How happy are you with your current distro?

don’t worry, when you get tired of distro-hopping, Debian will still be there for you

Is this your current driver?
- yep, plain old boring Debian Stable with Xfce

Extremely happy. Debian Stable. Every time I open the lid of my laptop, it's working and ready to go. Wonderfully boring and exceedingly reliable.

Gotta love debian stable. It has it's kinks, but goddammit every day you boot up it's the same as yesterday, until next major version
Happy lemmyversary
- Thanks my dude!

I'm very content. Stopped distro-hopping a few years ago and settled on EndeavourOS.

Same. Two years and counting.
Same here, couldn’t be happier (been using it for about 6 months).
- That's still the honeymoon period

I'm running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

99% happy, once in a blue moon there is a library issue during an update, I have to wait a few days, that's it.

Very solid KDE experience, all of the things I wanted to do worked out of the box. Very solid.

Fedora fees like a nice and tightly integrated distro. I'm no apple fan but I can appreciate consistent UX, I feel like Fedora for now is the closest to that level of experience, whilst pioneering in desktop-centric technologies.

I have this looming fear that IBM will somehow fuck everything over someday, but as far as I understand, the Fedora project still operates with the same level of autonomy as they did pre-aquisition.

I'm enjoying Linux Mint so far

I'm thinking I may hope around to a distro using a newer kernel but meh

Mint is pretty nice

Edit: My "meh" is because Mint has been super stable for me and I'm not really sure that the effort to switch distros is worth it given that my systems are already rock solid.

My only issue with Mint Cinnamon is it doesn't have badges for notifications on app icons. For example, when you get a Discord message.
It's a really weird omission.
Happy lemmyversary!
I've been rocking mint for about 4 months, it works for me.
I'm pretty sure Mint even has a graphical tool to install a newer kernel.

my arch systems have been great for years now. had one breakage that was not my own fault though.

i also have some older thinkpads with endeavor and they're working great as well.

i would distrohop but i'm too accostomed to the arch repos and aur at this point.

Since I installed Arch 14 years ago, I've never looked back. I guess I'm happy with it!

Same! I’ve had the same Arch install since 2010. It has outlasted all the original hardware, except for the case and power supply.

I'm on Fedora Silverblue and I'm pretty sure my distro-hopping days are over. After 20 years of tinkering I really like an OS that requires literally no maintenance and basically just disappears in the background.

Gosh that's a little personal, isn't it?

I am 100% happy. I use a rolling distro, secure (firewall+apparmor), stable (snapshots tested through openQA) and easily revert to a previous snapshot (snapper). Yes, I am using openSUSE Tumbleweed and in my opinion there is no rolling distro that offers all these features.

Fedora. Super stable, super smooth. Used the thinkpad + fedora combo for over 10 years and will use it for 10 more.

+1 fedora. Tried almost all popular distros but came to back to fedora every single time

EndeavourOS. Arch, but easy to install. I'm thrilled with it, although I suspect I'd be even happier if I'd have tried one of the convenience installers for the base. Endeavor is has prettier defaults, so less fussing with basic stuff.

Otherwise, I'm thrilled. I have Artix on my laptop, and while I like not having systemd on it, some things are a bit more kludgey, and I spend more time on maintenance and working to fill gaps. Like, there are not dinit entries for every service, and I have to write them myself; which is absurdly easy, but still. Maybe in a couple years Artix will be less of a chore; in the meantime I'm preferring EndesvorOS.

I do not like the frequency of reboots necessitated by kernel upgrades. I know that I could mask it, but IME that eventually causes problems with packages than make .ko kernel modules; it's just more things to fail, and it makes me really wish Linus would have just based Linux on MINIX.

Anyway, I have 4 computers I deal with which are Debian based, and I never love Arch more than when I have to do something on Debian. Two are Mint, which are infected with flatpack, and I really hate those.

