this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago (2 children)

"We now added AI to the kernel"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

This would be 100% valid

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Weird Al: Kernel Drivers

A parody kernel of Linux USB Support

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can't fix.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well one day I heard about NixOS... And that's all it took

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Sell it to me, please

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Last time I did, it was thanks to canonical pushing snaps and other things no one asked for.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

If gentoo stopped being maintained, I guess I'd find something else.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I'm on Bazzite, so I may be tempted to switch to SteamOS on at least one of my devices, but Bazzite covers pretty much all my bases currently, both for gaming and work. I have a laptop with EndeavourOS and I love it, been using it for about 2-3 years there, but I'm switching laptops soon to a framework so I'll also go with Bazzite there for consistency and due to the official support it has with framework laptops.

Honestly the experience I've had with these distros so far leaves me wishing for nothing more, and now with immutability and distro box I kinda don't see the point in changing to anything else unless Bazzite development dies out or they make a painfully stupid decision, which doesn't seem to be the case so far!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I usually try out a couple of new distros whenever I am either setting up a new computer, or something happens with my current machine that requires a fresh OS anyway.

I've been married to Pop!_OS for a couple of years now. however, for the past couple of months I've been booting exclusively into KDE Plasma on my desktop computer; almost everything works really well for me in that environment, except the built-in Pop!_OS stuff itself, such as the pop shop, does not work very well. so I might end up switching to a distribution that's built around KDE, such as KDE Neon.

I'm also pretty curious about the Nix package manager and the concept of immutable desktop systems, so I guess I might try NixOS at some point? I don't know much about it yet.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 days ago

When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nothing could get me to switch off gentoo at this point. It's so flexible that you can use package managers from other distros (if you're crazy and like to create problems for yourself). Creating your own packages is very easy with their ebuild system. In terms of the packages they offer the USE flags are an absolute killer feature that let you install only the parts of the program you want. They even have binary versions of larger programs like firefox or rust that you can install if you don't want to compile them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Well technically with compilers like Rust, you need a Rust compiler to actually compile Rust for you. That's likely why they give binaries for such a thing.

Firefox though is a nice convenience.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

A whim, usually.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Not sure... I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I'd rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool... but I really don't want to use a weird language for making packages, I'm just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I half the point of package managers was so you could easily uninstall them. Do package managers usually not fully uninstall?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Nix becomes extremely easy once you get the hang of the language. Much more straightforward then some cryptic bash

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

Saturday for some

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago (10 children)

Other than massive breakage, I'm not sure. Completely reinstalling and reconfiguring my setup is a pain in the ass, in part because of my slow internet connection. But damn if Ubuntu isn't trying to find out.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Eh, probably if Guix becomes significantly better I'll switch to it (from NixOS). I really like how seriously they take user freedom, bootstrapping (only 357 bytes of binary to bootstrap everything else from source!) and consistent user interfaces (scheme everywhere). But unfortunately the package repo is just not big and mature enough yet, and declarative configuration options are not as good as they are with NixOS. My job is also Nix-related, and that's another major reason I'm staying for now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Nix-related job - do tell!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm doing Nix consulting-type jobs - it can mean anything from simply packaging some stuff for Nix and making a devShell to refactoring existing Nix-based infra (which can be hundreds of thousands of SLOC) to building entirely new developer UX, CI/CD and even production deployments on Nix/NixOS. I've also been paid to implement some cool features into Nix itself, fix bugs, etc. I'm really quite happy with the job, even though it could probably pay more :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Cool! Thanks for sharing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Was a Ubuntu user from 9.10 until 20.04; snap shittyness caused me to hop around for a while. Settled on Mint a few years ago.

It's stable, gets out of my way and lets me get my work done.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

It has been a really long time (20? years) since I've been on nix. Kind of torn by Mint and Deb. I want the ease ootb but the flexibility of Deb.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I use Fedora Asahi Remix currently, and I want to switch to NixOS but am uncertain about the MacBook support, and even if it was good switching would take longer than it's worth unless my current installation stops working for whatever reason

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I used ubuntu for 10+ yr and switched because of firefox snap. To fedora. Wow it is so much better here

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Shadow updating their Linux app to support anything other than Ubuntu 20.04...
It's the only reason I use it, and it's weird and bad that they only support that distro and version (which has reached EOL). I've talked to them about it and all they say is "We see the need from users for support of newer Ubuntu versions and other distros" which is such a nothingburger of an answer. I spent three days with several other distros and Ubuntu versions trying to figure out a fix but sadly never found one. I just wanna use Linux Mint or anything other than Ubuntu, especially a 5 year old version.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Ubuntu 20.04, and doesn't work on other Ubuntu versions? Sounds like it's compiled against old libraries.

If you want to try something more advanced, you might be able to get it to work in Nix or Flatpak. Both are ways to use the exact software libraries with an application. Both would be quite steep leaning to do! Even docker might solve the problem; still not an easy solution though, and might be harder to get hardware features working.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

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.

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