Did you choose for Linux for freedom or ...
for gratis or other reasons ?
- Have you been a distro hopper ?
- What is your favorite Linux distro ?
EDIT : Thanks for all the comments so far. Heartwarming really!
for gratis or other reasons ?
EDIT : Thanks for all the comments so far. Heartwarming really!
I began using Linux as my daily driver in 2001. I was 21. I think my story is pretty unique.
I lived in a house with 5 roommates, of which I was the second oldest. The others were 17, 18, 19 and 43. Except for the 43 year old we were basically all friends from Waldorf School (which is a fucking cult disguised as a liberal arts school, don't let anyone tell you otherwise).
There were only two computers in the house. Mine was the only one with an ethernet card. I got a Cable Modem. No one else thought they needed fast internet.
It was a kind of disaster of a living situation... like the 17 year old was an emancipated minor who was stripping using a fake ID, the 18 year old was a stoner who worked at the local bagel shop and sold weed. The 19 year old was a kid who immigrated from Mexico City when his mom married a American and was into a BUNCH of sketchy shit. SUPER nice kid, but his friends were like, in retrospect, obviously a bunch of gangsters.
Before the 43 year old we had two other roommates. The first was a girl who was 20 who we knew from school, but then she left and went to college out of state. The second was a girl our stripper roommate knew who was ALSO a stripper and had an inoperable brain tumor. Poor girl was 19 years old and was told she had 18 months to live. She quit school, became a stripper and dedicated her life to sex, drugs and partying. She was a complete mess and her friends + the gangster guy's friends turned our house into an absurd party flat that got the cops called on us (for noise or trash or sketchy people hanging around) like once or twice a month.
(yes... this IS the story of how I became a Linux user, I'm getting there).
So terminally ill stripper girl just disappeared one day. Never came home, never showed up to work, we never heard from her again. We needed to pay rent and we were all poor young people. Gangster guy has a legit job as a dish washer at a Mexican restaurant and he's like "Hey, this dude who's a server there needs a place to live."
Enter the 43 year old who is a TOTAL creep ball (imagine that). Just to cut straight to the chase, one of the first things he does is start regularly fucking 17 year old stripper girl's 16 (or possibly even 15) year old best friend from middle school, who starts spending the night at our house almost every night (and also ditching school all the time). They don't just fuck in his room, they fuck all over the house and don't clean up. Like I had clean up their used condoms and cum tissues from all over the house.
The other thing 43 year old creep ball does is fucking use my computer to download a shit ton of porn while I'm not around. Here's how we caught him.
Some friends and I are messing with my computer and we notice that... for some goddamn reason... AOL has been installed. Why the FUCK would AOL be there? I have a goddamn cable modem! So my buddy, who's also a computer nerd and is starting to get into Linux himself and I uninstall AOL and it asks if we want to save local files. When we say yes, it dumps... a bunch of AVI files of the hairiest 90s porn you can imagine onto my desktop and all I can think about is this creep ball who's used condoms I'm cleaning up sitting in my chair in my room when I'm not there jerking off.
SO... my buddy and I nuke my OS and install Debian. I leave the house and leave the computer logged in leaving a virtual console running.
Creep ball comes in to watch porn on my computer and is faced with the linux terminal. He typed (I'm not kidding)
That's the 100% true story of how I became a Linux user.
The desperation of typing start windows has me cracking up
And he was that close to mistyping "start sex" and getting "startx".
Well, that was certainly a rollercoaster. Points for authenticity and uniqueness. Also, what the actual ever loving fuck?
Stealing this for copypasta XD
The best story of beginning with Linux I have heard so far!
ah yes, my favorite os. win.exe.
ad and annoyance-free
And efficient on resources.
the fact it doesnt slow down my computer with needless crap is a big bonus
Being a geek, I have tried many linux distros (I've been using Linux since 1998, on and off). Curiosity was what was driving my usage of it.
In the early 2000s, when I used to write for OSNews.com (second only to Slashdot for OS tech news back then), I really didn't find any distro polished enough to be a daily driver for me. Red Hat was big at the time, but even when ubuntu came around, it was still not as polished as it is today. These days, I'm using Debian-Testing mostly, however I concede that the best distro for newbies (and for me really, I'm too old now to be tinkering) is Linux Mint (flagship version). Mint really is well-thought out for daily usage. It might not have the latest tech innovation in it, or be bold with its choices, but it just works 99% of the time.