I do not like the frequency of reboots necessitated by kernel upgrades. I know that I could mask it, but IME that eventually causes problems with packages than make .ko kernel modules; it's just more things to fail, and it makes me really wish Linus would have just based Linux on MINIX.
Here's a tip that you might not be aware of: Arch has an LTS kernel. It may seem counter intuitive to run Arch and not have the latest, bleeding edge kernel, but the upside is that you get a stabler, less breakage-prone system.
- I didn't know about the LTS kernel. How does that interact with module packages, like the fscking Broadcom support packages, or bcachesfs (before it for mainlined)? That's where I've historically run into issues with pinning the kernel.
  I will absolutely look into this, though. If it prevents the "you need to reboot or else" messages after every Syu, I'm in. On Arch, when you get a message like that, it's best heeded.

I’m very happy with gentoo. My computer is a universe and I am its god.

I’m still a beginner but Mint Cinnamon has treated me well, as has my Debian server.

Don’t see any reason to test anything else as long as it works this well. Nor do I have time after the kids came either…

I'm super happy with Nobara. As a beginner its got everything I need without feeling too limiting

https://nobaraproject.org/
The Nobara Project, to put it simply, is a modified version of Fedora Linux with user-friendly fixes added to it. Fedora is a very good workstation OS, however, anything involving any kind of 3rd party or proprietary packages is usually absent from a fresh install. A typical point and click user can often struggle with how to get a lot of things working beyond the basic browser and office documents that come with the OS without having to take extra time to search documentation. Some of the important things that are missing from Fedora, especially with regards to gaming include WINE dependencies, obs-studio, 3rd party codec packages such as those for gstreamer, 3rd party drivers such as NVIDIA drivers, and even small package fixes here and there.

My distro hoping days are about done. I started with ubuntu -> KDE Neon -> Arch -> Manjaro -> Solus -> Manjaro -> Pop_OS -> Fedora.

I'm sticking with fedora because I love the ideology behind the project and the pace of updates works perfect for me. Not too fast but still very up-to-date. Also I used to hate gnome but after using fedora I love it, I realized I didn't hate gnome but hated all the clunk other distro would add to it. I am interested in NixOS but for now I'm gonna continue to stick with fedora, might hop to fedora silverblue tho.

I’ve been with Fedora for awhile now because I like the project and how it pushes things forward. Changed to Silverblue and never returned.
Now I’m using Bluefin because I like the little tweaks on top of Silverblue. Would recommend.
- Definitely gotta try it out. Been on the same install for years and I need a fresh start

For me Debian is living the purpose I gave it, resisting me messing around or at least being easy for me to fix.

I wouldn't say I'm 100% happy with NixOS, but there is no going back at this point.

Really happy with EndeavourOS for the last few months - started daily driving Linux in October last year.

blendOS has caught my attention though, I’m very interested in using immutable distros more and more.

Fedora 40 KDE. I like it. Longest I have been on the same distro in years.

I run Debian with gnome, headless and raspi and love it.

Used Ubuntu for years, also had a good time and still respect the project even though it deviated from my needs.

Sometimes I’ll boot up something new just to poke around but I’m happy sticking with Debian for the time being.

Bluefin, very happy. Nice toys on top of an atomic Silverblue base. Love the concept.

I run Kinoite on my Laptop and Silverblue on my desktop. After years of "I use arch, BTW", I decided I needed something that Just Works; and let me tell you, Fedora has not failed to impress.

Recently tried Kubuntu. It was able to successfully connect to my docking station with double 4k monitors connected too, which some other distros failed at. So pretty happy with that I suppose.

All in all, I still find most distros to be hit and miss with issues. There's always something that makes it meh. Like missing features or inconveniences.

Sometimes I think the Linux community should try to consolidate more to focus on a few well-working distros rather than the large amount of distros that are currently there, each with their own set of issues.

I've used Fedora for years and it is solid. I also use Debian, Linux Mint and Pop OS

I use Ubuntu at work. No issues with it.

I'm using Bazzite for games and I like it so much I started moving homelab machines to Fedora IoT.

I've been on Nobara for almost a year now and am really happy with it. The only distro I'd probably switch to is Bazzite just to try out immutability, but aside from that I'm good where I am.

Vanilla Arch w/ KDE plasma (I know)

It was a bit of a struggle at first but that's what I signed up for. Very happy with the finished result.

