What would make you change distro?
What would make you change distro?
Just curious to know if anyone has been using the same distro for multiple years/decades and what or if you have it takes for you to want to switch to a different distro?
I’ve been in Pop!_OS for a lot of years now; and Ubuntu/Mint before that. The lack of updates in Pop!_OS (not Cosmic!) is starting to wear me thin; the U22.04 basis is starting to get a bit threadbare and their App Store has always been broken— but now it seems even more brokener.
The Cosmic Alphas don’t work well on my machine, Wayland is still pretty unstable and some of the apps I have to use just don’t work with it at all. I’ve got way too much to do to go and try to debug it or hack it or even give up and go try another distro. When they take Cosmic out of beta, if it doesn’t work for me I’m just going to drop and go back to hopping. Or worse, I may just go back to MacOS 100% except for when I’m working on some server-side shit.
Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can't fix.
I've been settling on Linux Mint more and more as my generic workhorse distro. I have the least amount of issues with it out of the box compared to any other desktop distro.
It's clean, relatively low bloat, includes codecs and drivers for basically everything I've ever needed to use/do, and Cinnamon's only crime as a DE is looking kind of boring. But it's easy to select a new theme, so not really a huge issue either.
I use a bunch of different distros for different purposes, but if you held a gun to my head and made me pick a distro I had to use exclusively for the rest of my life, it would be Mint with Cinnamon.
If something was to replace it, it would have to be even cleaner, simpler to setup, and have even better general stability and compatibility.
When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)
Probably nothing. I'm currently in the process of starting to distrohop a lot. I want to try out lots of distros, for fun and in order to recommend distros to other people. I will probably eventually settle on arch or nixos though, the customization seams really awesome.
Saturday for some
Not sure... I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I'd rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool... but I really don't want to use a weird language for making packages, I'm just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.
Other than massive breakage, I'm not sure. Completely reinstalling and reconfiguring my setup is a pain in the ass, in part because of my slow internet connection. But damn if Ubuntu isn't trying to find out.
If gentoo stopped being maintained, I guess I'd find something else.
I've been using openSuSe Tumbleweed on one device or another for quite a while now. Recently I switched my last device, so I'm officially 100% Tumbleweed. NGL, feels pretty good. I would, however, switch under a few circumstances:
- openSuSe releases Tumbleweed clone with systemD alternative (like runit). I've tried Void repeatedly, but unfortunately never really fell in live with it.
- openSuSe releases NixOS style immutable distro (not the current aeon or kalpa) based on Tumbleweed.
Honestly, Tumbleweed is nearly perfect for me. It's just that I've tasted what life without systemD can be like, and I goddamn miss it... I'm totally hooked on openSuSe products though.
A whim, usually.
I'm on Bazzite, so I may be tempted to switch to SteamOS on at least one of my devices, but Bazzite covers pretty much all my bases currently, both for gaming and work. I have a laptop with EndeavourOS and I love it, been using it for about 2-3 years there, but I'm switching laptops soon to a framework so I'll also go with Bazzite there for consistency and due to the official support it has with framework laptops.
Honestly the experience I've had with these distros so far leaves me wishing for nothing more, and now with immutability and distro box I kinda don't see the point in changing to anything else unless Bazzite development dies out or they make a painfully stupid decision, which doesn't seem to be the case so far!
I usually try out a couple of new distros whenever I am either setting up a new computer, or something happens with my current machine that requires a fresh OS anyway.
I've been married to Pop!_OS for a couple of years now. however, for the past couple of months I've been booting exclusively into KDE Plasma on my desktop computer; almost everything works really well for me in that environment, except the built-in Pop!_OS stuff itself, such as the pop shop, does not work very well. so I might end up switching to a distribution that's built around KDE, such as KDE Neon.
I'm also pretty curious about the Nix package manager and the concept of immutable desktop systems, so I guess I might try NixOS at some point? I don't know much about it yet.
I've changed distro's a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.
Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.
The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).
Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.
Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.
Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.
Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.
Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.
I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.
I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?
I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.
The ability to wake up the laptop from sleep.
Damn, do I regret going with Fedora. Anything newer than kernel 6.10 (which I salvaged from Fedora 39) and my laptop doesn't wake up from sleep anymore.
But changing distros is a hassle and idiot me went with a single partition for system and data, so migrating to another distro requires me to actually backup everything, so I haven't done it yet.
I used ubuntu for 10+ yr and switched because of firefox snap. To fedora. Wow it is so much better here
There was a power loss, my PC was on UPS for some time and UPS battery started running low. I initiated the shutdown and systemd stopped it because it could not find a network share on the already stopped server. It didn't gave up so I ended with fucked filesystem because the battery died. Switched to systemd free distro the day after.