As time has gone by, and seen corporations taking everything for themselves (via enshittification), I have stopped using Linux because it was the geeky/cool thing to do, but I started using it because it frees me from all the spyware, and corporation agendas. Back in the 2000s, when I was a news editor for foss matters, I was mostly siding with the BSD license side of things (and mit/apache/ etc). I felt that the GPL was too restrictive, and that we should allow innovation take its course as it wants to. Now, that I've lost all my faith in corporations doing the right (smart) thing, I'm now a GPL3/AGPL type of a gal. The more "restrictively open" something can be, the better. Don't allow anyone to manipulate you, or use you, or take away your data etc.
I don't care about Linux. I care about freedom. It just so happens that the best free software operating systems are built on Linux, so that's what I use.
I use GNU Guix System on my desktop, laptop, and server machines. I use LineageOS on my mobile devices, although sometimes I wish I could use Mobian or even Guix System instead. I do have a Pinephone with Mobian but it's collecting dust and the battery is swollen so I can't use it anyway. I also have a router running OpenWRT.
I used to use Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until 2010. When I was something of a kid I played around with a Knoppix live CD, which was my first taste of GNU/Linux.
Excel wouldn't stop converting sku numbers to date formats. IT guy was excited to share an "easy fix" for that with Open Office...
When I saw his genuine excitement as he described Linux, plus the security it provided I realized, if I ran Linux I'd have the best support in the company. And I did.
I eventually had to move on from Linux at work after 10yrs or so but it's all I run at home.
All because of Excel and those fucking date codes. Which yes, Open Office solved as advertised.
And yes I know you don't need Linux for that but it was a long time ago.
Excel š¤ incels
Incorrectly assuming something is a date
It was and still is a few things: Mostly the cool factor. It's different, does what I tell it (safety be damned lol ).
Security: Mostly sane defaults (like not making the initial user with full admin rights).
In the early days, a major factor was being poorer, constantly rebuilding Frankenstein PCs that would trip Ms activation crap. And with so many used parts, performance was better too.
Well ... I first got into contact with OpenSource due to Gratis: OpenOffice, Firefox etc. Combining my knowledge of OpenSource with my tendency to break stuff (Reinstalling Boston for the nth time) led me to Linux which I first tinkered with and soon fully adapted.
I had a short hopping phase where I went from Ubuntu (my starter) via Debian (accidentally tried stable) to Arch.
Stuck with arch on my personal machines now run Ubuntu for my work machine and Debian for Servers.
My favourite distro is the right tool for the job (see above) but I'm pretty happy with Arch
The Linuxes are the bestest IDEs ever. They even let you run mini IDEs (vim, vscode, etc) inside them. Coincidentally, they're also where a lot of server code gets deployed, so they're a a good place to verify fresh coffee.
I'm sure other platforms have caught up, but when I started out, *nix was the most accessible dev platform I could find.
Basically Intel graphics on windows broke. Hopped to Linux, no such problems here.
Tried (hopped) almost every mainstream distros, some niche ones too. Due to some issues with trackpad, I am forced to use arch based distros. Currently rocking EndeavourOS.
For me it was network card and underpowered POS laptop. For light office work and web it is enough computing power with Linux but with Windows it was unusable.
For the philosophical reasons of free as in freedom and because it's way more cool
Mostly because windows kept bothering me by breaking or changing something every single dn update so I jumped ship and have been pretty happy. Now windows only gets used for certain things I don't feel like configuring my normal system for.
It's how I've always used computers I hate fighting a tool
I went into Linux because I saw some coworkers use it. I stayed in it because I fell in love with the ideals (while it also works at least just as well as propietary OSs).
That shows how important it is that you spread the word. Linux does not do advertising. It needs the community. I love that.
I guess in Linux you either go Ubuntu and stay Ubuntu... Or (like me) you hop for a year or so until you find out your place. (Generalisation)
My fav is Arch Linux. Endeavour OS for easier install of Arch Linux. I haven't found anything better for personal computers. For work, the choice is clearly Debian for me, because Debian.
First time I switched it was because I had a piece of trash for a computer and making it work with Windows was easier said than done. It was truly amazing how smooth that machine would run Ubuntu while crying to run Windows XP (t'was a long time ago) I knew about Linux before then because my father was an oldschool geek and had messed around with old Linux distros that came on magazine cover discs, so I was somewhat familiar with the idea of Linux. Still had a lot to learn.
Eventually I got myself a "real" computer, and because I'd be using it for gaming and this was before Proton was a thing, I had it run Windows. But good god it was hard to go back. And the first thing that made Windows a pain in the arse to me was something surprisingly simple: This was the Windows 7 days, and Microsoft had yet to figure out what a Dark Theme was. It wasn't until Windows 10 that one was added, and even then, it took quite a few updates for it to appear across things like the file explorer and such.
Enshittification kept happening and such, but I couldn't exactly drop windows at the time, I'd spent a fortune on a gaming PC and it was my only games machine. I longed to go back to Linux (even set up dual-boots for some time but didn't stick with them) but couldn't justify it vs the loss of most of my library.