(I know)
I don't. What's wrong with Plasma on Arch?
- Nothing, just that 'I use arch' is a meme so overused that its cliche. Arch and plasma are great, hence why I use them
Using Arch with KDE Plasma too. My only problem with KDE‌ Plasma is that I just can't stop customizing it. I find a couple of things that "I can do something to improve upon" and the next thing I know I'm tweaking things again!
Other than the odd problem with Wayland/XWayland or something, that I usually just make a mental note to investigate further, I'm pretty happy. Now if I‌ can only stop myself from "making just one more little change..."

I've settled on Manjaro for this computer, and I'm pretty happy with it (I've stooped distro-hopping, I just don't have the energy, nor the time to entertain that on my only laptop), though I'm considering changing to base Arch for my next one (which I hope is still 3 years or so in the future; this machine is only 4 yro still). Why? Because the version wait on Manjaro seems a bit arbitrary sometimes and that lag often doesn't play nice with the AUR (which I love). Sometimes I think of switching to more esoteric distros, such as the neat Alpine (which I've been using on servers for a while) and reproducible NixOS, but then I question the day to day usability and pain points, which are quite relevant to me atm.

Why do I like Manjaro though? I like the Arch made easier, the mhwd tools, the support forums (which I know people have mixed feelings on, but my experience has been nothing other than very pleasant).

Feel free to discuss my points!

If you want to learn about Arch, I recommend you to use ArcoLinux, a distribution that uses the direct Arch repositories (unlike Manjaro) and serves to acquire knowledge about Arch.
- Thanks for the suggestion! However, I'm more than comfortable going with Arch now, something that wasn't true when I first picked up Manjaro (over 6 years ago).

I'm unhappy that after an update gdm has a logo of the distro I'm using. I don't want people to be able to see what distro it is, that way I don't get the fun of telling everyone that I use arch btw.

No other issues.

I was quite satisfied with Debian Stable for a few years on at least two different laptops, and felt I had found my "forever distro", until I got a Framework laptop whose AMD graphics were quite buggy on it. In order to get rid of all the issues, I had to upgrade to Testing and install a mainline Liquorix kernel (and along the way, I briefly made a Frankendebian and fiddled with kernel parameters). While my years of experience with Debian and derivatives has prevented me from breaking anything, I do wish I didn't have to use all of this beta-quality software just to prevent games from freezing and crashing constantly, just because I bought "new" (about a year old) hardware.

I still want to keep Debian, because I've found nothing else that works quite as elegantly or stably, but I'm hoping to find ways to get the performance I need without Liquorix, and if something forces me to reinstall between now and the time Debian Trixie becomes stable, I'll probably give Fedora or KDE Neon another try.

I'm on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and I'm not quite satisfied, but I think it's a "me" problem. The distro is fine. It's great! It has practically all the things I was looking for in a distro when I came back to Linux. I have had no major issues that I can recall and updates have never broken anything. The only small nag I have is that Zypper sometimes wants to install patterns that I never installed to begin with when updating, but there are ways around that. I'm just annoyed that that's the default behavior.

But I'm not happy. I'm constantly weighing my options and thinking of different distros/DEs and I don't know why. The current setup serves me wonderfully but it's not perfect, what ever that means. I think I'm looking for a combination of attributes that doesn't exist, possibly can't exist. TW and maybe Debian sid get the closest and I try to tell myself that's good enough, but there's always this feeling of dissatisfaction I can't quite shake and it's annoying.

On my phone I run postmarketOS and on my Raspberry Pi I have Raspbian and those are great.

I’ve been using NixOS for the past few months and it’s been great. Before NixOS I was using Fedora Silverblue so immutable distros aren’t a new thing to me. I like that NixOS has a configuration I can keep backed up. I can copy different options from my desktop to laptop easily. I’m still learning about flakes and the nix language to be able to do more advanced things, but overall NixOS is a great distro if you want something you can configure once and be done.

I'm using Manjaro for my desktop and laptop. If I had to pick a new distro today, I'd likely give EndeavourOS a try. But Manjaro has been working well for me for a several years now, does everything I want with little drama, and issues have been few. So I'm a happy camper and I'll keep on using it.

I have a home server that has been running Debian Stable since the mid-2000's or so. It just chugs right along, so complaints are few. Though occasionally having to deal with the old versions of some of the packages on it can be annoying.

