What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?
What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?
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.
Opensuse. Did absolutely nothing wrong but I just didn't vibe with it. Went to fedora and I vibe hard with it
manjaro.
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.
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 :)-
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.
Basic, but Ubuntu. It's got snaps which are slow and generally suck, plus Canonical
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.
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.
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🤷♀️
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.
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.
Ubuntu. It has become so shitty over time, it's oretty sad.
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.
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...
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.
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: I need reproducible setups. Also bleeding edge is not for me.
I have to give credit to their documentation though!
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.
Debian, don't like apt.
Arch, breaks too much.
NixOs, just don't need the tools it provides.
Any fork of a mainline distro because it's never as good as the root.I used arch for a while, but got sick of running repairs every few weeks. I use Gentoo now, it's stable and good. I have a fuck ton of ram and a good cpu, I also take advantage of binary packages from time to time. I don't really need to install new things that much after having done the initial install.
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.
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 Reason : Canonical
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.
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, 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.
Alpine. I actually really like it, but it just doesn't fit any of my use cases.
"Not exactly Linux", but FreeBSD. Gave it a couple tries but gave up when I realized its minimalism is a placebo at best and its "super security features" can (also) be achieved on any other standard Linux distribution.
Ubuntu, tried to install vim 8 when it released, too bad they only update major package versions once every 2 years. Find myself some random dudes repo, great it's vim 8, too bad it was compiled w/o python support... Installed Manjaro (arch based) and never looked back.
NixOS .. loved the idea but doing configuration all the time for every little thing became too much of a headache.
Windows 🤣
Fedora. Just feels like I'd be moving to the dnf ecosystem for no reason.
ZorinOS. I tried to install it on my spouse's computer with all modern, well-supported AMD hardware. Had nothing but problems, to the point that the computer was barely usable. WiFi broken, GUI was laggy, repositories were buggy. When I finally got the system somewhat stable, I didn't like the interface at all. Styles were bland, icons dull, everything just seemed clunky and awkward.
For a distro advertised as a beginner-friendly and pay-for-polish system, I was very dissapointed.
Might have been a fluke, I don't think my experience is standard for Zorin, but it was a really terrible first impression and I never suggest it to Linux-curious folks. Mint or Vanilla Fedora are my go-to for newbs.
Anything that isn't Arch.
- Ubuntu's package managers won't stop fighting with each other so I can't complete an upgrade easily. Also, I hate apt. Trusting prebuilt binaries from PPAs seems a little dangerous to me compared to trusting build scripts in the AUR, so I don't feel comfortable with that. I do like it otherwise, though.
- Linux Mint is fine, I guess, but no Wayland yet and I don't like Cinnamon. Same PPA issues. Has some more outdated packages than Ubuntu.
- openSUSE is great, but the package managers won't stop fighting with each other and it's lacking a few packages. I like the Open Build System a lot less than the AUR.
- Fedora is fine, while missing some packages, but it broke on me after a week and I had no idea how to fix it so I stopped using it.
- Pop_OS makes everything about GNOME worse.
- Debian's packages are too old.
- Manjaro is more work than Arch and the packages are out of sync with the AUR.
- The packages I want aren't in Solus. Is this distro even still around?
And for distros I won't consider trying:
- Gentoo is too much work.
- Qubes is too much work and I can't play games on it.
- I don't like any of the ZorinOS modifications and the packages are old.
I have liked Ubuntu based distros until they release a major update. They are aimed at beginners and they work fine for that. If you use one to the end of support, the updater will say that your software is up to date because there are no new updates.
You have to check the website to find out you've reached the end of support, and to get instructions on how to update.
That is an awful user expierence for beginnners, and a great way to have users using vulnerable software without knowing about it.
I've switched to rolling releases for this exact reason.
All of them except arch. It just strikes the perfect balance between being easy to pick up after a bit of reading and keeping its simplicity. Paired with vanilla gnome its uwu gang. I also looked at manjaro and stayed well clear of that, vanilla is so much simpler as I don't have to worry about conflicts caused by man jar roe randomly holding back packages for no reason.