Then Proton happened and things were good again. It took me a bit longer to actually take the leap, but when I did, I was so happy.
... Ironically, nowadays I only boot into Windows for work reasons. Specifically Adobe reasons. What a time to be alive that all my games and chat applications and (...) are all on Linux and Windows is basically a quarantined zone for After Effects. Life is good.
I quickly fell partly into the Linux and open source rabbit hole.
So far I have tried small amount of distros on VMs, and the only distros I've run outside of VM and outside of my IT classes I've gone through so far would be Ubuntu on a very crappy laptop, and MX Linux on my current laptop. So far, MX with KDE Plasma 5.x (don't remember the specific version) is my favorite distro.
It looked different
It's free, gratis and it's fun to use and tweak.
I took a couple of in-person Linux courses when I was about 16-17. Teacher gave me a Kubuntu 6.06 CD to try at home.
A short time later I was using Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, etc. and until last year I was on Ubuntu MATE 14.04 until I made a new MATE 20.04 install and I built a new main PC with MATE 22.04.
I really notice the difference in UI apps between Ubuntu and Debian, which I tried (and failed) to swich to several times already.
I've used and gave support to RHEL in a couple of jobs (graphical and non-grahpical)
I just really, really like shortcuts. It started with vim, then I saw some of primeagenās videos. Especially the one where he showed his i3/tmux/nvim workflow that I decided to go all-in on trying.
Installed Ubuntu and uninstalled windows, and Iāve been struggling my way through understanding a bit at a time since then. I got a desktop PC after my laptopās charging port went out on me, installed Debian on it, and am now trying to find the time to work my totally unrelated job, be healthy, and to make some projects to get a job in tech.
Iāve read through the Linux command line by William shotts, but I really want to understand how more things work in a way that feels intuitive. Iāve got a dream writing-tool project Iām super excited to try to build this weekend, but I know I also have to drive a ton of lyft to be able to pay my bills on the 1st.
Iām considering installing arch for the sake of understanding the core elements in an OS, too.
But to answer the question, I love shortcuts. I got into emacs and learned enough to use enough of the agenda features to have a lot of journal entries on it. Shortcuts are so addicting, I was learning vim motions and emacs at the same time and I think I got burnt out trying to figure out how to configure both at the same time.
That didn't ring a bell though on further inspection I've seen it before. Thanks.
https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php (Creative Commons licensed. PDF free download).
I guess this Emacs orgmode, right ? I read of lots of people being very happy with that.
Yep! Itās a ton of fun, great tool for organizing. Iām not very organized, though, so the timestamp functionality with agenda is a nice way to look back. Not that I ever really do nowadays haha, I just write and write.
I did it because it was interesting.
Coming from Windows and DOS originally Linux was the first OS that made me realize that computers actually behave in deterministic ways when you get the ability to look at everything that is going on. And I also realized that given a proper OS you can actually automate most of the common tasks instead of doing the same things over and over again by hand.
I switched probably 2010 or 2011. I think I was on windows 7, but it might have been windows vista and I never got to 7.
At some point I had made a realization that software I downloaded from sourceforge (this website has been terrible for a long while now, but I think it was decent way back) was heavily correlated with not being shitty. After making this observation, I was able to generalize it to open source software tends to be less shitty and I had a year or two of experiences afterwards that reinforced my theory, which led me to try experimenting with linux installs.
I started with dual-booting Fedora, I had no idea what I was doing and didn't like the user experience as much as windows at first. I did a little bit of distro-hopping to see if there was something more appealing to me, but during that time I discovered the free software movement and that resonated with me a lot more than open source had, so I decided I wasn't interested in going back to windows. Moved to Trisquel (originally an Ubuntu derivative, and fully-free to the point of being FSF-approved) and grew to love it.
After a couple years, I decided I was curious enough to learn more about how the system works, so I moved to Parabola (fully free Arch derivative) to force myself to learn. I really learned barely anything, but I got very good at getting things working by trial-and-error while reading documentation I don't fully understand. I haven't progressed very far beyond that point at all in the years since, but I got too comfortable to make a significant change.
In the past five or so years, I've to some degree dropped the free software philosophy in favor of a philosophy that the problem runs much deeper (no hope of a successful free software movement in a capitalist society, and software is not even close to the most beneficial consequence of getting past capitalism), and I've moved to legit Arch rather than Parabola.
I've basically gone ten years without real issues on arch installs, but I still have no idea what I'm doing, I'm just comfortable with it and don't want to put any effort into a change. I feel like if anyone from the arch forums or anyone knowledgeable in general took five minutes to look at my pc they'd be like wtf are you doing. It's whatever, it works well enough for me.