I just gave up on Manjaro. It kept giving me intermittent Wi-Fi, driver, and update issues which almost nuked my interview for the job I have today (having technical issues during your tech job interview isn't a great look) . I don't mind an occasional issue or doing some research, but it felt a little too regular w Manjaro.
(Alien M18, for context)
So now I'm on openSUSE LEAP, and have had a much smoother experience overall. Shit just works. The only change I'd consider atm is switching to tumbleweed.****
Also I've got an old laptop running Ubuntu as a media server. It works well

Super happy. POP OS has been entirely pain free since I installed it and has a great looming future with COSMIC DE!

I've been using EndeavourOS for a few years now, which is effectively a "good sane defaults" Arch out of the box. I've attempted to use numerous distros in between (including plain Arch) but there's always something I feel is missing or just isn't right (for me).

its preety good but im in the process of switching to nix because ive started encountering issues keeping track of packages and dependency hell (I use Arch btw)

I use Nix for my server. It's pretty neat.
If you haven't checked them out you might be interested in aconfmgr or pacdef.

Because of all the nice feedback about OpenSUSE:
SUSE was my first (bought) Linux distribution, at a time when I would have spent days downloading an ISO, SUSE was available with a manual in store. That was nice.

But then I had an AVM Fritz! ISDN card and it was a complete shit show to get this working. Especially as YAST(2?) didn't support the configuration I needed, but every time you opened it, it would overwrite your manual changes in some configuration files.
(Edit: I'll probably need to add, that this was like 25 years ago. So besides "fuck, I'm old", my perspective in SUSE is very probably not up-to-date)

After that I hopped through a few distros and mostly stayed with basic Debian.

Nowadays I'm mostly using Manjaro (or just Arch itself, if I don't need X), because I like the Arch package system and actually also the whole system architecture... Don't exactly know what it is, but I feel much more at home.
With apt I sometimes found myself in situations, where a fresh install will resolve things faster than trying to restore/save the system. With Arch I always was somehow able to restore everything.

Can someone tell me how Tumbleweed differs/excels?
Thanks in advance!
Currently waiting for my new laptop (Framework 16 :-D) and that would be a nice opportunity to try something new.
But as I need my device for work, it's important to me, that I really have it under my control and am not depending on some half-baked configuration utility like YAST was.

Edit: I'm also playing with the thought of moving to something immutable. NixOS looked nice in concept, but the more I read about it, the more I see that it's more suitable for more server than my laptop - but maybe I'm wrong here, as I don't have any hands-on experience

The main difference between Arch and Tumbleweed, apart from the package type, is the update system. Tumbleweed does it through snapshots, which allows you to use the openQA automatic test to test the snapshot before sending it to the community. Arch upgrades on a package-by-package basis, regardless of the other packages that are part of the system.
My Framework 16 is arriving Monday! And I use Tumbleweed on my desktop. I currently use clonezilla every couple days and am starting to mess around with some other distros, but I keep coming back to Tumbleweed. My desktop is mostly for gaming, and it has pretty new hardware, so I like to have more leading edge packages.
I keep trying NixOS, and while I like it and it's cool, I have a mouse capture issue in World of Warcraft that I just can't solve, so it's taking a back seat. Also tried Bazzite, but had some issues during install, so didn't try it much. Currently trying endeavour, I've been using Arch off and on since 08, it's nice.
But Tumbleweed just works. It has sane defaults, updates frequently, has snapper just in case something goes wrong (but other distros can do that too), has yast for people that like it, but I've been trying to run some benchmarks between endeavour and Tumbleweed and I can't really tell a difference.

Started using Endeavour OS a few years back. Not necessarily the most stable, but I think my current install is the longest running single install I've ever had. Even if I screw something up and it won't boot I've been able to recover without a reinstall.

Using Debian Testing. Happy with it except with the fact it's still on KDE plasma 5 :(

Debian is like my wife, I'm always faithful to her!

Ok, can you keep a secret? I have cheated on her a few times. I tried redhat before I met Debian, but didn't get very far because of circular dependencies (it was the 90s and package management was new). I never used another Linux and wanted to experiment a little!

I compiled Linux From Scratch, but it was too high maintenance. I tried Gentoo, but it's not something I'd put on a friend's computer, ya know what I mean? And yeah, I admit it, I had a fling with Debian's little sister, Ubuntu. But it was basically like Debian, but a little more sexy but also a little more flakey.

