What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"?

https://feddit.uk/post/5978231

What distros have you tried and thought, "Nope, this one's not for me"? - Feddit UK

I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.

Most of them.

  • Debian world - apt sucks. For something with a sole purpose of resolving a dependency tree, it’s surprisingly bad at that.

  • Redhat world - everything is soooo old. I can see why business people like it, buy I rarely, if ever, agree with business people.

  • Opensuse world - I’ve only tried it once, probably 15 years ago. Didn’t really know my way around computers all that much at the time, but it didn’t click and I’ve left it. Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.

  • Arch - it was my daily for a year or two. Big fan. It still runs my email. At some point the size of packages started to annoy me, though. Still has the best wiki. I’ve never really bothered with the spinoffs, as the model of Arch makes them useless and more problematic to deal with.

I’ve got the Gentoo bug now. For the first time I genuinely feel ~/. A lean, mean system of machines :)

Later on I found out about their selling out to Microsoft and never bothered touching it again.

Ah yes, when Microsoft looked for a contractor to develop FOSS implementations of some Windows technologies to meet demands by the EU and Mark Shullteworth made a big fuss of it until making deals with Microsoft himself…

What about that time Suse supported Microsoft’s claim that Linux infringes on their patents? Ms got enough grounds to sue everyone even marginally related to Linux for over a decade, Suse got a contract to sell licences that prevent Ms from suing companies for using Linux.
The wider company, that included Novell at that time, entered some cross patent licensing deal. It happens all the time. Didn’t kill Linux as we can comfortably say these days.
No, it was the “don’t sue us and we’ll testify in your favour while you’re suing our competition”.
Considering that the competition is alive and well today, I think it’s fair to assume that this claim didn’t come true.

Gentoo all the way since 20 years, on all kind of devices, going strong and never looked back.

Ubuntu, I hate you. A messy complex windows-esque caricature in the Linux world, where “somebody else” knows better than me and shoves it down my gully.

So there you go, my best and worst distros choice.

I’ve only got a few years on Gentoo - how has your journey been? You must’ve started with stage 1!
Well, yes, stage3 has been a revolution. But I don’t remember using stage1 directly. I started with Linux way earlier than gentoo… On 386.

What’s the relation between opensuse and microsoft?

In 2014 some wrote that there is none forums.opensuse.org/t/…/5

What relationship between Opensuse and Microsoft?

Jim Henderson adjusted his tin foil beanie and wrote: > > Microsoft hasn’t tainted openSUSE in any way - at least in no way more > than any other distribution (they have an agreement with RedHat as well, > yet nobody insinuates anything nasty in Fedora because of that agreement) > - which I say because Microsoft developers have contributed to the > Linux Kernel - at one time, Microsoft was one of the larger corporate > contributors to the Linux Kernel, IIRC. > > So sleep easy, and use o...

openSUSE Forums

It is that deal from 2006(?) or so. Agreeing to not be sued for an exchange of money is dodgy. Add the competition which was not offered the same deal; add in the environment which was drastically different; it was a shit thing to do. Purely a business decision. I understand why the shareholders wanted that, but that doesn’t make it right nor desirable for me.

Granted, nothing came out of it in the end and Linux managed to get itself established in a way where one could argue is close to impossible to get rid of it, but I feel like this deal is similar to getting stabbed - the one being stabbed will always bear a scar and remember, while others will forget over time. People growing up after this deal will never have experienced the mood and environment of that time which only makes it more difficult to understand why it was a big deal.

Instead of providing apple’s chips to everyone, they keep them to themselves.

I’ll support suse as that’s not really an issue in my opinion.

Most distributions are fine honestly. Ubuntu is clearly not my thing. Not a fan of Redhat-based distribution either. I wanted to appreciate OpenSuse as they’ve been supporters of KDE for a long time but wasn’t comfortable with Yast.

Apart from that, Manjaro is awesome, Arch amazing, Debian brilliant, etc.

but wasn’t comfortable with Yast.

I don’t even remember how many years it’s been when Yast was actually needed. It’s optional since quite some time. Even installing the OS itself could technically be done through Calamares but I don’t think that’s worth the effort.

I had a huge problem with Arch because of the rolling release deal. I just can’t handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day, even with automation.

When I install an operating system, I want it to just work, and I want their repositories to have lots and lots of software. Most distros do this, but none do it as well as one of the major Debian-family distros like Ubuntu or Mint. Fedora is quite nice as well, and I could probably daily drive it without issue, I just see no reason to change over to it since Ubuntu has me totally covered. And it is basically like this for me with every other distro: I have to think, “why would I switch? What benefit would it provide me over what I have right now.” The answer is always “nothing important,” so I stick with Ubuntu.

I considered using Guix because its package manager is truly a revolutionary new technology. But using it as a package manager, I can see a lot of the packages and default configurations just aren’t quite to the point of “just works” yet. Still, I hope someday to switch to Guix as my daily driver.

just can’t handle the responsibility of updating packages every single day

Then don’t. You can just as well choose to update once per week or whenever.

Every day is something of an exaggeration, but if you don’t keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break. And this gets to be a problem, especially if I don’t keep a computer always on, or if I keep postponing updates because my laptop is not connected to the Internet at the schedule time. There are a dozens reasons why I miss regular updates, but the point is, it should not bork my system if I do miss updates for a while.

if you don’t keep a rolling release up-to-date regularly (like once a week), packages start to break.

Those are packaging bugs then. With proper packaging everything updates seamslessly. Outside of SteamOS I’m not a user of Arch-derived distributions but I am a user of openSUSE TW which is a rolling release and I have one old notebook for a specific task I need to do maybe twice a year and updating was never a problem and installing a package triggers updating all affected dependencies.

Every couple of years I think to myself “You know, I can’t actually remember why I don’t like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I’ve got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they’ve had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?”

And then I download Ubuntu.

And then I remember.

Recommending ubuntu to newbies is the product of either incompetence or malice when Mint, zorin and nobara exist
Pop os. I just couldn’t use their desktop (even though I think it’s good, it’s just not for me)

I've been using Debian since 1.3. Haven't really ever needed anything else.
I did "experiment" a bit when the decision to go with systemd was taken, but in the end, most distros went with it and it really isn't that big deal for me.

So it's just Debian. I need a computer that works.

I miss Debian sometimes, but systemD irks me.

I feel like I’m a chronic distro-hopper sometimes, but no matter how many times I try, I just can’t settle into OpenSUSE for whatever reason. The OBS feels a bit more of a wild west than the AUR.

Ubuntu, felt like I was being treated like a child with the lack of user customizability

then I chose to jump directly into Arch Linux🙃 and saw despair from analysis paralysis, somehow I learned Arch in just a month tho🤷‍♀️

As someone who hates Windows with a passion, once everyone recommend Linux Mint, I knew I had to try it.

I immediately had negative first impressions. I simply don’t wanna use something with a desktop environment that reminds me of something that I hate. I get that it makes transitioning a lot easier for many, but for me it simply looks too similar to Windows.

I’m sure you know it by now, but Mint is the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Windows!” distro very much on purpose, haha.
It’s good for those that want it, but some would rather just having a completely new user experience.
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
Ubuntu. I initially downloaded it for my sibling’s pc but now that I’ve downloaded and configured all these things on their computer, I don’t want to reinstall a new OS and reconfigure and download everything again.