Yes, I did it for freedom. Here's my battlestation:
Libreboot Gaming Desktop
Libreboot Server
Libreboot Laptop
Libreboot Laptop 2
GrapheneOS Phone (100% FOSS in the OS layer)
LibreCMC Routers (100% Free Firmware/Software)
OpenWRT Network Switch
Have you been able to just drop Libreboot on whatever or do you specifically buy hardware that you know supports it? I wish to use Libreboot.
Yes, I install Libreboot myself with a RaspberryPi and Pomona 5250 testing clip. Anything that's already supported by Coreboot, can be supported to Libreboot. They have a list of hardware that they currently support listed here:
https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/#supported-hardware
I actually sold Libreboot laptops previously on eBay, I used to sell the T440p a lot. Now, I'm about to setup my own website so I can start selling them for even cheaper. I also helped add Libreboot support for the Dell Optiplex 9020/7020 (Real thanks goto Mate Kukri, as I used his Optiplex port from Coreboot).
Impressive!
I first got into Linux because I was a kid with an old hand-me-down laptop that was meant to run Windows 98 but I somehow stuffed Windows XP on there (it had a 4gb HDD and it was filled to the brim, I'm shocked in hindsight that it actually installed). Then I discovered Ubuntu (I think version 6.06?) and installed it, and it ran great! Once I got newer computers I ended up using Windows primarily but usually had a Linux PC kicking around. In college I started dual booting my main machine since Linux proved to be useful for my courses (Computer Science). Then I built a PC and just installed Windows 10 on it, but now that my 7th gen Intel CPU is "too old" to run Windows 11, I said screw it and installed Linux again. Plus I just really like having a bash shell natively, and a proper package manager is really nice.
Windows is free for all intents and purposes. At least for most people. So it's about freedom for me.
My favourite distro is Debian. But I wish it had a workable rolling release. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is the closest distro to that ideal.
Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don't have to mess with it much.
I prefer Linux not for freedom, not for money, not for privacy.
I do it because I'll be fucking damned if hardware I own is going to generate value for some large faceless corporation. It's my computer. I paid for it. I'm not going to install Windows so it can send telemetry and show me ads in order to benefit Microsoft's bottom line.
It's like owning a car and letting Uber use it for free every once in a while. No thanks, not me.
Because compiz. No, seriously.
I got to know Linux back in 2006 in a hackathon-type-of-thing at uni and they gave me a Ubuntu 5.10 CD and my jaw dropped with the cube animation thing.
Ended wiping my hard drive trying to install it, finally could install it, tried XFCE for a time, went back to GNOME, was tired of Ubuntu and tried Gentoo and somehow could install it, with the GNOME3 drama moved to KDE, considered FreeBSD for a moment just to realize pkg/pkgsrc is absolute shit compared to Portage.
Oh and it seems KDE went back with the cube for Plasma 6! Alas it's still masked in Gentoo and who knows when it would be ready, but it's a bit great I'm not the only one for that cube nostalgia.
Nice. Learning some more Gentoo Linux is on my wish list, but every time I find the first step too intimidating. Now that they have binaries since (half a year or so ?) I expected an installation to be easier. Maybe I should try it with QEMU or VirtualBox. Hmmm, actually, are there any VPS providers that provide Gentoo as image ?
It was mostly just a skill issue, I don't know how anyone uses developer tools on Windows. Building tool chains on Linux just make sense.
I like to tinker and learn how things work, and windows ME blue screened on my one time too many, so I picked up Linux in 1998. Redhat box from compusa, if anyone remembers that place.
And thatās when my life changed; using the skills I taught myself i got well paying jobs as a sysadmin and then as software developer and now Iām an āinfrastructure engineerā (I write terraform to manage cloud infrastructure and i do other sysadmin stuff ).
Itās paid off!
Nice. So you're an old timer :)
compusa does ring a bell. Suddenly reminds me of InfoMagic though. Here's a photo found with a search engine.
Awesome.
Mostly daily drive macOS for work / personal stuff (the ease of windows guis with the underpinnings of āLinuxā [bsd]), but I have a home lab running a bunch of Linux stuff, my own infra in digital ocean (Debian), and windows for games. Iām not an os absolutist, they each have their place.
Must be weird realizing that you owe your livelihood to Windows ME.
lol seriously
Both. I have to use windows at work and I hate it.
I did a little bit of distro hopping: Mint, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Arch, Guix. Now I think I finally arrived at Tumbleweed, no need to hop somewhere else so far.
But I really like the concept behind Guix, it's just not finished enough.