Any distro that uses apt. I'm ok with Fedora and Arch.
Ubuntu. I just don't like how they do things. I cant even maintain a repo for the machines i host without putting aside multiple terabytes of space. So to me they cant even make it reasonably easy for me to help them and be self reliant on their ecosystem.
elementary os. Installed it, and noped right out of there the same day. On paper, it should be great. Maybe the execution was flawless for macfans, but it was not for me. I do appreciate how they tried to make an easy transitional Linux for macfans, though, and I do not regret the donation because of that fact.
I tried arch btw.
But didn't like it.
Arch\Endeavor, I more preferred the polished experience of Fedora Silverblue and Debian\Mint.
The first time I installed Debian on my desktop I didn't do my homework properly. This was a long time ago. It didn't take long for me to realize just how out of date many packages were and that was a deal breaker. I have since used Debian successfully in different contexts, because I knew what to expect. I still wouldn't install Debian stable on my desktop because I prefer to have a more up to date environment. Might try Debian sid one of these days though. But yeah, Debian, great distro, but you need to know what you're getting in to.
NixOS.
Cool package manager but constantly breaking compatibility with none nix package managers really annoyed me. (Ghcup, mason, etc...)
Also how difficult they made compiling software from source. I could live with nix packages if I could also compile the programs I need from source.
Great server os. I don't understand how people use it as a daily driver
Fedora. Dont get me wrong it is a great Distro but i did not really felt at home when using it.
Vanilla OS. I loved the idea of having access to so many packaging formats and package managers at my fingertips but maintaining the system, managing everything and keeping in mind all the things that I'm doing was just too much work for me when I just wanted a system that I can use without any hassle. I know immutable distros are quite the buzz these days but it just isn't for me. That was also the time when I was trying to find an Ubuntu based vanilla GNOME distro
Every single one of them until I hit arch. It just seemed to click and I enjoy the rolling release.
Manjaro. I had previously already used Antergos and Ubuntu, but after Antergos stopped I needed something like it. So I installed Manjaro in my secondary PC (with old components). I constantly got into trouble with the manual kernel version selection thingy. I was used to kernel updates being part of the normal update process, and suddenly I had to manually pick the new one. I constantly ran into incompatibility issues with older or newer kernels, vague update deadlocks where I couldn't update things because they depended in each other, and I absolutely hated having to use a separate program for updating the kernel. Now the PC runs Fedora and I'm liking that a lot more so far...
I've tried both LMDE and Debian itself, but I think I just ended up frustrated at the age of software in the repos and how much stuff relies on Ubuntu specific stuff.
Way back in the day I was an Ubuntu user, but then everyone simultaneously decided that gnome 2 was too old and that touch interfaces were the priority. So I now use Mint and Cinnamon.
I honestly don't understand why recent Ubuntu releases are popular. However, I enjoyed it in the early 2000s. There was another popular release a few years ago that had zero hotkeys enabled and I have never felt more disgusted by a release in my life. I can't even remember what it's called, it traumatized me hahaha.
Anything that isn't debian-like. I'm just very used to It and can't make myself learn anything else.
PopOS and Manjaro are two I never liked.
I attempted to try Garuda Linux (cinnamon) on a mini PC (Ryzen 5800H based APU), but graphic artefacting was a constant issue as soon as the install started.
After several tries I had to abandon ship and wait till a new release to maybe try again, if I remember. Not exactly "Nope, this one's not for me" as I had yet to properly try it.
Otherwise, I tried Crunchbangplusplus and just gave up for being a bit too minimalist or not yet ready for prime time as I kept geting issues after issues and did not have the patience to wrangle the whole OS for everything from getting network working to audio and screen issues on my system.
Anyways, it is always fun to try new systems/apps/protocols and see where thing are headed towards.
Anything that's not Ubuntu, because it's the "mainstream Linux", so guaranteed I'll find anything I need there.
