Two years into full-time Linux and I’m finally burning the distro-hopping cycle. I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
Switched back to Fedora, and it’s boring in exactly the way I need it to be. It’s a stable launchpad for my projects, not the project itself.
I went thought the exact same process for about 3 months, on CachyOS. Went back to Fedora about 3 weeks ago on both my laptop and PC, and it is refreshing.
Fedora for fun, OpenSUSE for work.
Nobara for fun, rocky for work.
I worked on United Linux, with suse. Never again.
Debian for server, NetBSD for tinkering
Kinoite user here - no urge to hop. Distrobox if I need something else
Don’t get comfy, I used to be fedora, then debian, then arch. Mint + Cinnamon is my final resting place.
I like cinnamon. Haven’t run desktop Linux since slackware, so it was a breath of fresh air on Nobara.
I fell for the Arch/AUR trap for a while, but I got tired of spending my weekends debugging file manager crashes instead of maintaining my home lab.
What sort of file manager crashes were you having?
Right mouse click, it was an intermittent issue and never did get to the bottom of it as the only forum posts I could find were from 10 years ago. Yes I know I could of used the keyboard shortcuts but my muscle memory is more mouse orientated than keyboard lol
Luckily for me, I switched from Cachy to Fedora kde right before the AUR attacks started happening. Fedora honestly feels like home to me now. I customized it to have a very Gnome like workflow, and its working flawlessly for me.
Dude, if you documented your process for this, could you share the configuration with me, please? I’ve been trying (on and off) to do precisely that because of how walled GNOME has become between GNOME 39 and now, but my results have been “less than spectacular” to say the least. I think I just need a starting point, but the videos on YouTube about that are not really practical. I’m on GNOME because I just love the whole workflow, but would rather be on Plasma with the Gnome workflow if possible. That would be great. If not, well FUCK YOU! Just kidding, lol (about the fuck you, I still would love a starting point on this 🤣)
Why not fedora gnome? 🤔
Gnome has slowly become like a DE made by Apple. Even trying to configure it to use a screen shot app other than the integrated one is a fucking chore, they want you to forcibly use theirs, which is great for basic screen shooting, but I’m more of a flames hot fan because of how seamless it is to annotate on any shot instead of taking the shot, having to use a second app to edit/annotate, and then, I don’t know when it started, but every screenshot gets saved as a picture now, no way to just use it with the clipboard and let it disappear on the next SC or copy.
Then there’s the mentality. In GNOME If a feature doesn’t fit the design language, no matter how popular, it’s rejected. Dissenting opinions on design choices are almost always met with “trust the process.”
Isnt gnome a bit more resource intensive? also like the option of more customization if i ever wanna change the layout or aesthetic.
You can customize gnome pretty far. The code to have normal human minimize/maximize/close buttons is all still there, and the window bar is there as well. You just have to know which programs to pull from dnf that know what
registrydconf settings to adjust. I have yet to find a use case for nautilus between Dolphin (KDE) and using a terminal.
CachyOS anyone?
Went from OpenSUSE way back then, moved to Ubuntu for a while, then when I decided to finally switch totally to Linux, I went with Arch. Last December I migrated to CachyOS and I really like it. I remove a bunch of stuff on installation and I install no DE/WM as I prefer to bring my own config, but as a base, it’s solid and has some stuff already configured that I don’t have to do, like btrfs snapshots for example.
I did the same thing. Settled om Baazite
Bazzite is just right for my daily driver. I was hopping around different arch distros for a while, but I had some really weird encounters with btrfs and not being able to recover after kernel upgrades. Happened to me 3 times in the span of 2 years.
Me too, on all my desktop PCs. Aurora on my work laptop. Ublue rocks.
I have been on this Linux jam since 1996 with a CD copy of Red Hat that came with a magazine (Byte, maybe?). In 2018 I made the jump to Debian based distros specifically because I got tired of the surprises. Now my lab runs LMDE. The only thing more stable and boring is Debian Stable itself.
Like you said, I want to focus on my projects, not have the OS be my project.
it’s kind of strange hearing about all this stability and everything on debian stable (and lmde by extension), when it was constantly broken for me and i had to do all kinds of weird fixes
i have a lenovo thinkpad t490s too so it’s not like im running on brand new components or anything either
been running fedora kde for a few months and it’s been running like a dream
That is strange.
it is!
i’m wondering if i have some special version of the t490s cus thinkpads are supposed to co-operate well with linux
fastfetch says the host is “20NYS0FU00 (ThinkPad T490s)” if that rings a bell to anyone
My first Linux distro was Red Hat 6 around 1996 I would suspect. It came with a Linux book that I bought.
I am pretty sure I started with either Halloween or Mother’s Day because Red Hat Linux for Dummies came with Red Hat 2.1 which I am pretty sure came out in 96 or 97. I know Red Hat 6 was released in 1999, because I was neck deep in Y2K work at the time I installed it on my Compaq laptop.
I found the O’Reilly Red Hat 6 book online and it came out in August 1999. I would have pegged it earlier than that but I guess not.
Debian for servers and fedora for desktop for me.
Some people I will put on Mint for desktop use, if they are super non-technical.
I love mint and I’m at least a little technical. Although I’m still mad I couldn’t get fedora working on my laptop.
What did you struggle with?
The live USB would boot, but the install would fail. It was my only computer at the time, so I needed it up and working and couldn’t really troubleshoot. In fairness, ASUS is not known for it’s Linux support.
Bazzite has lots of customizations built-in if you download the Asus spin.
