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?
“We now added AI to the kernel”
This would be 100% valid
Weird Al: Kernel Drivers
A parody kernel of Linux USB Support
Well one day I heard about NixOS… And that’s all it took
Sell it to me, please
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.
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.
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.
Out of curiosity how is life without systemd better? What does it taste like?
Boot times. I am the kind of person who shuts my computer (may it be a laptop or desktop) down, whenever I’m not using it. With systemD, boot times are generally kind of annoying; runit, however, completely changes this. It really feels amazing to turn a Void Linux system on, and have it boot in seconds, with just one screen of logs. On top of that, if you’re doing a arch-style install (like the Void Linux minimal install), runit is just much nicer and more ergonomic. The main point is really boot time though, which I think is improved due to adhering to the Unix philosophy and having much less bloat. Using a runit system reminds you of how bloated and slow (and kinda convoluted) systemD is.
I’m also the kinda guy who spends hours optimizing my neovim config (~80 plugins, including LSP) for 20 millisecond start-up times. In the end, I still use Tumbleweed though.
Boot times.
I love how you chose one of the prime advertised features of The Cancer – and my rhel6 could boot faster than rhel7 every day.
By comparison, Systemd feels like jumping on the back of a charging gazelle and hitting it with a salmon in the hopes it’ll go the other way, all the while it’s bleating and emitting and defecating from its regular port and a whole new journald port of its own choosing. And often tripping.
Runit has been solid and fast. I’ve seen it on several projects - I want to say alpine and proton/vm and gitlab’s own weird setup - and it’s never let me down. I wish rh could have seen that instead like I wish they picked James over Mike for automation.
Saturday for some
The distro I’m on getting worse would be one. Linux Mint has been pretty stable and enjoyable though. I admit, setting up a new distro can be fun, but it comes with many annoyances too.
I have been tempted to try KDE and Wayland though. The last time that I installed a new DE, I had all kinds of little reminders of the previous DE that would pop up. (E.g. file selector dialogue boxes.) Finding all the little config options I needed to change to make the switch completely was tricky. At this point, I’m tempted to day that it’s better just to install a distro with the DE that you want, but maybe I should try it again.
I got the impression Mint isn’t best for KDE. For the reasons you mentioned, I guess, because it’s not been set up with all those options right for KDE.
I’m also on Mint, and happy to stick with it for some time, but sometimes I’ve wondered about going back to OpenSUSE, or even trying KDE’s own distro. But by then I start thinking about Nix and Guix also, as well as old faithful Arch. Then it’s too much choice and I remember how nicely Mint works for me and the family!
A whim, usually.
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.
I love my Tumbleweed install. It is rolling and new while also being rock solid. But I do have the itch to try new stuff which j do sometimes
Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.
I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high
Love me some tumbleweed. Snapper ready to go on on top of everything is also very nice to have.
would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained
I saw too much while turning the corpse they kicked over the fence into a unitedLinux we could ship and support.
The horrors.
If the entire company died and absolutely new people made a new company by the same name with none of the former staff or principals involved, then I would consider suse. The taint goes so deep I would not consider even a new source drop with the same staff.
I’m not familiar with any of what you’re saying. Would you care to expand on it a little bit? Also, which distro do you use instead?
Same scenario as mine.
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.
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
I am
- Glad you had the courage to try something new
- Impressed you had your limit and stuck to it
- Relieved as a former security person that you’re improving package validation and will reap the rewards even if you don’t notice
- Disappointed it wasn’t before some seriously sketchy shit has gone down with RH and trickled down to fedora.
Finally
- Overjoyed as fuck if it seemed like an easy switch, but please correct me there.
Could you elaborate on the sketchy shit? I am literally about to switch from openSUSE to Fedora, is there anything I should be aware of? Thanks for your time.
id like to know too
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.
Switched to systemd free distro the day after.
PCLinuxOS?
Tell me more about how lennart’s cancer killed your machine too.
It was Ubuntu. Switched to Artix…
Systemd has its own OOM killer which was killing my VMs as soon as there is more than 50% of RAM in use.
Jebus. I never even suspect lennart’s people metastasized into there too.
That sucks!
I’m on Ubuntu, which I admit is not a popular option around here. But when my power goes out I use apcupsd and a network component to alert my attached or networked Ubuntu machines. When the power first goes out all of my non-essential machines automatically shut down gracefully. When the backup batteries get low enough (I have several separate APC units around the house) my essential machines also shut down automatically.
When the power comes back up one of my machines automatically powers up and runs a few checks before turning most of my other stuff back on.
I have very few power issues which last long enough for my batteries to run out, but when I do the only evidence is a few alerts and the fact that I have to log back into everything. All of my windows restore on my GUI machines, and no filesystem issues occur. It’s more seamless than when I ran Windows, granted that was 25 years ago.
I’m similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.
For servers, yes. But I want full control on desktop.
That makes sense.
The last time we had a power issue and I was at my desktop I didn’t get any GUI notifications of the outage, so that’s a miss.
However the incessant beeping coming from every APC in the house was enough to tell me that stuff was about to go really sideways 😂 I was able to manually power down my desktop before the systemd stuff kicked in.
I’m similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.
You say that like it’s a feature we never had before. I used apcupsd to save my homelab server many, maaany times during blackouts in NJ, and I was there from 1999.
I’m not sure what you mean?
I’m certainly not saying systemd is the only way or best way to solve this problem, only that it does in fact work, despite the other many misgivings I have with it.
I’m also not sure whether you’re trying to turn this into a measuring contest, or why? My home setups are relatively rigorous for a residential setting, but they’re all based on the many many years I worked in data centers, mostly in Los Angeles which is notorious for poor power availability and stability.