My windows install started corrupting my hard drive every 1-2 weeks. Completely unrecoverable requiring a fresh install. I installed Linux to try to see if it was a hardware issue, and it worked fine without issues. Ending up just sticking to it. Couple years later I built a new PC, and tried windows again. I enjoyed having all my games work again (this was pre-proton so Linux gaming was hit or miss), but really hated the experience of using windows after being free from it for so long. Went back to Linux, and have been here ever since (about 10 years now). And thanks to valve/proton, I no longer feel like I'm giving anything up to use exclusively Linux.
I stuck with Windows for as long as I did because of the widespread compatibility and ease of use, and I still use Windows 10 on one laptop that I've been using for 4 years because I just don't want to go through the pain of switching everything over when I'm likely to just upgrade the hardware before long anyway.
But I did switch over to Mint on my desktop and I've been shocked at how easy it was to switch. I haven't ran into any insurmountable compatibility issues and flat hub makes everything a breeze.
I'm super happy with the frequent updates and The cinnamon user interface is very familiar and easy to adapt to.
That being said, I'll never use a Windows operating system on a new machine or build ever again.
Windows 11 is just trash.
The UI changes alone left a bad taste in my mouth but you can undo most of them with a little bit of work, But you just shouldn't have to.
Then with the addition to advertisements in the taskbar and start menu I'd had enough.
I'm over the top, just fucking DONE with being a commodity and I refuse to use any paid service that serves ads.
Yes, Windows comes with most machines but it's not a free service.
And the option to stay on Windows 10 and continue receiving security updates on for a monthly fee is just short of extortion.
My personal tin foil hat theory is that they purposely made windows 11 trash so that people would support a subscription based Windows service with Windows 10.
I'm with you on that.
Probably a combination of free/libre and gratis. Thing is,I was amazed at the speed of it compared to Windows (at the time I had XP).
My first incursion was with Puppy Linux circa 2010, then Ubuntu circa 2012, and now I want to hop to another distro but don't know which.
Started using it because I was a nerd, still using it because windows cannot provide anything close to a sway/i3 style of wm.
Also setting up a programming environment is dead easy, just install a package and you can compile your code within 5 minutes of a fresh install.
and also the kernel logs actually make sense and tell me what I need to fix when the system breaks. windows errors are just a goddamn mysterious mess
My laptop with windows 10 shit the bed, it would let me type in my pin but get hung up on the spinny loady wheely thing never moving past that. I used a linux liveUSB to rescue my files from the disk, and while I was using it I noticed how my computer did things like "still work." So I switched! Actually had two laptops at the same time I had to switch too, the other would let me log in but was bogged down and barely responsive, ran like a top for years but now I'm upgrading to a framework. The framework can probably run windows but it would've been like $200 more and like, why? I might just run a VM of WatermarkWindows for the few times I need it but really the only thing I need works in wine well enough.
I think I originally checked it out after watching an LTT video on a gaming distro, because i liked computers and I was pretty good at them. Not sure if I was the problem or the distro but it was pretty bad. Still fell in love.
Now I appreciate the open source aspect, but I still like it because I can do more with it and learn in the process.
I mostly just wanted a simple media server at home but also I needed to use Linux and Docker for university work. I've only really used Ubuntu. I'm happy enough with it and have no reason to change for now
I use Linux for largely the same reasons I use Lemmy. While I'm still far from strictly using FOSS software, I respect the decentralization and freedom that comes with Linux. I have such a deep admiration and respect for everyday people that create/maintain platforms, as opposed to large companies that seeking to profit off their userbase.
While I have distro hopped a number of times over the past few years, I keep coming back to Pop!_OS. Everything just works right out of the box for me, but still gives me the freedom to tweak my environment however I choose. I love their tiling desktop feature and am anxiously awaiting the release of their new COSMIC desktop.
I wanted to be a hacker as a kid, so I had some experience with Backtrack 5. A prof said if you wanted to be a cowboy coder, do everything in your terminal. That was good advice, I've learned a lot about OS's from that
Your OS is basically a set of drivers that allow you to leverage your hardware, as well as a package manager for managing your software, and a system for managing services (like at startup or by some event trigger)
I'm an advanced user but NixOS has been an excellent OS, it's like all the fun of tuning arch but with less elbow grease. I was a kde neon (ubuntu base + plasma display manager + KDE desktop environment) user before
I listened to the wan show and kept hearing about the linux challenge that was going to be released and i was excited to see how it goes. A month before those videos came out I ran a normal windows update and it completely fucked my computer. I could recover the files but not the activation key. There was no way I was paying another few $100 so I thought I'd give linux a try. Mint worked perfectly except wifi didn't work but that was fine. Reading about how to do things on linux reignited my passion for computers. It had been so long since using a computer felt new. I loved that everything was configured by a text file and commands could easily adjust settings without having to dig through convoluted control panel. I then distro hopped a few times but now I'm settled on nobara and I enjoy linux because it makes my computer feel like my computer.
