I've tried hundreds, I have a laptop I just use for bare metal distrohopping.. but I've just hit 6 months using NixOS on all my PCs and laptops. I strongly recommend everyone give it a go.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
456 points (98.3% liked)
linuxmemes
32187 readers
2297 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
- Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
- Don't come looking for advice, this is not the right community.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
5. π¬π§ Language/ΡΠ·ΡΠΊ/Sprache
- This is primarily an English-speaking community. π¬π§π¦πΊπΊπΈ
- Comments written in other languages are allowed.
- The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
- Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
6. (NEW!) Regarding public figures
We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations. - Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
- We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
- Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed. Β
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
i've never used a distro other than arch
Ubuntu -> Pop!_OS -> EndeavourOS.
I'm quite happy here :)
Ubuntu 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 -> 9.10 -> 10.04 -> 12.04 -> 14.04 -> 16.04 -> 18.04 -> 20.04 -> 22.04 -> 24.04 -> Fedora J/K Ubuntu 26.04
I like how sh.itjust.works
Arch. Would love to find something better but I can't.
same. not having those big version updates and having control over everything i want from the start just feels so good
and how incredible stable it is
Fedora ended that for me. It has mostly what I want and is just kinda comfy to use.
Same. But I went atomic, bluefin.
For a stable every day driver? It's gonna take a lot to get me to switch away.
Still Debian for my proxmox VMs though
Linux mint and often LMDE.
is funny, I always end up back at mint.
It just good, it just works yet let's me customize.
At least we can distro-hop. Different needs, different preferences, and we can choose what works best for us. Heck, you can even go hardcore with Yocto and create your own distro!
Compare that to the poor sods on the Apple and Windows side of the fence. They have to cope with whatever some bigwig thought was best for them. A mediocre one size fits all solution, stuffed to the brim with whatever they fancy. Including ads, malware, and AI everywhere.
Started with deb based distro, swicht later too arch based, now still on cachyOs
i liked using cachy for a while, but it broke plasma's login manager once so i gave up on it and went to base arch
though it did have snapper which i liked a lot, so i added it to my arch install too
I had the same experience a few years ago.
Now I'm just having trouble with SerialPort access; the Arch Bible didn't offer a solution.
With Parrot Home as an additional OS on an external SSD, I was able to use WebSerial on Linux.
I have this handy little bash function, I think you should use it.
get-english-ordinal-ending() {
case "$1" in
*11 | *12 | *13) printf 'th' ;;
*1) printf 'st' ;;
*2) printf 'nd' ;;
*3) printf 'rd' ;;
*) printf 'th' ;;
esac
}
This gets it wrong for the seventy-secoth item.
The urge to downvote something you really shouldn't have never been so strong.
On servers: Red Hat -> Debian (with a brief detour through Ubuntu Server for a couple of years).
On desktop: Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro.
Switched away from Red Hat around 2004 after RHL was discontinued and split into RHEL and Fedora. You may think Fedora would've been a more obvious choice but it was still new in 2004 while Debian had 10 years under its belt. We also migrated the servers at work to Debian around that time and I had used Debian at school in the '90s so it made a lot of sense to use it at home.
Ubuntu on desktop was a fucking revelation when it came out (on CDs shipped free to your home π) in 2004. Early days Ubuntu was soooo good that I stayed with it until 2020, long after the magic was gone.
I mean I would've probably left eventually anyway given the whole snap and privacy and so on debacles but what really put me off was how it would almost never upgrade cleanly once you've added a bunch of 3rd party repos (which you wanted to do all the time on a desktop PC). Eventually I got so sick of it that I was determined to find a rolling distro where upgrades would never be a problem.
Tried a bunch of them during stay at home during the pandemic and settled on Manjaro + XFCE on the desktop and a fresh install of Debian stable + Docker on the server as a happy medium between "hands off" and "up to date". I'm at a point where I like my Linux machines to just work and to need zero maintenance so I can put the time into other things instead.
I didn't realize WHAT the problem was, assumed it was just Linux in general. But that's my experience with Ubuntu, too.
Been with it since the beginning, it was one of my earlier introductions to Linux. But I could NEVER upgrade cleanly. I was always reinstalling. And yeah there are easier ways to do that too but for a noob I struggled.
That kept me dual booting Windows, or for a good number of years running mainly Windows.
But last year I went atomic fedora bluefin on my new laptop, and I love it. Slightly more restricted, and a couple issues with flatpaks, but the stability is top tier.
I still run Debian on my prox VMs, and I keep a win 10 ltsc VM on there too for the rare program that doesn't play nice, but otherwise I'm all Linux now.
