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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[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Better compatibility with Intel Arc cards, for one. Actually that would be a really big one.

I'm on Ubuntu. I had my Intel card work pretty well in Blender 3D,except it couldn't do BVH calculations in cycles, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make it work, because the thing that is supposed to make it work breaks the render kernels for Blender.

Alright... But it still rendered faster than my GTX 1060.

But then I also realised I couldn't boot up any UE5 game because somehow it was convinced my card isn't DX12 compatible. Also major artefacting issues in Oblivion Remastered.

Right... So I decided to go from Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu 25.04, because the cutting edge MESA drivers needs a newer kernel, and the newer kernel is supposedly more Intel card friendly, which might fix my BVH calculation issues with Blender as well.

UE5 games run now, except for Oblivion Remastered, which still has graphical artefacting. But Intel didn't have render kernels for Ubuntu 25.04 yet, so I couldn't render with cycles at all until they updated their repo.

They eventually updated their repo a week or two ago. But the render kernels don't load at all in Blender 3D, telling me "Oh this is meant for OneAPI compatible cards", yes, what the fuck do you think an Intel Arc A770 is!?!

So... Uh... Yeah, if there is a distro put there without all of this, that would be very great.

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I had my Intel card work pretty well in Blender 3D,except it couldn’t do BVH calculations in cycles, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it work, because the thing that is supposed to make it work breaks the render kernels for Blender.

BVH building is always done on CPU (unless that changed)

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Well, apparently for Intel cards you can use "embree" to build BVH. But it requires a component of OneAPI.

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[–] z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 days ago

I've been using Artix Linux for 5 years. Its great, minimal, and does everything I need for my day to day tasks.

If I were to ever change, it'd probably be because the devs could no longer maintain it. In which case I'd probably just hop to Gentoo.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago

Been running Manjaro for years. Don't really know what would make me change.

I guess maybe if I suddenly started getting more and more dependency errors when upgrading packages from the AUR it would make me consider jumping to put Arch.

But right not that's not the case. So the benefit of switching is out weighed by the pain in the ass of having to say Everything up again.

[–] despaircode@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 days ago

I've been running Slackware for a long time and have no intention of switching unless Pat steps down and Slackware goes down with him. As long as my base install receives updates, I'm good. I take care of the rest.

[–] gi1242@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

I went Gentoo to Debian to Arch.

Gentoo took too much time to maintain. (Not just compile time. But also human time editing config files).

Debian was great, until I had new hardware that needed a recent kernel and Wayland. i tried testing but that wasn't stable enough and took too much of my time maintaining.

I'm using arch now. i would only switch if they do something egregious (push ads, malware or snap)

[–] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 5 days ago

Dropped Ubuntu because of snaps.

Dropped Manjaro because updating anything on it was too annoying and potentially destructive if you didn't read through every changelog.

Currently on bluefin because everything is working smoothly on it. Also have a Bazzite setup which I'm not as happy with as I am with bluefin but not to the point of thinking of dropping it.

I made the jump from Manjaro when a bunch of their maintained repos started to ... corrode? for lack of a better term, other than that I tend to adapt to whatever my workplace chooses, last place loved Ubuntu, current workplace is all about RHEL, so i'm not going to argue

[–] AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

the creation of a non-kodi htpc/media center alternative that works like a smart TV OS and works on a raspberry pi would get me to change my streaming device.

i stream jellyfin from a home server, and jellyfin on kodi is painful to use :(

an OS that can be controlled with tv-controller buttons and has an interface similar to any of the other players in this space would make me throw away my nvidia shield tv in a heartbeat

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It is? What issues are you having?
I've used the Jellycon plugin for a while and it worked amazing.

[–] AmazingAwesomator@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (3 children)

kodi is really good for local media, but none of my media is local. instead of using the smartTV-style jellyfin UI, jellyfin indexes the media from the server and throws up a text-only list of media in a folder structure. if i rip another movie, it needs to be indexed.

though it is pulling the index and functioning as expected, it makes the experience feel like browsing in dolphin for spreadsheets instead of getting ready for movie night.

the experience was bad enough where i just plugged the old streaming stick back in and hid my failur. i didnt tell the wife about my experience (she hates the streaming stick and wanted an OSS option). i said i would deliver one, so she thinks i just haven't done it yet. :(

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[–] wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee 3 points 5 days ago

The repo servers going down or some unacceptable change to the system defaults. Starting to distribute my browser (or anything else) as only snaps / flatpaks would absolutely do it. Yeah, I'm looking squarely at you, Ubuntu.

[–] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 days ago

Moved away from Ubuntu due to SNAP. Never looked back.

[–] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 1 points 4 days ago

Despite using MX only for a relatively short time, just messing around in a VM for a long period of time would increase my odds of switching to something else*.

*when I need to switch to something else or find something a lot better

[–] Raffster@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Ubuntu 20.04 running out of support. Things start to break slowly now and I sure as hell will not go with the corporate asshattery anymore. Might switch to arch but still deciding.

[–] NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago

Hardware bugs/support, and Snap.

[–] TheMightyCat@lemm.ee 2 points 5 days ago

My first distro was debian and why I switched was that I wanted up to date packages.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 days ago

I relatively recently (a year or so?) switched from Ubuntu to Debian.

I felt like Ubuntu was bloating up and that sadly those decisions were done through the enshitification process. I went then "back to basics" and I don't regret it at all.

I had the (wrong) preconception that Debian was "behind" or "slow" for "new" stuff but truth is, despite being "stable" most of what I care about is already in, even for things like gaming in VR. For the rest if I need something "edgy" then I can get the software via another mean than the package manager.

So... what made me change is a desire for more minimalism and the ability to test safely (files saved).

[–] vegetvs@kbin.earth 2 points 5 days ago

I ditched FreeBSD and Slackware when I got tired of installing everything from scratch on every major release. Compiling stuff from source was interesting for learning and seeing how amazing open source can be, but it wasn't fun long term.

Then I ditched Ubuntu because there was always something not working on laptops, usually related to hibernation/sleep and/or webcam/wireless. I was frustrated with how little care was put into making sure such basic things would simply work.

I'm currently very satisfied with Mint. Everything just works out of the box and Mint X is a lovely theme for old folks like me, who appreciate a proper good looking desktop and can't understand what all the hype is with dark/flat themed UIs these days.

[–] DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

if gentoo decided ti bake spyware into every package that i cant removr thatd be a deal breaker

[–] wfh@lemm.ee 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

On my laptops: Debian -> Fedora. Mostly because I couldn't reliably use my external display on Debian, and because I ~~needed~~ wanted shiny new things. Also new hardware.

On my gaming rig: Manjaro -> Nobara -> Bazzite. I left Manjaro because the system was slowly getting worse with each update, and I wanted to game, not maintain my system. I ditched Nobara after a botched version upgrade. Bazzite is fine for now.

[–] Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 days ago

Lol, I had the same Nobara issue recently. Had to completely reinstall 😭... Installed openSuSe Tumbleweed instead, which I can highly recommend though.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

Previously? Some schmuck changing all the windows to be left-handed, immediately before a long-term-support feature freeze.

Zero percent surprised by many other comments throwing shade at Ubuntu.

[–] 0xf@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago

Having broken lts-kernel and broken 6.15. At the same time. But the zen kernel saved me. So I guess if it was 3 broken kernels at the same time I would switch distro, haha. Lts was broken amdgpu kernel module, worse then sleep issue for mainline.

[–] timmytbt@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

Having more time to spend learning a new distro

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