Void Linux with musl. I wanted to try setting up a distro with Musl, but many things I use daily simply don't work with it, and the hassle of troubleshooting everything was a bit too much. I went back to Fedora Workstation, and I'll likely stay on it for my workstation (though I'll switch to Fedora Kinoite when Fedora 40 releases). I also use Fedora Server for my personal server, since it's very familiar to me, and there's not a huge point in switching to CentOS anymore with the recent changes, so I'll probably just stick to it.
Manjaro. Probably because I tried it with GNOME which isn't for me either.
I had a huge problem with Arch because of the rolling release deal. I just can't handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day, even with automation.
When I install an operating system, I want it to just work, and I want their repositories to have lots and lots of software. Most distros do this, but none do it as well as one of the major Debian-family distros like Ubuntu or Mint. Fedora is quite nice as well, and I could probably daily drive it without issue, I just see no reason to change over to it since Ubuntu has me totally covered. And it is basically like this for me with every other distro: I have to think, "why would I switch? What benefit would it provide me over what I have right now." The answer is always "nothing important," so I stick with Ubuntu.
I considered using Guix because its package manager is truly a revolutionary new technology. But using it as a package manager, I can see a lot of the packages and default configurations just aren't quite to the point of "just works" yet. Still, I hope someday to switch to Guix as my daily driver.
Never tried regular Arch after trying Black Arch, so not sure if they're the same feel, but after realizing the work it would take just to be given the capability to resize windows in the UI instead of just coming with drag and resize out of the box, Black Arch was a huge no go for me... Which kept me from wanting to touch regular Arch, lol. That being said, I go nope to Ubuntu the most. Gentoo is my favorite and is what my server has been running for the past decade without any kind of issue, but for laptop and daily use, I use Mint. Been on that one for about a decade now too... Used to use Peppermint (that still a thing?) and Suse the most before those.
I feel like I'm a chronic distro-hopper sometimes, but no matter how many times I try, I just can't settle into OpenSUSE for whatever reason. The OBS feels a bit more of a wild west than the AUR.
Gentoo because while it was fun to try I sure as hell won't be waiting around for my stuff to compile.
Gentoo. But it took a few years
Pop os. I just couldn't use their desktop (even though I think it's good, it's just not for me)
Fedora Core. It had so many problems updating. That would have been in the mid 2000s so it may have improved since then.
Mint, actually. I tried it and found it too similar to windows and not customisable enough for my liking.
Wasn't a fan of Ubuntu, RedHat, Debían...
I guess I'm just a Fedora person? I'm on KDE right now, usually Xfce. Idk I'm enjoying my KDE experience.
Mint was pretty smooth. No complaints.
It pains me to say this, but voidlinux, though I'm still not in the stage of "this one is not for me", it has potential and hopefully I can sort all the issues I've encountered so far.
I've tried multiple distros, and also used artix for a while so I'm used to not using systemd but man void is really another thing, this isn't the first time I've used it, I tried it a year ago and gave up, recently I decided that I'm up for the challenge and began using it again, here's what has happened so far:
Well right now I'm dealing with the pc freezing when quitting the user session, for some reason I need to exit i3 before logging out, otherwise the system freezes.
Also I wasn't able to get a clean boot screen even though I had the typical kernel parameters quiet, loglevel, etc, it even prints info on the login prompt where I should be putting my username, though I managed to mitigate this a lot by passing a kernel parameter that tells it to use another tty for the boot messages.
file-roller is broken, I can't compress some directories to 7zip, the weird thing is that it only happens to some directories and not all.
Though the very good news is that they fix issues very fast, puddletag was broken and they fixed it in like 2 hours after I reported the issue.
Edit: It is not just file-roller that is broken, it is all of 7zip on void, I can't compress with xarchiver either
anything with GNOME or xfce. modern cinnamon is ok ig but KDE plasma just makes anything bearable for me
Gentooo, the only reason I' use it is so I could bring up systems on old architectures. Besides that it really isn't worth it.