I switched to Linux full time (I'd gone back and forth for a while) about 10 years ago when my XP laptop died.
I had access to Windows 7 via work, but I didn't like how much telemetry was being sent back to MS...
I made the switch at the start of the year out of curiosity. I had worked for QNX as a student and though that I should have had a better understanding of the system, so I started using WSL for all my programming.
Then joined Lemmy in the summer and that increased my interest in trying it out full time. I was also getting increasingly disappointed with Windows pushing updates for Win11 and features like onedrive.
I've been super happy with it so far. I've gotten way more familiar with my OS and it's been such a huge shift in perspective for me to be able to shape the way the OS works to my workflow rather than the inverse.
I am an IT nerd so I use Linux to learn more about the OS and programming. This was the original reason and still is the reason I keep a Linux machine on hand. Current machine is a dual-boot LG Gram running Windows 11 (wanted to keep the original OS so just shrunk it) and Arch Linux. It runs on Arch 90% of the time. Really only boot the windows partition to use it for work.
I was born into it. I stayed with it for some mix of gratis and libre. I'm not rich or dumb enough to buy an Apple device or Windows licence, and I like having a computer that won't turn on me.
I chose it for development reasons. I kind of fell into a decent career but one I didnāt enjoy and was tied to a specific geographic region. So, I was learning to code and my coworkers who wrote code were using Linux and all our servers were CentOS (or maybe WhiteHat or whatever it was called then). So, I installed Fedora Core 4 ā Iām old ā and liked it better than Windows. I loved being able to customize everything.
Eventually, I learned the philosophical reasons for open source after I got into it but they matched my personal beliefs so that was no issue.
I used to distro hop frequently and Iāve probably tried all the major distros at least once but after awhile, I began to just stick to Fedora or Ubuntu LTS for servers (and I guess Arch on Steam Deck, Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi, etc.). I like Vanilla Gnome nowadays and when I want to see a new distro, I just check it out in a VM.
I think Chrunchbang (R.I.P.) was my favorite distro when I was all-in on distro hopping and customizing everything. But at some point for a developer, your OS becomes more of a tool for opening an IDE and/or terminal and you value stability over customization or having the very latest software. In the Flatpak era, thatās even more true since you can run the newest versions regardless of the system.
I liked GNOME 3, and first disliked GNOME 4 but with the gnome-tweaks tool (to get the two extra window buttons back) and the easy to enable Night Light feature, I got used to it and appreciate it more and more.
btw, there's a new life : https://www.crunchbangplusplus.org/
Agreed.
I had the most elaborate Conky scripts for CrunchBang. That was a fun era for experimentation. Even the closed source OSes were trying new things because of the transition to smartphones.
Itās probably just as fun today but everyone likes the music that came out when they were young and experiencing it for the first time.
Initially I was just curious and I've always loved playing with new (to me) tech. Then I began to really appreciate various things about it - not least the high configurability. As I learnt about OSS I began to also appreciate that success of things as well.
First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10's twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn't ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.
Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven't been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don't like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).
If I chose it for gratis, I wouldn't have replaced Windows with it.
Initially, I chose Linux for it being gratis, but as I've used it more and more, I started to appreciate its freedom. It's really kinda moot though since I first gotten exposed to Linux because I had to. Our uni adopted Linux (some faculties used Linux Mint, others used Ubuntu) for their school computer laboratories after they couldn't pay for their Windows licenses. In a way, I indeed got into Linux because it is gratis.
I started daily-driving Linux when my Win7 desktop broke, and had to use an ancient, hand-me-down, laptop. It can barely run Win7, and so I tried installing Ubuntu on it (funny in hindsight though, I should have used a lightweight Linux distro). Then a friend of mine introduced me to Manjaro. It worked well for quite a while, until the HDD finally croaked (it's had a long life of nearly a decade). I stuck with Manjaro when I got my present desktop, but that same friend of mine who introduced me to Manjaro pushed me to using Arch despite my protests. I would have wanted to switch to Endeavour instead since I was intimidated by pure Arch. But since they offered to do the "installation and set-up process" with me, I relented. (The scare quotes are there because it was not an ordinary installation process: my friend basically exorcised the Manjaro out of my system.)
I have a few distros I would like to try, off the top of my head: EndeavourOS, Fedora Silverblue, and NixOS. However, I don't think I'm a distro hopper. I would prefer that I stay with a distro unless I get pushed off it for one reason or another. Perhaps, if I've got an extra computer to test things out, I might be a bit more adventurous and go distro-hopping using that extra machine.