Eh, probably if Guix becomes significantly better I'll switch to it (from NixOS). I really like how seriously they take user freedom, bootstrapping (only 357 bytes of binary to bootstrap everything else from source!) and consistent user interfaces (scheme everywhere). But unfortunately the package repo is just not big and mature enough yet, and declarative configuration options are not as good as they are with NixOS. My job is also Nix-related, and that's another major reason I'm staying for now.
If all the mirrors for pacman somehow got taken down, probably would switch to something corporate like Ubuntu.
Similar to other users - repos go down or corporate stuff starts to creep in.
As long as I get to maintain agency over my system I’m pretty content.
I use Fedora Asahi Remix currently, and I want to switch to NixOS but am uncertain about the MacBook support, and even if it was good switching would take longer than it's worth unless my current installation stops working for whatever reason
I'm attracted by Alpine Linux, but it lacks an official way to use glibc for the programs that unfortunately use some glibc extension...
An operating system is a means to an end. I'm not looking to critique a package manager, I'm looking to get work done. If it can support the applications I need it's perfect.
what or if you have it takes for you to want to switch to a different distro?
Any meaningful difference that improves my use. I'm a pragmatist, not a distro zealot.
For the 'I use ... BTW' meme to say something else.
No, actually, I can't think of anything. I'm pretty comfortable with it at this point. Been running it since 2013...
preinstalling snaps. i havent bothered to format my computer in years though, so i just purge it off for now.
Using Debian for probably a decade now (before that, various Linux distributions).
IMHO only community driven distributions with great (in size as in quality) communities are worth investing time/energy and learning.
One reason to ditch Debian would be that the software I need to run would not run anymore on it or that there would be a too strong commercial influence on the project. Another reason is for play/entertainment where better options exist (SteamOS) or if I need up to date hardware support (Fedora).
After more than two decades with Linux, I will not play around with non mainstream distributions anymore. Have seen too many come and go, and in the end I would rather do something interesting with my computer than playing around with the Linux distribution of the week.
Modern desktop enviroment design, and seamless updates like in macOS
I'd start mixing it up if I got a new computer and could play around more on my current laptop.
Pretty pleased with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Only reason for me to change would be if there were a Debian based rolling release distro with the same quality as Tumbleweed.
I've been using Arch (BTW) for a few years now. I would only consider switching to something non-Arch if they started enshittifying like Windows. I don't see that happening though.
I've been using Artix Linux for 5 years. Its great, minimal, and does everything I need for my day to day tasks.
If I were to ever change, it'd probably be because the devs could no longer maintain it. In which case I'd probably just hop to Gentoo.
It'd just have to stop working. I've been running debian for probably 10 years now and it's problem free. I don't care that it's not up to date in comparison to other distros. It's stable and works.
At this point i think nix would have to die. I like the declaritive way of doing things, and invested a lot of time in learning how to use it.
Dropped Ubuntu because of snaps.
Dropped Manjaro because updating anything on it was too annoying and potentially destructive if you didn't read through every changelog.
Currently on bluefin because everything is working smoothly on it. Also have a Bazzite setup which I'm not as happy with as I am with bluefin but not to the point of thinking of dropping it.
Switched from Fedora to Debian. Here are my reasons:
- That computer doesn’t need the latest versions. Debian is new enough for me.
- The update GUI has been broken for years. I fixed it once, but then it broke again after a year. I’ve been installing updates from the terminal, because I can’t trust the GUI. I realized I appreciate reliability, and that’s exactly what Debian is all about.
- Can’t be bothered to do much admin work like that.
The repo servers going down or some unacceptable change to the system defaults. Starting to distribute my browser (or anything else) as only snaps / flatpaks would absolutely do it. Yeah, I'm looking squarely at you, Ubuntu.
Been running Manjaro for years. Don't really know what would make me change.
I guess maybe if I suddenly started getting more and more dependency errors when upgrading packages from the AUR it would make me consider jumping to put Arch.
But right not that's not the case. So the benefit of switching is out weighed by the pain in the ass of having to say Everything up again.
I like the question. Nothing would make me change. I use Debian for servers and fedora for my desktop. The distro is not what makes it good or not. The window manager does not change the only think that does change is the package manager and how up to date it is.
I only use Debian for servers because the installer makes it super easier to install without a wm.
I use fedora for my desktop because I like the atomic versions and more up to date packages.