After using Arch based distros for more than a year when I use any Debian/Ubuntu based distro it really feels like they aren't for me, at least when it comes to daily driving. I still have a laptop with PopOS that I use for school, stable distro is a better option in my oppinion for that usecase because I use it twice a week (unless it's summer or winter in which case I don't use it at all).
Honestly, depending on whether you count it or not, LFS. I have not tried Gentoo yet, though I want to one day, for the learning experience, and yet I already know that compiling everything is not something I enjoy.
I can get by with OpenSUSE and Void (kinda), I've used Debian for a few weeks, I've used Fedora for a month or so, I've used Ubuntu for a bit, I've tried PopOS for a week or two, I've used NixOS for a few months, and I've used Arch for most of my time on Linux.
Currently I'm on Arch, but I don't like rolling releases that much. At the same time, I am also not a fan of immutability, as there are some programs I need that cannot be installed on an immutable distro, so that's why I'm on Arch. Why am I only using these 2? Because they are the only distros that have all the packages I need (excluding the specialist software that I need for university). By the time I discovered Distrobox (which would solve this problem), I was already on Arch. I've also done some changes to my setup and as such, I'll need to wait for some new features to make their way into program releases and into the NixOS Stable repo with the following release. Until then, I'm on Arch.
I hopped to many distros and found Ubuntu to be my home.
- Mint => Desktop looks dated and ugly
- POP! OS => Unstable for Ubuntu distro
- Rest of Ubuntu forks => nothing special about them
- Arch Linux => Too bleedy edge
- Debian => stale packages (Really solid distro though but dated version of Gnome)
- Ubuntu => Really solid distro (It is a great balance between stability and bleeding edge)
In 2007 I tried Ubuntu and it was weird, then again in 2008, no! In 2009 I found Mint and was really happy, until they stopped supporting KDE. Then I tried a ton of distros, Xfce, no. Lxde, no. open suse, no. fedora, no, lots of others, no. I finally found Kubuntu and I have been on it ever since. Even tested Neon lately but hated it.
Kubuntu does what I want it to do.
Linux always seems scary at first, but once you learn enough, it's super easy.I have tried a bunch of them: Manjaro, Fedora, Opensuse Tumbleweed, Mx Linux, EndeavourOS, Arcolinux, Debian, currently LMDE. But Fedora, the spin with XFCE not the default one, never convinced me enough to keep it., is the one that never convinced me enough to keep it.
Fedora, as someone who uses mostly Arch and the AUR, I couldn't get used copr, flatpak, and dnf. I rather just use yay.
I’ve messed with a decent amount, listed in my post. Most distros weren’t customized the way that I wanted them to be or I didn’t like the looks so I prefer Debian and Arch for simplicity’s sake depending on the use case and going from there.
Ubuntu when they first switched to Unity. I had been running Ubuntu for 2 or 3 years at that point, but I was already thinking about switching to Debian at the time. I hobbled along for a few weeks on that first version of Unity, but I didn't like what I was seeing. I took the plunge into Debian, thinking, "If I'm going to have to learn something new anyways, I might as well try switching."
I'm currently using Linux Mint as well. I tried Garuda out and I did really like it, but the rolling release kept breaking NVIDIA.
I used Ubuntu back in the day but it sucks now. Snaps are the devil's work.
Puppy Linux
AntiXPopOS!
It's supposed to be good for gaming, but a lot of its packages (including the video drivers) are outdated af because it's based on Ubuntu, so you may have to wait months for a mesa patch that makes a game playable while on Arch I can just install mesa-git and play.
I also don't like the Gnome interface and the fact that it casually encourages installing proprietary software, but that's not relevant given its target audience.
Yeah, I get it, it's a distro for novices so obviously it won't go all freetard on you for installing nvidia drivers, but the fact that it's so outdated is absolutely inexcusable and can drive users away because games that are marked as playable on steam may not even launch.
Not too ick someone's yum, and this ventures outside of Linux.
I dislike the BSDs. Great for getting pf, and not being a homogeneous shop, but just different enough to be difficult outside of one specific use case.
Gentoo was similar. It may be different now, but a pain on the Xbox.
Mint was too dumbed down and ugly.