But in the end, I always go back to Debian. Solid, dependable, and low maintenance. Just upgraded to bookworm this weekend (because I'm always behind on dist upgrades LOL). Updated the apt sources ran recommended the apt commands with no issues. Only noticeable difference is the grub and login screens are a different shade of blue.

Debian is more stable than Windows or Mac. It's 30 years old for a reason.

I was early on Silverblue but went to Workstation. The Fedora Anaconda UEFI shim on enthusiast edge class hardware is flawless. The ability to roll back if there are any issues is default config. Encrypted drives are easy. NVME is managed. Nvidia kernel modules are built lightning fast in the background. I have a dozen distrobox container environments each with layers of Python containers within. I occasionally have a minor issue, like upgrading to F40 put me on Python too far ahead for some projects, but it was an easy fix for me.

Unfortunately I must be on a shim, so only Fedora and Ubuntu exist on my main.

Hey, good to see you are still around!
- Ouch

OK-ish. I use Manjaro. It's a pretty good idea to read Announcements before updating: https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/

It may have instructions on how to update without borking your system. For example, the February update broke Plymouth, causing systems using it to be unbootable. Sort of. It would actually boot, just to a black screen. On one of the threads someone reported being able to SSH into his PC just fine.

Or the May update bringing Plasma 6 to stable. The recommendation was to reset Plasma to defaults, log out, stop SDDM and update from TTY. I tested doing exact opposite of that in VM, and it still went fine, except for missing icons, but still a good idea just to be safe.

But I had some other problems too.

February update: Booting to black screen. I found threads mentioning the same stuff for this update. Cool. "Remove Plymouth or just don't use splash". I... already disabled splash (and quiet to make boot-up cooler).
Fix: Updating Linux 5.15 LTS to 6.6 LTS. Something changed in 5.15 making it break on my laptop, I guess. I couldn't even get to TTY without nomodeset.
Furthermore, the animations became choppy after resuming from sleep.

May update: Turning on Bluetooth may cause system crash. It would show as "ON", but actually be inactive while shoving already paired devices. This couldn't be reversed. Logging out and back in would lead to only the welcome screen and yakuake showing up. Trying to reboot from both yakuake and plain TTY would stop mid-way. After issuing reboot, the system would be mostly dead, but still kinda running. Linux still responded to magic SysRq.
Fix: Upgrading Linux 6.6 LTS to 6.9.

So, I can deal with it, and it definitely taught me to use Timeshift. Oh, and the brightness buttons sometimes stop working.

That’s the same thing I’d do when o used Arch. Always kept up to date to announcements of something major like a DE upgrading and usually would reset all the settings just in case. It avoided me any problems during the years I ran it.

I love Debian, but want Plasma 6, so I’m installing openSUSE right now.

Debian 12. It just works, except for buggy Wayland, thankfully KDE still supports Xorg.

I regret ever having switched to the amateur distro that is Nobara bc I was too lazy to set up Feodra a 2nd time after the Grub fiasco Arch (and thus my daily driver back then EndeavourOS) had lol

Will switch the second OpenSuSe Slowroll becomes stable

I just switched to Nobara actually for my steamdeck and I was liking it a lot more than SteamOS but I was having some issues. (Ethernet just doesn't show up, indexing with baloo doesn't start)
Can you elaborate on why exactly it's amateur?
- It has no large community nor an organization behind it.
  Leading to a lot of trouble for me personally, it's the 2nd month now (after multiple updates) that my Gnome wayland desktop hasn't been working properly at all (like xwayland programmes displaying as a blank transparency, me not being able to start certain ones) and switching to X11 works but it's buggy af and sometimes freezes for a few second
  I suspect that it has been a problem with the nvidia driver after having updated it and I have never had those problems before
  Don't get me wrong Glorious Eggroll is doing good work but qa (due to size) leaves smth do be desired

I'm on Debian Stable with KDE Plasma. Been thinking of trying XFCE because i've only heard good things. But eh...everything runs smoothly as it is so I'm happy.

Love Gentoo. Being using it for 20+ years and never looked back.

