I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
Hannah Montana Linux?
And after Manjaro broke for the third time, I switched to Arch. I’m generally happy with Debian, though. I’ve noped out of Ubuntu like a decade ago.
All but Arch. Find commands much easier to remember and me having dyslexia and ADHD my memory is shocking.
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
Nix’ docs are horrendous imo
For whatever reason, Nix zealots always tell me “it’s way better now” and “it’s not that bad”. When I was trying NixOS, I literally rage quit. With other distributions it was just “sigh, time for something else”, but with NixOS I really got infuriated at the developers/maintainers.
NixOS. The declarative principle is very nice (especially the installation process) but as soon as you do something advanced like compiling stuff or using software that is not in the repositories or outdated, it’s not very simple to use as you basically have to become your own packager and maintainer. Recently I tried upgrading the main PC of my hackerspace from one NixOS version to the next and we had lots of breakage, because the migration paths are not automatic and you have to change your configuration even though upstream didn’t change anything. Upgrading my Debian home server from 11→12 was as simple as changing the sources.list, running apt full-upgrade and answering a few questions.
Most of them.
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Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it’s surprisingly bad at that.
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Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.
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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.
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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 :)