To date, I've only had a bit of experience with Linux Mint and Ubuntu, and a bit more experience with Manjaro and Arch Linux. I don't think fairly limited experience with those allows me to pick a favorite, but I suppose despite its reputation for being hard to use, I quite like Arch Linux. Its package manager as well its repositories really does it for me. It's changed the way I think about installing programs, as well as updating them.
Currently, I use Arch and Win10 in a dual-boot system. After I've gotten myself an AMD graphics card, I spend my time on my Arch system almost exclusively.
š
I am not a NixOS user but I have tried it a few times and I find it really impressive for some features. Though I feel intimidated by having to learn about more features. But the thing I find impressive so far is how to switch DEs so incredibly easy after a basic NixOS install. For example in case you're currently running XFCE4 :
It's like magic! š§
I still intend to show this to a Linux friend one day just for fun and sharing. And with clonezilla or rescuezilla it should be pretty easy and fast to recover from backups, show it to the friend, and then put Arch Linux back from backups.
That sounds amazing, to be honest. One major concern I've got is the initial setting up. That same friend of mine (the one who exorcised my system) already has a NixOS system for their NAS, and seeing the config files kinda scared me. However, as far as I've understood their explanation, it's basically a "set-up once and forget about it" affair. It's still quite a departure from the way I've learned to do things though, so it's still intimidating.
To be honest, maybe I'm just waiting for that friend to be somewhat of an expert in NixOS, so that they can push me into using it, lol!
š Well, you know I'd say you don't have to sacrifice your daily driver Linux install. I use more than one computer and SBC cause I like to tinker with Linux and BSD. In the country that I live in a reasonable (as in : I only need to browse the Internet and check email and Fediverse, no gaming or 3D rendering or pro photo editing and so on) refurbished laptop with touchscreen can be had for just 75 Euros. I'm thinking about getting another one so that I can omit some clonezilla restore/backup time.
I actually have some plans (no timeline though, it's basically just a wishlist item as of now) of making my own NAS, so there's that opportunity. And of course, yeah, getting an old machine is also an option. Who knows, maybe I'd get my hands on another old laptop that could very well be my way to testing Linux distros.
Honestly, because Windows is a steaming pile of garbage and using Mac feels like swimming with pool floaties.
I recently started using NixOS as my distro and it has been phenomenal. Saying the learning curve is a little steep is like calling a hurricane a little bit of rain, but once you start to get it, it's extremely powerful and delivers on the promise of "all of your configuration in one place." It gives me a lot of peace of mind to know that every time I tweak or fix something, it's reliably making it into a version controlled and backed up repository. I could throw my laptop out the window, pick up a new one, and have all my applications installed and configured within half an hour.
Obviously you are not their target market as the vast majority of their users do not have such extreme complaints about the OS.
For me, it was originally just an experiment because oh, I've heard about this thing and I'm curious about it. This was on my school laptop that I had managed to obtain administrator permissions on by cracking the password and installing VirtualBox. It was a Dell Latitude D505 with like 512 megabytes of RAM running Windows XP. The very first distro I booted was Ubuntu 10.10 and Oh dear God was it slow as shit. I knew that it was because of Windows, and so did not judge it for that reason, but judged it based on user interface and ease of use, which I found good enough to play with and continue messing with. Then I had a summer camp thing that I had went to with coding and we had to use a Mac in order to do it and I was used to Linux in the way Ubuntu worked so it wasn't hard for me but for other people it was difficult because of the interface change. That particular place is where I learned about SSH and SCP and started really playing with making web servers on them. And as they say, the rest is history. I've been running Linux 100% for around 5 years now, and just keep a Windows virtual machine around in case it's necessary, which it proves to be very, very rarely.
Partly for freedom, partly for free software, partly for tinkering opportunities. I broke some installs before I started thinking of Linux as my daily driver.
I've tried Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy (and then Fatdog), Knoppix, Rasbian, Xandros, Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core, Arch and Endeavour, but Mint is my favourite. It's never failed to just work.
The freedom is great, and the fact that things don't change out from under me is awesome --- I can use a basic or tiling window manager while still running a modern system. Updating Windows or macOS = new "improved" GUI, generally speaking. KDE and Gnome also change, but it's your choice to use/not use them, as it should be!
Started with Red Hat in the kernel 2.0 or 2.2 days, because I picked up a book+install CD at a garage sale.
Slackware on an old laptop got me through undergrad (desktop ran Gentoo, but I didn't use it much).
Switched to Debian after that, with a little Arch in grad school btw (not a huge fan --- to each their own).
Running Debian now (desktop, laptop, and SBCs), but my heart belongs to Slackware.
