What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?

case_when@feddit.uk to Linux@lemmy.ml – 239 points –

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.

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To all gentoo detractors.... 20 years ago compiling a browser would take 5 days (as in 24 x 5 hours...) So you are not allowed to complain TODAY about compile times ahahahaahaha ahahaha ahah haha aaaaaaaaah ಠ_ಠ

I remember jumping from Ubuntu (my first distro) to a Gentoo stage 2 install in 2005. I was using it on my desktop so I needed a GUI. I was using either a high end P4 or an X2 Athlon. I attempted to compile KDE and all the deps. It would compile X for about 10-20 hours... and then the compilation would break with a seemingly obscure error message.

I tried a few times and never did get a GUI built.

Today on Intel i7/Xeon with 16gb ram I go from a stage3 to full GUI (plasma, no libreoffice or such) in a few hours.

I've considered giving it a go again since I have a 24 core Threadripper which could easily compile everything pretty quickly, I just never got around to it.

Try accidentally emerge world on a full desktop environment with open office and said browser on a Pentium 2 after changing some base level compile flags... Oh, and I was on dial-up. Didn't do that again.

I got Gentoo on a DVD with instructions in a magazine for a Stage 1 build. No internet connection at that stage so I had to work through problems myself. Took a few goes but I learnt a heck of a lot about how Linux boots.

Been a very long time so apologies if I got some details wrong.

Yeah I remember trying it out on a k6-2 400 MHz (maybe? I don't remember if that was it's rated speed of it it was with the bus at 112mhz) and it was days of downloading sources and even more for compiling. I think there was a bootable CD bundled with some zine that allowed you to have something running on your machine