.
Windows from 1999 until December 2023. Debian since then!
Debian -> Slackware -> Guix
Windows -> Ubuntu ->dual boot with Ubuntu-> Windows-> Ubuntu-> Fedora workstation
All of this over 20 years.
And now I really don’t plan on going back to Windows and I’m happy with Gnome and Fedora even if I’d want to try other distributions outside of a virtual machine sometimes.
And the f course there were some accidents with lost data over the years, but I always had a pretty recent backup on a drive before syncing with cloud backup became a thing.
Ubuntu -> Arch -> Debian (stable) -> Fedora Silverblue -> NixOS
Window -> Mint -> Mint Debian -> Arch -> NixOS (not complete yet)
I am incredibly happy with NixOS, I love having my entire OS and software configuration in a GIT repo, commits and comments included.
Windows -> Fedora
Been almost 10 years and no thoughts of changing. What can I say? I lucked out first time.
DOS -> slack ware Linux -> win 3 -> os/2 warp -> win 98 -> win XP -> osx (several years on Mac) -> win 10 -> Ubuntu 14, 16, 18, 20 -> fedora 34, 35, 36 ,37, 38 -> Debian 12 --> fedora silverblue 40.
Ubuntu (in VM, a few months) -> Linux Mint (1 year) -> Archlinux (2 years) -> Ubuntu (1 year) -> Fedora (2 years) -> Linux Mint Debian (3 years) -> Debian (5+ years for now)
I have had a desktop PC and a laptop for a few years now. The laptop had Mint (DE) for 2 years longer.
That should be more or less it, makes about 14 years on GNU/Linux now.
Windows -> Ubuntu -> Arch Linux
Samesies
Windows (2015-2021) --> Manjaro (2 Weeks) --> Arch (2021-today)
Windows 95
Suse Linux
Yoper Linux
Windows XP
Slackware
Windows 10/11
Fedora Linux
“Relapsed” to Windows for a while because I became a graphic designer and running a somewhat current Adobe suite on wine was impossible (it works now).
Slackware has been amazing, but having to built so much stuff from scratch takes too much time nowadays.
And those first Suse years were too rough to keep using it as a daily driver.
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In the 90’s: Slackware, then RedHat, then Debian, then Progeny (Debian based), then shortly Mandrake (RedHat based)
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Early 2000’s: RedHat Japanese edition, TurboLinux (because I was in Japan and Japanese IME was almost impossible to get working on non-Japanese distributions)
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Then I had fun with Gentoo looking at my terminal compiling stuff everyday and fixing broken package because I followed advices to activate crazy compilation flags
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2004: Ubuntu, that I used for nearly 20 years
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Last year: switched to Fedora
What happened last year?
Nothing in particular, for the past few years I didn’t like the direction Ubuntu was taking but I stayed because I was too lazy to switch and it didn’t feel that bad.
So I’m not sure exactly what was the last straw, maybe part of it was me getting a Steam Deck, discovering flatpak and understanding how bad snap was compared to it.
The Shakahola Forest Incident, for one thing.
I just realized that I used Ubuntu for 20 years. I might be interested in switching to Fedora. How ist your experience so far?
It just works, just like Ubuntu before they started pushing snap down everyone’s throat (which is what made me switch eventually.)
I had a bad image of RedHat/Fedora’s package management from the time deb was much superior, but no they caught up and are on the same level (I know, it’s probably been a while).
I also like how they mostly package upstream without too many changes. When Ubuntu started upstream was a bit lacking so making changes was necessary to get something that looks like a consistent OS rather than a patchwork of packages, but now it’s no longer needed. Ubuntu is no longer the only distribution with that level of polish.
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Slack, mandriva, Ubuntu, gentoo, arch, xubuntu, knoppix, mint, QubesOS. In that order.
Currently at Qubes and I can’t imagine downgrading to any OS that doesn’t have these VM-level sandboxing features built-in