Slackware! The good old days with Pat :^) (Yeah, that smiley is (c) Patrick Volkerding)
I tried Linux in college because it was a hot thing there. Been hooked ever since.
I'm not a distro hopper. I used Debian Testing for many years. Last year I switched to NixOS because it was a compelling value proposition for me. I'm very happy with it!
Perhaps a different perspective, but I am gearing up to switch at the moment.
While I have previously used Linux (I have been running Debian 12 on my laptop for about a year), I bought windows 11 for my Desktop as I was still under the impression that is was the only real way to play games.
I recently learned about what Proton has done for games on Linux and also noticed how many games are truly playable on Linux now with the ever increasing market share.
Even though I am using NVIDIA hardware, I have looked up the process for installing the NVIDIA drivers on Linux and while not as easy as AMD, it appears to be quite easy anyway (I am an IT graduate so it seems pretty straightforward to me).
It really was only games that was holding me back I think.
Windows, especially lately has been growing more and more and more and more invasive. I feel like in the last 6 weeks I have read tens of articles on how Microsoft is trying to insert ads into the OS, watermark the OS, install AI into the OS, force the use of MS accounts instead of local accounts etc, and it is completely disgusting. At this point given the recent activity, I would not at all be surprised if they started to try to enforce the OS as a "subscription service".
The moment I installed windows 11 I knew it was going to be a poor experience, considering I had to create registry keys and manually relaunch the OOBE with flags in order to use a local account.
For all these reasons (Gaming becoming ever more accessible on linux, and MS consistently making their product less valuable), I will be switching to either Debian 12 on my desktop or Arch in the near future.
It is a disgusting corporate world we find ourselves in right now, but while this is in many ways a bad thing, I have never in my life noticed more people taking notice of that, becoming interested in FOSS, in Linux, in even considering no longer putting up with this kind of thing, and that gives me hope.
maybe sorta. I did not even realize there was a difference at the command line and was like. ok this uses this. Loved the nextstep workstations. worked at a place that was very unix and liked a lot of it. got very excited with macosx which was pretty much nextstep with a freebsd base and macs were always easier to use. Heard stallman speak and definitely agreed and I began to recognized foss and prefer it. Im still pretty practical though so use zorin os although if I had more time I would play around with qubes os and sourcemage linux.
initially i chose Linux because Windows on my laptop was way too sluggish. eventually, me and my family made a definite move to Linux because of the continuous enshittification Windows is going through in the modern days. Linux has become good enough for daily driving and even gaming that it just made no sense sticking to Windows.
i wouldn't say i'm fully out of the "distro hopping" phase just yet, but i'm certainly doing it rarely, once in, like, 3-4 months maybe. currently using Void Linux on my personal laptop.
my favorite distro is Mint. yes, it's a basic-ass choice, but it is the de-facto "just works" distro.
because win98SE sucked horribly.
I tried pop in November last year. I've since tried nobara, mint and now arch. I hate it because many arch users are so obnoxious but the AUR is invaluable, I think. It's a bit more work to setup, but with the new arch install script it's really not so bad. Watch out for the partitioning bug though! You basically have to manually partition your drive currently, because of an off by one error.
I switched because I was sick of dealing with corporate garbage and abuse at the hands of Microsoft.
It wasn't the cost, I've always activated my Windows installations with gray-market keys bought on eBay for 5-10 dollars. Plus I've paid far more for open source software than I ever did for Windows and their proprietary trash.
I had so many problems with Windows over the years. Fighting with drivers, fighting with software installs, fighting with the registry, etc etc.
I also couldn't stand how bad their spying was getting, how bloated and clunky their software was, and how much adware they were forcing on me.
I finally vowed about 3 years ago that I would never use Windows again for any of my personal computing, no matter what I had to sacrifice.
Turns out, I didn't have to really sacrifice anything significant, and I gained far more than I lost. I would never go back to Windows now, especially with what is happening with windows 11.
My main computer runs Nobara, because I use it mostly for gaming. I use KDE Plasma as my DE. Both work fantastic, games run fast and smooth, and everything looks so pretty lol.
I use Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon on my laptop and it's awesome too. Almost never have any problems with it.
My work allows me to use Linux, so I run Debian with KDE Plasma. It took a bit of work to get everything running smoothly, but I'm enough of a power user that it wasn't too bad.
My phone runs GrapheneOS, I'm on it right now typing this. Love it also, so glad to be off a corporate version of Android. GrapheneOS is awesome and does everything I need very well.
I've used a ton of different distros. Different strokes for different folks. I've used Arch, Fedora, Zorin, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Alma, and several others. Some were a fad, some I use for my servers, some I use for home lab testing, etc.