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit I got from a CD out of a magazine from barnes and noble and it blew my mind. I had so much fun learning everything about Linux and I think I even got oblivion running on WINE, which was a nightmare compared to how easy games run on proton nowadays.
Those were the glory years for sure. Now I run Arch and want a "just werks" experience. It's why I use unRAID for my server.
How is Unraid? I've been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I've been wondering what I should install on it.
I'd like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they'd put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it's not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn't need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
I love it for ease of use. It's very straightforward, has given me few (if any) problems over the years on the OS level. The only real issues I ran into were specific to individual docker images. I like that I can open a web UI and jump right into the shell if needed. It's very easy to install docker images and VMs
However, there is a caveat about how it stores data I suppose. Your use case of mirroring drives is not possible on unRAID. Instead, it uses one drive for parity and redundancy, or you can do dual parity if you're really concerned about data loss. Basically how this works is your largest drive stores all the information about all the other drives to rebuild the data in case of drive failure, including the parity drive itself can be rebuilt if it fails. So say you had a 12 TB parity drive and a dozen or so other drives for the array. All of those drives can be literally anything so long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity. They can be 12 TB, 8 TB, 500 MB, old drives you shucked out of external storage cases, whatever. And you can add / remove these at will. The parity does not count to your max amount of storage, think of it like a mirror but for every other drive
Dual parity is an extra level of redundancy. It's basically like say you had a drive fail, and in those couple days where you order a new one or whatever, or when the data is rebuilding itself, if another drive fails, your data is still in tact. I don't bother because this would be such a rare occurrence. I do know data rebuilds are very high read/writes for days on a drive so it can be high stress on the drive so that's why the extra protection exists, but I still think it's overkill unless it's like irreplaceable data you can't lose (remember 3-2-1 backups in those cases)
CachyOS. Everytime I stray away from Arch, it always finds a way to pull me back in.
I settled on Solus but I broke the laptop itself somehow. Now I'm back to using NixOS with my new thinkpad with trackpoint disabled...
Interesting, I was also using solus on my main machine for a couple of years before switching to NixOS. Good choices.
distros i have been distrohopping on so far:
TailsOS (somewhat for the LuLs,multiple times),Linux Mint(twice, i think),NixOS,Arch (twice),CachyOS (or Distros based on ARCH),OpenSUSE(Twice)
i stuck to CachyOS
Went back to Ubuntu after laying off of it for a while. Now that I'm used to not using Windows, I feel like trying either Arch or Cachy though everyone keeps raving about Bazzite.
Man, I don't miss windows. My laptop works better without it. Idk what the hell windows does but my internal wifi works better than it did with windows. A 750mbps USB adapter was needed and my 1200mbps internal wasn't able to capture my 5G internet from 2 rooms away from the router.
I install Ubuntu and I can use my laptop in the shitter/3 rooms away for the router. All or most of the streaming is 720hd or 1080hd and it loads. IT ACTUALLY FUCKIN' LOADS.
Distro hopping sounds like too much work. I went from mint and was happy on that for years, then I went to Debian and I'm happy here. I'm curious about Fedora but not curious enough to be bothered with a new install.
I'll live vicariously through others
Debian (for 2 days because I broke it) -> Mint -> Arch (for an hour) -> CachyOS. I like Cachy and it has been half a year. With the package optimization I don't really see myself switching to anything else.
So far my personal favourite is manjaro. I always liked Arch based distros and Manjaro has done a great job at pre configuring everything. Manjaro also came with zsh as the default shell and I really liked that.
Am I the only one here that uses their computer instead of fucking with it?
I settled years ago on a setup I like, but until that point I bounced around like a rubber ball. That said, my current setup is built on Ubuntu and I think it's about time to switch to Debian to get rid of the corporate bullshit.
Yeah Iβm a mint guy and I might switch to lmde, but not anytime soon
Aren't mint users supposed to reinstall when it's time for a major version update, anyway?
Last time I think it updated through the update manager. Might have reinstalled itself in that process.
I don't think that's how that works Γ
I think one of the whole reasons the mint team stick with Ubuntu is it grants them the ability to use the kernel manager which makes these things more seamless.
Sure, but that's not what "reinstalling the OS" means in general use. I'm talking specifically about the kind of reinstall that overwrites everything on your root partition, and doing that for major updates seems to be a fairly common recommendation for certain kinds of distros; MX Linux says to do it like that, too.
Yes
load more comments
(10 replies)
Ubuntu -> Debian -> Linux Mint -> Fedora -> Arch -> Manjaro -> EndeavourOS -> SuSE Linux -> NixOS
I'm pretty happy on NixOS now...
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next βΊ