Using also CentOS for work, and would switch to Gentoo if I could.

Really, gentoo for everything (from laptop to headless server), but not for where a rolling release distro is not suitable (configuration control and such needs).

Switched from Kubuntu to Mint + KDE last week. Very happy indeed.

Surprised I don't see any Fedoras on here yet. Very happy on Fedora KDE.

I have Void running on my desktop, server, laptop, and media center. Then my NAS and router are running versions of FreeBSD (TrueNAS, Opnsense). Not really looking to change, so pretty happy overall.

When you copy a file onto the Void, does it disappear?
- Nope, what happens is segmentation fault
  CORE DUMP FAILED, DISK OUT OF SPACE

I'm still rocking my 2011 Arch install, immediately ended my distro hopping for over a decade and still going strong.

Arch. ~3 y/o installation and I never had any significant problems with it. And yes, I have broke my installation a few times (I think only 2 times) but that is totally my fault (changing repositories, downgrading packages, changing critical system files, etc) and not something that would apply for every arch user.

My experience with Arch+Gnome has been problematic with Gnome version changes. When I upgraded to Gnome 46, the system wouldn't boot. I have had several problems related to grub and aur, so a few months ago I decided to abandon Arch for good. I need a distro that works for me, not me for the distro.

Arch + i3wm on my work laptop and I love it. Super functional.

I got a refresh/new laptop and they put Ubuntu on it. Really miss Arch's repos & package manager. Probably will switch it at some point.

I use OpenBSD on my prod machine and vps, and that's serving me very well (other than suspend and usb expansions cards being buggy on my framework laptop (latter might be hardware issues))

I have the default SteamOS on my steam deck; I'm not a fan of its immutable filesystem paradigm and not shipping with any real package manager besides flatpak, so I'm thinking of putting Void Linux on it at some point.

My phone runs PostmarketOS (alpine based mobile OS); which is adding support for systemd and making it default for phosh, kde and gnome installations; which I'm disappointed about to say the least. openrc will still be supported, but given it's no longer the default (and requires recompilation to change), it's probably taking a backseat to systemd. openrc will still ship by default on sxmo, but I'm ready to find an alternative at this point. Maybe I should look into trying to port OpenBSD to the pinephone again, as much as a dream as that seems like. Looks like there's also been some effort put into porting Void Linux to the pinephone, so I'll check that out.

I’ve been really into learning about BSD lately and even setup a VM with OpenBSD here to try it. I also like the concept of “immutable” base system and everything else is a user-version package that takes precedence.
- Base system in BSD isn't "immutable" per say; the filesystem is mounted rw and is prone to the regular unix file modes. The base system is more just the userland that was written by the OpenBSD project themselves (plus some 3rd party components that are dependencies like perl and clang), which typically isn't on Linux, as most Linux distributions simply use GNU userland or similar; so everything is 3rd party.
  That being said, it is very easy to replace the base system should anything go wrong, simply by re-updating to the same version inside of bsd.rd on OpenBSD.

Happy, Fedora Kinoite uBlue-main

In the process of making my own variant, but that is quite some effort

Have you checked out Aurora?
- Yeah it is kinda strange. I like some things but their images are really opinionated, and...
  As I said, in the process of creating my own. The secureblue creator and "boss" has permabanned me for asking "critical" questions. Its all transparent on the internet, the things he used as reasons are hillarious. (I just never saw a reason to make that gossip public, also my contributions were not that many).
  But the secureblue project is really good in many parts, I agree with many things, just not with some that are poorly pretty dealbreaking.
  For example: Fedora has RPM firefox in their base image, uBlues base images keep it, secureblue removes it. Rpm-ostree is confused and adding it back is not possible. Yay!
  So there are 2 options:
  The better one: use blue-build and secureblue as base image, revert some opinionated changes (like uninstalling RPM Firefox which is simply the best browser on Fedora. Librewolf is made for f38, Flatpaks are not complete and probably insecure, Chromium sucks (I tried to use it) and crashes all the time (on secureblue)).
  The annoying one: hard fork it (if you are blocked you are not allowed to fork a project, making this even more annoying). Change the things and constantly keep track of secureblue, which now has a few people working on it.
  So yeah it is a pain. I am experimenting with both, lets see.

