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What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"? (feddit.uk)
submitted 11 months ago by case_when@feddit.uk to c/linux@lemmy.ml
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Most of them.

  • Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it's surprisingly bad at that.

  • Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.

  • 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.

  • 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 :)

[–] jaykay@lemmy.zip 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

NixOS… for now. I was on Fedora and was looking for something new. Thought I’d try these new „immutable” distros. Then realised I didn’t know enough about normal ones yet, so I switched to Arch instead. Plus, Nix’ docs are horrendous imo

[–] Helix@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

Nix’ docs are horrendous imo

For whatever reason, Nix zealots always tell me "it's way better now" and "it's not that bad". When I was trying NixOS, I literally rage quit. With other distributions it was just "sigh, time for something else", but with NixOS I really got infuriated at the developers/maintainers.

[–] scriptGoober@linux.community 1 points 3 weeks ago

manjaro.

[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 weeks ago

Opensuse. Did absolutely nothing wrong but I just didn't vibe with it. Went to fedora and I vibe hard with it

[–] atmur@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

XFCE with Wayland is really needed. LXQt is really close btw, you can already use it

https://github.com/stefonarch/LXQt-Wayland-files

I can imagine how that setup is really stable though, and yeah GNOME is annoying. But XFCE is really far behind from many modern Desktops. I want to do a minimal KDE setup, without most of the bloat. Its not really possible, but Plasma 6 will be fancy and solid, modern and Plasma doesnt really need more resources than XFCE nowadays. If you disable baloo, maybe remove kdeconnect, maybe replace Dolphin with pcmanfm-qt (which is nice but inferior too) it is really snappy and light.

[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

I've been fedora for some months and recently switched to LMDE. Fedora is a great OS, don't get me wrong, but the stability that I got by being in Debian is amazing.

Debian will always be my comfort zone, it just feels right.

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

Manjaro or Nobara because of their unstable and not really well supported foundation

LXDE, Cinnabon, XFCE, Budgie, damn Mate Distros, because they are simply outdated.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

All of them, so I'm still on Windows

[–] GustavoM@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Yes officer, this heretic right here.

[–] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] UprisingVoltage@feddit.it 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Recommending ubuntu to newbies is the product of either incompetence or malice when Mint, zorin and nobara exist

[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Mint relies on often outdated versions of Ubuntu, always LTS. Many modern features will break there. Debian Stable is not better and will get veeery outdated soon. Debians stable release simply is currently pretty new, but that is due to its feature freeze, with GNOME 43 (now 2 versions outdated btw) etc. being "pretty new". In 2 years you will have basically no new development, which is happening.

Nobara is extremely flawed, its Fedora 39 release was like a month too late. It does extreme and manual changes. I would highly recommend Bazzite from ublue instead, it is made for Gaming and has all the enhanced Graphics and Gaming things just as Nobara, but up to date, immutable, self updating etc.

I havent tried Zorin but their modded GNOME sounds like a good idea, Wayland support and very stable Desktop, unlike Mint which will take at least a year to have a stable Wayland release. There are already apps like Waydroid that only support Wayland, and that has to be the future, as X11 is very bad with multiple Monitors, it lacks any security and is simply not maintained for years.

So no, Nobara and Mint are not recommended really, Zorin maybe.

I would recommend ublue.it images for the matching hardware (main, nvidia, asus, framework, ally etc). They are close to upstream, immutable, autoupdating, solid (every local bug should be reproducible) and you can simply install every app from Flatpak. If an app is not there, you dont have to switch Distros, as Distrobox is already installed. They even have Fleek, which allows Nix easily, and you can also use homebrew, which combines the MacOS and the Linux community!

It may be unconventional for some, but it really isnt. Its not sudo apt install but now try upgrading Debian, its a total mess. It is such a better model for people that dont want weird breakages they cant reproduce. I broke literally every other Distro as a beginner, Fedora Kinoite (although if you can stand GNOME, use Silverblue) is currently the best.

I also think NixOS is pretty good for beginners. Dont know if Flatpak is preinstalled, but the setup should be like 3 commands. It does not break and has no package conflicts, and installs are also just nix-env --install APPNAME. Its defaults are good and you can choose any DE you want, and it will come complete and ready to use with some clicks. Swap with Hibernation just works, things like that. Its package repo is bigger than Debians, so you can just install every package you need from one source.

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Hannah Montana Linux?

And after Manjaro broke for the third time, I switched to Arch. I'm generally happy with Debian, though. I've noped out of Ubuntu like a decade ago.

[–] 30p87@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

Pop, after tinkering with it broke it one too many times. However, as I had installed LFS on my Laptop at the same time, out of curiosity and lulz, I noticed DIY distros are much better for me. LFS itself is not really usable as a daily driver tho, especially without a Threadripper, so Arch it was.

[–] Helix@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

NixOS. The declarative principle is very nice (especially the installation process) but as soon as you do something advanced like compiling stuff or using software that is not in the repositories or outdated, it's not very simple to use as you basically have to become your own packager and maintainer. Recently I tried upgrading the main PC of my hackerspace from one NixOS version to the next and we had lots of breakage, because the migration paths are not automatic and you have to change your configuration even though upstream didn't change anything. Upgrading my Debian home server from 11→12 was as simple as changing the sources.list, running apt full-upgrade and answering a few questions.

[–] squid_slime@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

All but Arch. Find commands much easier to remember and me having dyslexia and ADHD my memory is shocking.

[–] Helix@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

yay, new software! 😅