Interesting! I’ll have to check it out. I’m a little wary of immutable distros though. I do a fair amount of tinkering and random package installs. And I dont love flatpak.
They are not as restrictive as people make them out to be. Ostree works quite well for installing a primary app like a different browser.
If you want to avoid dependency conflicts entirely, You can have a look at distro shelf. It allows you to run a container for nearly any distro, install packages and then export those apps to run like native apps. I use it all the time when something is only supported via package and not flatpack, or some other distro only.
The container still maps to your same home folder for file and config access.
I have 3 containers, a fedora workstation one for standard apps I don’t want to do via Flatpak or AppImage. An Debian one for deb packages. And lastly a Arch one, which is for the more experimental apps. If I end up breaking something, I can just wipe the container and start again.
Exactly what I do
I’ve recently had some issues with Fedora (KDE). After I install any update it tells me to restart to finish installing. So I restart and it still tells me the same thing. Probably time I distrohop again.
With the usual restriction of “either upstream or Mint, otherwise you’re doing it wrong”. There are 6 options. Ubuntu is obviously out. Arch is not my cup of tea. Fedora is already ruled out. Debian/Mint aren’t as secure as Fedora/OpenSUSE. That leaves me with going back to OpenSUSE Leap.
But the proprietary media codecs on OpenSUSE come from the AUR … looks like I’m out of options.
This might not be your issue, but I remember for me there’s this button in the tray that appears after all updates are downloaded. You click it and there’s an option to restart and update. If you just go to the main menu to restart, it doesn’t always show this “restart and update” option, and just restarts without installing the updates. Though even if you make this mistake you shouldn’t need to re-download the updates. Just go to KDE Discover and check for updates again, and the button will appear in the tray again. I think.
Also maybe you’d like the Fedora atomic distros, like Bazzite or Aurora. Unlike installing the updates during reboot, they install them in a “disabled state” while the system is running. Then you reboot and it automatically boots to the new version, no need to wait for any installation. What’s neat is that it’s really hard to break. Even if you pull the power while it’s installing updates, it will just use the previous version and try installing again. No risk of corruption.
What’s the security issue with Debian and Mint? Debian is usually my goto but I don’t want to expose myself to security issues
Linux in general is not secure for desktop users. There’s basically never sandboxing, and when there is it’s usually weak, antivirus is rarely used, and developers aren’t vetted as stringently as with paid software. Apparently Fedora and OpenSUSE take these issues more seriously, and SE Linux does somewhat restrict what malicious things a piece of software can do.
It’s a pretty widely held view that Fedora and OpenSUSE are more secure than Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch for desktop users but I’m not really an expert so I’m mostly retroactively justifying what I’ve heard second-hand.
There’s also https://secureblue.dev/
I got fed up with Discover’s whole reboot-to-update thing and just disabled it.
Eventually, I ended up just disabling updates through discover altogether, I’d rather just use my little bash script anyways.
With LUKS the whole “reboot to update” thing is 1000 times as inconvenient. I set it to install updates immediately, and even automatically, but the update process just isn’t going great for me in a bunch of ways.
Yeah, LUKS or multiboot make things much more complicated. I think it’s well intentioned, but I’ve never had any stability issues skipping it, so it seems unnecessary for most folks. Also, snapper-boot is just a better solution to the upgrade stability problem.
I’m on bazzite
I just swapped over yesterday to Fedora from Ubuntu. It’s been a good experience so far! Except for installing nvidia drivers, still working on that
Ubuntu has (imo) always been incredibly difficult dogshit for no reason. The fact it used to be the defacto Linux recommend is probably one of the reasons adoption was so slow
Why do distros make that so difficult?
# pacman -S nvidia # systemctl rebootGood to go. 🚀
Shouldn’t be difficult. Add the rpmfusion repo and install drivers (with akmods that handles everything when the driver / kernel updates). Instructions on the rpmfusion web site. After that, setup dnf-automatic and you’re done.
I also settled on fedora with kde but the fans in my laptop keep spinning up every few seconds, even when locked. It’s very annoying.
I get the opposite with any Linux distribution I’ve tried on my HP laptop. Windows, fans never shut up but with Linux just pure silence!
I sometimes dual boot into windows on the same laptop and it also hits the fans hard, especially after booting up, but it doesn’t suffer the periodic fan problem. Not that I’m shilling for windows. I hate windows and use Linux on my server.
Is your computer Lenovo by chance? I experience the same with my Lenovo laptop. I could figure out some tweqks to calm it down a little bit, but it’s still running quite often despite a minimal load.
It is; it’s a Lenovo Legion 5. Or something like that.
This issue seems symptomatic to Lenovo Legion laptops, as far as I know. Something seems to trigger the cooling effect. Mine also is a Lenovo Legion laptop.
That’s strange, I hadn’t heard that thanks. Time to do some research.
What is it with everyone going to Fedora? New Ubuntu apparently.
Fedora is solid these days, well the last few years. It’s been so easy and everything is up to date, not lagging behind lke Ubuntu.
Ubuntu been awful since the beginning, always buggy always needing to be rinstalled at some point.
It lives on hype alone. I would choose anything over Ubuntu.
I don’t get it, but I also haven’t used Fedora since like 2007. I settled on Ubuntu for a while then jumped ship to Arch, and maybe for the first time I haven’t been wondering where I’d go to next because something frustrated me with the os lol
You know? Like, there’s zero friction with Arch, I feel like. It’s just out of your way.