Couldn’t be happier with Debian stable. Easiest year on my computer since I installed bookworm when it was released. There is a reason it is the basis of so many distros.

Debian and very. Sorry I strayed to Ubuntu for as long as I did.

We all make mistakes

Eh. I'm just (again, take 371) trying to get a ThinkPad running on Linux for light use, and I've dabbled with a lot of distros in the last 20 years, but I've always reversed course because something didn't work, and I got frustrated troubleshooting it.

This go around, I wanted Debian 12, fde, btrfs, snapshots. And I wanted it to work ootb (spoiler: it did not). It also needed to support my hardware, which includes WWAN.

D12 installs fine, everything is great, until the restart, where it hangs on hardware errors (I thiiiink it's thunderbolt but I can't remember) on boot. Okay, let's try Fedora - yay it works. Oh no, the fcc unlock for WWAN doesn't work. Let's try Mint (Debian Edition). Wtf, I can do fde but only on ext4, and gparted is useless here. I want Debian(-based) since I have the most experience with it, and the software I use is available easily. Don't like straight ubu, but not a lot of options so let's try kubu. After a couple installs, it checks all my requirements (Debian, fde, btrfs, snapshots via gui, WWAN, ootb* (with fcc unlock and added apn)).

It's fine, it works, but it's not what I wanted. And between needing WWAN working, and needing compiled packages for my software, I'm kinda stuck.

So I dunno. Kubu is fine. It's like the compact car you get as a rental. It does the job. But fuck, WHY is WWAN support so shit, why isn't btrfs support in the installer more common, why is it often difficult to do fde. Those three were a huge pain for me. And I'm not fresh off the boat, but I'm not going to fuck with the terminal just to install a fucking system. Ugh.

Anyway. I'm not "happy", but it's currently working. Suggestions (or assistance) welcome.

E: I should add that I tried fedora because it was recommended to me to try; afaik it's based on red hat

You might take a look at spiral linux, its basically a customized debian install that preconfigures a bunch of quality of life stuff for you and is set up to use btrfs with snapper by default. It doesn't use custom repos intentionally so that (in the words of the developed) if the developer gets hit by a bus, nothing stops working. Your install just works like a pre-customized debian
- I'll check it out, thanks :D

So far I haven't had any major issues whatsoever with MX running KDE, other than Vbox being the absolute worst to attempt to get working (which I still can't). Otherwise, works fine enough for what I need.

Been using Debian stable again this year, but this time in a VM (Windows host. I know, I know.)

I'm very happy with it. I tried other distros but kept coming back to Debian.

I've found that Windows is a pretty bad hypervisor
- It really is bad compared to KVM. Though for my usecase of pandoc+vim, running Debian with VMware does the job. Browsing the web, watching videos, and listening to music are okay too. It's very bad for GPU accelerated stuff though which is what the Windows host is for.
  I want to dual boot again but I'm still working on this project on one of my SSDs so I don't want to touch anything yet.

I currently use endeavourOS and I am happy with it, due to it being "just Arch with some wallpapers and optional extras".

I am open for more though, even if it's just for trying out :)

On my desktops and laptops, I've been slowly migrating from Mint to EndeavourOS. Mint will always have a special place in my heart and I don't think I'll ever abandon it completely, but I've been falling in love with Endeavour lately. The Arch ecosystem had a bit of a learning curve, but once it clicked, it felt great. And then for servers, I've finally switched away from Ubuntu over to Debian. The familiar environment without all the bloat feels perfect to me.

I enjoy Fedora. I can complain all day about Redhat being evil, but I haven't found a desktop distro that scratches the same itch, so I'm happy for the time being.

On the server side, Debian is perfect for me and I have zero qualms with it.

I like it but Wayland has given me nothing but issues

Let me guess: Nvidia?
- Nope, Rx 580. The screen completely freezes for a couple seconds when an xwayland window closes and the mouse wheel doesn't work right on some apps

Using Mint on my laptop for 3 years. I don't really like it. I want to switch on OpenBSD to taste pain and suffering (But Devuan is my plan B. I love Devuan :3)

I think how happy I am depends on what I am comparing it too.

Compared to Windows? I am very happy with Mint since thus far everything I need works, and I can even play some games.

