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.
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I went thought the exact same process for about 3 months, on CachyOS. Went back to Fedora about 3 weeks ago on both my laptop and PC, and it is refreshing.
Fedora for fun, OpenSUSE for work.
Nobara for fun, rocky for work.
I worked on United Linux, with suse. Never again.
Debian for server, NetBSD for tinkering
Kinoite user here - no urge to hop. Distrobox if I need something else
Don’t get comfy, I used to be fedora, then debian, then arch. Mint + Cinnamon is my final resting place.
I like cinnamon. Haven’t run desktop Linux since slackware, so it was a breath of fresh air on Nobara.
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.
What sort of file manager crashes were you having?
Right mouse click, it was an intermittent issue and never did get to the bottom of it as the only forum posts I could find were from 10 years ago. Yes I know I could of used the keyboard shortcuts but my muscle memory is more mouse orientated than keyboard lol
Luckily for me, I switched from Cachy to Fedora kde right before the AUR attacks started happening. Fedora honestly feels like home to me now. I customized it to have a very Gnome like workflow, and its working flawlessly for me.
Dude, if you documented your process for this, could you share the configuration with me, please? I’ve been trying (on and off) to do precisely that because of how walled GNOME has become between GNOME 39 and now, but my results have been “less than spectacular” to say the least. I think I just need a starting point, but the videos on YouTube about that are not really practical. I’m on GNOME because I just love the whole workflow, but would rather be on Plasma with the Gnome workflow if possible. That would be great. If not, well FUCK YOU! Just kidding, lol (about the fuck you, I still would love a starting point on this 🤣)
Why not fedora gnome? 🤔
Gnome has slowly become like a DE made by Apple. Even trying to configure it to use a screen shot app other than the integrated one is a fucking chore, they want you to forcibly use theirs, which is great for basic screen shooting, but I’m more of a flames hot fan because of how seamless it is to annotate on any shot instead of taking the shot, having to use a second app to edit/annotate, and then, I don’t know when it started, but every screenshot gets saved as a picture now, no way to just use it with the clipboard and let it disappear on the next SC or copy.
Then there’s the mentality. In GNOME If a feature doesn’t fit the design language, no matter how popular, it’s rejected. Dissenting opinions on design choices are almost always met with “trust the process.”
Isnt gnome a bit more resource intensive? also like the option of more customization if i ever wanna change the layout or aesthetic.
You can customize gnome pretty far. The code to have normal human minimize/maximize/close buttons is all still there, and the window bar is there as well. You just have to know which programs to pull from dnf that know what
registrydconf settings to adjust. I have yet to find a use case for nautilus between Dolphin (KDE) and using a terminal.
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.
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?
This might not be your issue, but I remember for me there’s this button in the tray that appears after all updates are downloaded. You click it and there’s an option to restart and update. If you just go to the main menu to restart, it doesn’t always show this “restart and update” option, and just restarts without installing the updates. Though even if you make this mistake you shouldn’t need to re-download the updates. Just go to KDE Discover and check for updates again, and the button will appear in the tray again. I think.
Also maybe you’d like the Fedora atomic distros, like Bazzite or Aurora. Unlike installing the updates during reboot, they install them in a “disabled state” while the system is running. Then you reboot and it automatically boots to the new version, no need to wait for any installation. What’s neat is that it’s really hard to break. Even if you pull the power while it’s installing updates, it will just use the previous version and try installing again. No risk of corruption.
What’s the security issue with Debian and Mint? Debian is usually my goto but I don’t want to expose myself to security issues
Linux in general is not secure for desktop users. There’s basically never sandboxing, and when there is it’s usually weak, antivirus is rarely used, and developers aren’t vetted as stringently as with paid software. Apparently Fedora and OpenSUSE take these issues more seriously, and SE Linux does somewhat restrict what malicious things a piece of software can do.
It’s a pretty widely held view that Fedora and OpenSUSE are more secure than Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch for desktop users but I’m not really an expert so I’m mostly retroactively justifying what I’ve heard second-hand.
You’re mostly right, but I disagree about the bit about paid software and vetted developers. Open source like Linux is also mostly developed by programmers hired by companies, so there’s no difference there. Proprietary software has also had problems with malicious developers and there’s less transparency there.
