Which stage are you at?

I started from Ubuntu. Now I use Mint.

Mint was my first serious move to Linux too! It’s so user friendly and clean.

I’ve been running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with an Nvidia GPU for quite a few years now on my gaming / 3D art rig though, and I’ve really enjoyed it. My Win10 partition has been dormant and shrunk for a very long time.

Just make sure you stick with the default of using BTRFS at least on root, to get that snapshot rollback support!

For being such an up to date distro, it’s ridiculously stable. Usually issues I’ve had have been Nvidia problems, but I’ve been able to roll back until they resolved. Things have definitely gotten much better over time.

Wayland has also matured wonderfully and things like multi monitor setups with different refresh rates work just fine these days.

Totally get what you mean about KDE too, I really enjoy how much easy customization it has!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

The only distro I’ve ever used is arch.

Awesome, thanks for sharing your experiences!

I’ll just repost this repost of my personal experience then:

Here’s my answer to this same question from an old thread on Reddit:

My Ubuntu system always reserved a whopping 20% of my 32GB ram for no reason and I never bothered to know why. Later I uninstalled snapd because of boot time issues and guess what happened? Only 1.5 GB used after a fresh boot.

I had like 4 different JetBrains IDEs installed via snap with each totalling around 2GB of disk space. While removing snapd I discovered it kept back 2-3 previous versions of every package on your disk.

Uninstalling this bloat was the best thing I did to my ubuntu system. It was suddenly light as a feather and way more responsive like I just did a fresh system install.

Some time later I was installing something from apt and Ubuntu tried to install it from snap, thus sneakily installing snapd in the process. Looking for a solution, I felt like I was looking up how to disable Windows updates or some other shit.

I had a moment of clarity and wondered why the fuck did I have to put up with this kinda bullshit on Linux. I wiped that drive clean and switched to Fedora.

Edit: and there’s also flatpak which-despite being awful in some ways-is better than snap in every conceivable way.

Kubuntu on my desktop, Debian on my server, postmarketOS on my phone. Where do I fit?

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!

“Almost bricks their machine” lol

It’s not an iphone, breaking the boot sequence won’t brick it. But sure, go ahead, lecture everyone else…

Idk, maybe? It was a real experience like this:

1. I install system

2. I have a screen that prompts me to login either as a root or as a user.

3. I login as a root just because I was to install a lot of software.

4. I have a black screen and the forums recommend me installing the system again.

It was waaaay before you started using Linux, maybe 10 years ago?

They hate snaps but love flatpack or some other container. I don’t get it and they love to trot out some example of Ubuntu being bad that has never applied to me. I have tried other distros but none seem as glitch free as Ubuntu. I run Ubuntu mate on the Raspberry Pis I have here and there. They don’t run xrdp all the time. Just when I need a remote desktop. I run Debian on my servers since I quit CentOS when IBM killed CentOS 8. Just today I read where IBM is Taking over some aspects of Red Hat. How long before they kill Fedora by shutting down Fedora users access to the Repositories. Fedora is Red Hat with a bunch of sucker…er developers contributing.

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/0039236/red-hat-back-office-team-moving-to-ibm-from-2026

Love me some SUSE. People forget that it is one of the OG distributions out there. Been trying Linux from time to time but only switched completely from windows earlier this year. Been messing with Fedora and SUSE way back as a teenager. Unfortunately my experience with opensuse was laggy YouTube on a complete fresh install (AMD btw) so I just switched to cachyos which didn’t have any issues (sooo much better than Manjaro IMHO). Still love SUSE… And fedora. These two will always have a place in my tech heart.

Edit for typos from typing on glass.

If you delete /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/* you can brick your motherboard. If it doesn’t have a recovery mode of some kind then it will be permanently bricked.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/UEFI-rm-root-directory

Edit: most modern hardware comes with protections against this nowadays though

Sadly I dont have this Copypasta where someone explains to an Arch purist why his Distros is just Linux.

Or it comes as a second low with an even higher peak at the end.

I hopped around until I found Arch, and it has been rock solid, first time an OS has lasted ten years without needing a reinstall. Windows has never lasted more than two years without shitting itself.

I seem to have skipped most of it.

Nice one, Fedora I’ve been keen to check out. it seems similar to SUSE albeit with a different package manager and no Yast. I respect a quality controlled rolling release.

How’s cachyOS? I’m very wary of the AUR/Arch generally. There must be so many unmaintained packages on there.

yeah! there’s a punishing learning curve but it’s sooo frikkin powerful once you get it. for my NixOS config on WSL2, I have it cross-compile age-plugin-yubikey for Windows, then stuff the (absolute) path in a wrapper script to use agenix with passage as a git-credential-helper storage, all of which gets set up using home-manager as my default git config. and it all just gets automatically built and configured when I nixos-rebuild switch, so I can sync it to my other machines.

unfortunately I have no idea how it works anymore lol. that’s the problem, it’s so resilient I forget how to change it! but I can’t imagine doing that in any other Linux distro.

Yast is great but I honestly don’t find it all that useful nowadays. Feels to me like most of that configuration can be done through KDE anyway. Still, great piece of software, might just not fit my current needs.

CachyOS, Manjaro and endeavour OS are all Arch. The main selling point for cachy is the ease of use when installing “stuff for gaming” e.g. gfx drivers and their custom compiled kernels and software packages (basically just other builds of packages on the Arch repo) have been optimized for newer generations of CPUs. Light weight, heavily optimized, customizable. Lots of small optimizations here and there. You can do the same on Arch but I don’t want to bother. I know what do to and how to, but been there done that.

I went Kububtu -> Pop -> Arch with Sway -> Fedora KDE -> Arch again, now with KDE. I like Arch, been using it for years now and no interest of switching.