Compared to my dream distro which doesn't exist. Not as happy. Since it works, but asks me to use the terminal more than I want to.

I use Fedora Silverblue which actively discourages using the terminal.
In fact I hid it from the gnome application menu since I can't think of a reason to ever use it.

Pretty happy. Debian works good. Rhel works good too.

The Toyota Camry and Lexus 300 of distros.

@Blaze
100% of my venomlinux river system

Very. I've always used Debian flavors, but I recently installed barebones Debian 12 starting from the command line up. The result has been a sleek, lightweight powerhouse of a laptop.

Very happy. My two daily drivers (Desktop and Laptop) are on Ubuntu but user space is managed with Nix.

All other machines are Nixos proper. Only thing keeping me back from moving to Nixos fully is I decided to piecemeal my own DE and I've just lacked the time to debug some issues related to gnome-keyring, computer locking, and coding up some system setting widgets.

Currently on Fedora. Pretty stable, but I really hate some parts:

RocM just straight up doesn't work for some reason? this is really annoying for AI and Blender
No h264/265 decode support in mesa by default 😬
redhat is now owned by IBM
dnf is very very slow (I don't mind this as much since I use the GUI software center and flatpak)

Otherwise

Very happy with my Arch setup since 3-4 years I believe. But my laptop that I use and update too irregularly to justify having Arch on it, probably needs an alternative :D

I want something that looks like Q4OS (looks like XP or 7) but with Wayland like Kubuntu. I'm not quite there yet.

Kubuntu: It's doing the job I expect it to do.

I've been using Ubuntu or one of its variants for the last 20 years after having moved from Mandrake back in the day. It has never let me down. It's hands down one of the easiest distros to use and I trust the company behind it, Canonical, which has helped Linux move forward in great strides.

Part of which I've stayed with Ubuntu is also because it uses the Debian package system which, back in the early 2000's, was the easiest to use with its automatic package dependency management, contrary to Red Hat's RPM based packaging system where you could fall into a dependency rabbit hole. And I've never wanted to go back to and RPM-based distro ever sine from the PTSD lol! Though recent experiences with CentOS showed me it has improved quite a it.

Tried out Mint, Debian w/ KDE, switched to Debian w/ gnome, now settled into Cachy OS. Only thing I'm wanting for is support for my Dell Canvas touch and totem, but I expect that'll get pushed to Open Tablet Drivers before long

I stopped distro hopping pretty much after trying arch. I still love arch, but my new love is chimera Linux.

For servers I used to run Debian stable, but these days I'm pretty set on alpine.

Have you ever gone wandering under a clear blue sky?

I’m kind of souring on Fedora Kinoite. I generally sometimes pop in to try how Linux is doing, and I had great hopes for KDE Plasma 6 and immutable distributions for stability. However, I’ve found that many things in the UI are still wonky and broken, fonts don’t render well, and I keep running into limitations in the flatopak/containers ecosystem.

Here are a few paper cuts:

I can’t get the launcher to do web searches despite them being available and configured, even when manually invoking the keyword
fonts look blurry and render weirdly; all of the household macs produce ok output on the same screen so it isn’t the issue
I really miss having consistent emacs text navigation bindings but shortcuts like C-a/C-e are already taken and remapping is difficult to get to work consistently
I’ve been trying to compile parts of the Linux minidisc system but the dependencies aren’t available outside of a toolbox and USB isn’t available inside. I think, it’s difficult to google and I’ve time boxed trying to fix it to N hours and exhausted those, so it’s either impossible or too difficult
for a long time Obsidian (from flatpak) couldn’t agree with the window manager to draw drop shadows and window decorations which meant that figuring out where obsidian ended and the white window underneath it began was literally impossible
sometimes the wired USB keyboard stops working if I unplug it and doesn’t start working until I’ve plugged it in/unplugged it a few times

Somewhat happy with NixOS. Documentation is still abysmal but it's the most stable yet up to date distro I've used so far.

I wish the community were better and the decision-making less top down and anarchist at the same time, but there's maybe a fork in the making (Auxolotl) that I'm keeping an eye on. Maybe it'll pop up in phoronix or the nix community forums once it's stable, then it might be worth switching to.

Anti Commercial-AI license