I used arch for a couple years, then crux for over 10 years, so I though Void would be a great distro when the systemd drama occured. Tried that, and noped the hell out of it…
creating/maintaining packages is a pain
the dev team was awful with newcomers
system couldn’t handle more than a couple weeks without updates
it’s an arch wannabe that doesn’t admit it, making it a worse alternative
Honestly, if you’re not using nix to deploy systems or need it to create reproducible environments across systems, then NixOS is a bit overkill.
I want to use NixOS for servers and embedded systems as well, so I run it on my laptop. But the user experience gives Gentoo a run for it’s money for being the most finnicky bastard in the distro world. They would both contend if there was a Razzy award for usability.
I tried it out, and it was so cumbersome to install packages that I gave up. I understand its application in servers, but for home computers it’s a pain in the ass
I have tried a bunch of them: Manjaro, Fedora, Opensuse Tumbleweed, Mx Linux, EndeavourOS, Arcolinux, Debian, currently LMDE. But Fedora, the spin with XFCE not the default one, never convinced me enough to keep it., is the one that never convinced me enough to keep it.
To all gentoo detractors… 20 years ago compiling a browser would take 5 days (as in 24 x 5 hours…) So you are not allowed to complain TODAY about compile times ahahahaahaha ahahaha ahah haha aaaaaaaaah ಠ_ಠ
Try accidentally emerge world on a full desktop environment with open office and said browser on a Pentium 2 after changing some base level compile flags… Oh, and I was on dial-up. Didn’t do that again.
I got Gentoo on a DVD with instructions in a magazine for a Stage 1 build. No internet connection at that stage so I had to work through problems myself. Took a few goes but I learnt a heck of a lot about how Linux boots.
Been a very long time so apologies if I got some details wrong.
I remember jumping from Ubuntu (my first distro) to a Gentoo stage 2 install in 2005. I was using it on my desktop so I needed a GUI. I was using either a high end P4 or an X2 Athlon. I attempted to compile KDE and all the deps. It would compile X for about 10-20 hours… and then the compilation would break with a seemingly obscure error message.
I tried a few times and never did get a GUI built.
Yeah I remember trying it out on a k6-2 400 MHz (maybe? I don’t remember if that was it’s rated speed of it it was with the bus at 112mhz) and it was days of downloading sources and even more for compiling. I think there was a bootable CD bundled with some zine that allowed you to have something running on your machine
Yet color management seems to have negative priority for Wayland while the Wayland push is strong at present. Shit or not, at least X11 has basic color management via ICC profiles; Wayland be like ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ubuntu. I hated not being able to customize certain things and it had some interesting bugs on my hardware. Switching to a different distro solved those issues
Ubuntu, tried to install vim 8 when it released, too bad they only update major package versions once every 2 years. Find myself some random dudes repo, great it’s vim 8, too bad it was compiled w/o python support… Installed Manjaro (arch based) and never looked back.
I have liked Ubuntu based distros until they release a major update. They are aimed at beginners and they work fine for that. If you use one to the end of support, the updater will say that your software is up to date because there are no new updates.
You have to check the website to find out you’ve reached the end of support, and to get instructions on how to update.
That is an awful user expierence for beginnners, and a great way to have users using vulnerable software without knowing about it.
I’ve switched to rolling releases for this exact reason.
you have to spend an insane amount of time updating
How slow is your internet connection?
or it will reach EOL in no time
Sure you don’t confuse Fedora with non-LTS Ubuntu releases? According to docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/ each release is supported for 13 months which isn’t 10 years of LTS but hardly “in no time” either.
I don’t mean downloading updates I mean manually updating your configuration to adapt to new versions of the software. That’s what takes time. I know 13 months is already quite high but it feels too low for me. I’m running servers over longer periods than that
Fedora annoys me (even though I’ve been using it for like 2.5 years on my work laptop) because a lot of packages that would be in extra in something like the Ubuntu (and it’s derivatives) or Arch (and it’s derivatives) is in a separate repository that you have to add.
Debian => stale packages (Really solid distro though but dated version of Gnome)
Did you try using the testing or unstable versions of Debian? Testing is still more stable than some other distros. Packages need to be in unstable with no major bug reports for 10 days before they migrate to testing.
Try Debian sid (unstable), from my experience it’s actually more stable than testing because it gets updates even more often.
And ditch Gnome. There is no way to be happy with it as it craps out very often and is a maintenance burden for maintainers, therefore the quality differs so much.
Ubuntu. Started out great but every release got worse with time.
I’ve always used KDE, so always was on kubuntu, or mint, but my latest kubuntu install managed to piss me off badly with its systemd taking over. A simple 10 seconds port=number config in sshd_config change now requires 20 minutes of searches, documentation readup, cursing, and jumping systemd hoops
FUCK systemd
Also FUCK SNAP. Absolute horrid garbage.
My next distro will be debian or some derivative, bye bye Ubuntu
I’ve learned to like systemd over time, but not snaps and how Canonical handles things.
Debian also uses systemd nowadays, maybe you can try devuan (I think that’s how it’s called,) which is debian based but without systemd. I only tried it once on a server but came back to debian.
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