Ubuntu is useful, but likely harmful with it's constant pushes to commercialize everything.
Redhat is needed for work, but the commercialization drives worse quality. Documentation seems purposely bad to drive training courses.
(Yes, I like Debian.)
Garuda. Looked pretty and tried it for a day or two and noped out. Went back to Manjaro before I figured out how to install Arch without the installer
I game a lot, so I need the latest drivers. So anything with a slower release schedule than Manjaro is a no go for me.
GNU Guix. Need to do an Ayahuasca ceremony sometimes and try again with a much more radiant mind.
Its a meme at this point, but I tried to install arch. Ran into display issues during install and couldn't progress. Gave up and did Ubuntu instead.
I know there's supposed to be some helper stuff out there now to make it go smoothly, but don't think I am motivated enough to retry ever.
Zorin OS, which was the second distro I ever tried, I hated how outdated their repos were since they were using an older Ubuntu LTS repository for packages. It was quite painful to install software that would otherwise have worked out-of-the-box on Ubuntu. I hope this is no longer the case today.
Void linux.
I used arch for a couple years, then crux for over 10 years, so I though Void would be a great distro when the systemd drama occured. Tried that, and noped the hell out of it...
- creating/maintaining packages is a pain
- the dev team was awful with newcomers
- system couldn't handle more than a couple weeks without updates
- it's an arch wannabe that doesn't admit it, making it a worse alternative
Garuda. I tried it because it's supposed to be "gamer" oriented. I thought it meant it would make it easier/smoother for gaming. What they actually meant was it felt like being locked inside a gaming PC with flashing and spinning RGB lights everywhere. No fucking thanks.
Ubuntu. The whole interface paradigm puts me off.
i run arch on my surface
my dell runs kubuntu, but i plan to move it to arch as well (after i back up my data)
i liked it for a while and suddenly had tons of issues with snap, especially with firefox, and webusb breaking constantly on chromium (i use android flash tool a lot)
Linux mint waaaaaaay back when it first launched.
The first distro I tried to daily drive on my desktop was Pop!_OS because everyone told me it's the distro you "need" if you have an Nvidia card.
I'm sure it works fine for most people but I just had A LOT of issue, weird audio issues I had to fix every other time I turned on my system, some games refusing to load properly unless I forced them into borderless fullscreen.
Then one day it just refused to boot, even tho I had booted into it that morning and did nothing more than go on Youtube for an hour before work, Timeshift didn't work even tho I had manually made a handful of backups.
Went back to Windows for about 2 months before trying EndeavourOS and despite peoples warning that Arch systems will break if you look at them the wrong way, I've found it way more stable on my system and any issues I have ran into have been easy fixes.
Fedora. Fedora is solid, but coming from arch I felt it was lacking so much in the way of the package repos and doing things like secure boot was more effort than it was worth.
Ubuntu gnome. Wanted to install a gnome add on (hibernation button), searched how to do it and learned there's a section in the gui store but couldn't find it. Searched for that and turns out they removed the add ons section from the store in the latest version and I need to use a browser. Tried to install it from a browser and it still didn't work. Tried the other browser and failed again. Searching for that discovered that the pre-installed browsers are snap packages and can't interact with anything else 🤦
Instantly switched to kubuntu. It had the hibernation button out of the box
I used Linux Mint for about 1.5 years before transitioning to Arch Linux. For me, the transition was to learn more about Linux and to try something new. Thus far, I'm really liking Arch. There have been a few issues that have popped up here and there, like getting Bluetooth devices to connect properly, but the Arch Wiki and forums often have the solution. You just have to spend time reading the articles or the forum responses.
As for other distros, I've tried Zorin, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Pop OS, and KDE Neon before settling on Linux Mint.
Any distro that's based on an existing one but changes or adds very little to it. There are so many dead Ubuntu and Debian reskins
Ubuntu. I initially downloaded it for my sibling's pc but now that I've downloaded and configured all these things on their computer, I don't want to reinstall a new OS and reconfigure and download everything again.