Desktop Linux so far was meant to be a fun general purpose computing experience for geeks. Throwing extra security layers on it evidently spoils some of that fun, you can see how Linux nerds react to things like Polkit, SELinux, Wayland or Flatpak. But PCs in general suck at security, they’re based on legacy tech from an era when cybersecurity wasn’t even a concept.
There’s also https://secureblue.dev/
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.
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).
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.
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.
The upgrade issue is exactly why I don’t like Debian-based distros for my desktop
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.
Debian for everything I need to not fall over, CachyOS for computers I want to fiddle with.
If you like to fiddle, I might suggest Arch. 😁 Hit me up if you want help with getting started!
CachyOS is Arch with a few tweaks, some of which are hard to do by yourself.
Fair enough. I thought it was one of those distros that you couldn’t change much once installed. My bad, if incorrect.
You probably think of Bazzite. Same gaming focus, but on immutable base, also very popular :)
No I was thinking of CachyOS, I just incorrectly thought it was immutable. 😊
Yeah, I tried pure Arch first, fucked up by not installing the right drivers for my old Nvidia card, and was never able to really get it running properly. So I gave up and tried CachyOS instead, on the basis that it’d probably get the drivers right for me. And it did.
I’d come with a word of caution then - while CachyOS automatically and conveniently installs with correct defaults, it is still a direct Arch derivative. Going forward, it will be just as easy to screw the system up and not know where to go next.
With that said, I strongly advise to learn to revert any change you can make to your system. The simplest way (assuming CachyOS installed root filesystem as btrfs) is to learn your way around snapper early on. Check tutorials on how to do it right on CachyOS.
With Snapper set up well, you can essentially undo any change. And this will be essential as you learn Arch (which CachyOS still really is).
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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
Just switched my wife to EndevourOS because she wanted to ditch windows and it’s what I daily drive. Maybe should have done cachy but I didn’t think about it and didn’t want to put her on something I also don’t have direct experience with.
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.
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I did the same thing. Settled om Baazite
Bazzite is just right for my daily driver. I was hopping around different arch distros for a while, but I had some really weird encounters with btrfs and not being able to recover after kernel upgrades. Happened to me 3 times in the span of 2 years.
Me too, on all my desktop PCs. Aurora on my work laptop. Ublue rocks.
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.
it’s kind of strange hearing about all this stability and everything on debian stable (and lmde by extension), when it was constantly broken for me and i had to do all kinds of weird fixes
i have a lenovo thinkpad t490s too so it’s not like im running on brand new components or anything either
been running fedora kde for a few months and it’s been running like a dream
That is strange.
it is!
i’m wondering if i have some special version of the t490s cus thinkpads are supposed to co-operate well with linux
fastfetch says the host is “20NYS0FU00 (ThinkPad T490s)” if that rings a bell to anyone
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.
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.
Debian for servers and fedora for desktop for me.
Some people I will put on Mint for desktop use, if they are super non-technical.
I love mint and I’m at least a little technical. Although I’m still mad I couldn’t get fedora working on my laptop.
What did you struggle with?
The live USB would boot, but the install would fail. It was my only computer at the time, so I needed it up and working and couldn’t really troubleshoot. In fairness, ASUS is not known for it’s Linux support.
Bazzite has lots of customizations built-in if you download the Asus spin.
Interesting! I’ll have to check it out. I’m a little wary of immutable distros though. I do a fair amount of tinkering and random package installs. And I dont love flatpak.
Exactly what I do
Holy shit me three. Although I am currently running an experiment where my partner, who is less technically inclined, is using zorin instead of mint. Been about 2 weeks since I refreshed their laptop. They still haven’t turned it on. Will report back.
Insert spongebob time meme.
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 don’t get it, but I also haven’t used Fedora since like 2007. I settled on Ubuntu for a while then jumped ship to Arch, and maybe for the first time I haven’t been wondering where I’d go to next because something frustrated me with the os lol
You know? Like, there’s zero friction with Arch, I feel like. It’s just out of your way.
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You have commented this under every arch mention and are too stupid to know the difference between pacman (package manager) and AUR (Arch User Repository) even when every recent article states this.