Despite using MX only for a relatively short time, just messing around in a VM for a long period of time would increase my odds of switching to something else*.
*when I need to switch to something else or find something a lot better
I've been running Slackware for a long time and have no intention of switching unless Pat steps down and Slackware goes down with him. As long as my base install receives updates, I'm good. I take care of the rest.
Ubuntu 20.04 running out of support. Things start to break slowly now and I sure as hell will not go with the corporate asshattery anymore. Might switch to arch but still deciding.
I went Gentoo to Debian to Arch.
Gentoo took too much time to maintain. (Not just compile time. But also human time editing config files).
Debian was great, until I had new hardware that needed a recent kernel and Wayland. i tried testing but that wasn't stable enough and took too much of my time maintaining.
I'm using arch now. i would only switch if they do something egregious (push ads, malware or snap)
Hardware bugs/support, and Snap.
Its mostly if I see the distro as unmaintainable (looking at gentoo), too much of a hassle to keep updated (Like tumbleweed on a PC i just about never use), or generally not fit for my purpose (If it dosent have packages I need, forces flatpaks, or is generally built in a way I dont find it comfortable to use
I don't care about my distro. The choice I make when decicing on a distribution is entirely based on use case. I have LMDE on my server. I have Mint Cinnamon on my macbook. I use arch when I'm doing minimal installs for basic functionality. I don't have a distro of choice for ARM, I've used rasbian and I use muOS on my rg35xxsp. I've been looking at learning gentoo and deploying that for raspberry pi as I have some projects in mind for some micro arcade cabinets and want as little overhead as possible in regards to background processes
My first distro was debian and why I switched was that I wanted up to date packages.
I relatively recently (a year or so?) switched from Ubuntu to Debian.
I felt like Ubuntu was bloating up and that sadly those decisions were done through the enshitification process. I went then "back to basics" and I don't regret it at all.
I had the (wrong) preconception that Debian was "behind" or "slow" for "new" stuff but truth is, despite being "stable" most of what I care about is already in, even for things like gaming in VR. For the rest if I need something "edgy" then I can get the software via another mean than the package manager.
So... what made me change is a desire for more minimalism and the ability to test safely (files saved).
I ditched FreeBSD and Slackware when I got tired of installing everything from scratch on every major release. Compiling stuff from source was interesting for learning and seeing how amazing open source can be, but it wasn't fun long term.
Then I ditched Ubuntu because there was always something not working on laptops, usually related to hibernation/sleep and/or webcam/wireless. I was frustrated with how little care was put into making sure such basic things would simply work.
I'm currently very satisfied with Mint. Everything just works out of the box and Mint X is a lovely theme for old folks like me, who appreciate a proper good looking desktop and can't understand what all the hype is with dark/flat themed UIs these days.
if gentoo decided ti bake spyware into every package that i cant removr thatd be a deal breaker
On my laptops: Debian -> Fedora. Mostly because I couldn't reliably use my external display on Debian, and because I
neededwanted shiny new things. Also new hardware.On my gaming rig: Manjaro -> Nobara -> Bazzite. I left Manjaro because the system was slowly getting worse with each update, and I wanted to game, not maintain my system. I ditched Nobara after a botched version upgrade. Bazzite is fine for now.
I made the jump from Manjaro when a bunch of their maintained repos started to ... corrode? for lack of a better term, other than that I tend to adapt to whatever my workplace chooses, last place loved Ubuntu, current workplace is all about RHEL, so i'm not going to argue
the creation of a non-kodi htpc/media center alternative that works like a smart TV OS and works on a raspberry pi would get me to change my streaming device.
i stream jellyfin from a home server, and jellyfin on kodi is painful to use :(
an OS that can be controlled with tv-controller buttons and has an interface similar to any of the other players in this space would make me throw away my nvidia shield tv in a heartbeat
Having broken lts-kernel and broken 6.15. At the same time. But the zen kernel saved me. So I guess if it was 3 broken kernels at the same time I would switch distro, haha. Lts was broken amdgpu kernel module, worse then sleep issue for mainline.
Having more time to spend learning a new distro
Moved away from Ubuntu due to SNAP. Never looked back.
This is an image someone else posted here. Asking if there was a desktop environment that looked like that. There wasn't really.
For the record, I run Linux Mint Xfce with Chicago95. Honestly it was a mistake, the vibes of the UI are nice but it still feels kinda Linuxy (as in, held together with duct tape) and I keep roling up Firefox by mistake. SerenityOS or FreeBSD, something Unix-like, may be more what I'm looking for.
The slightest praise for another distro / other feature that I fixate on for a month. I tend to hop.