Mandrake > Ubuntu > Debian > Mint > Arch > Artix

Settled on Artix for openrc and all the aur goodness

Mint unironically. I’ve reached a point where I’ve got a lot of things going on in my life that I don’t have the time and just need something that works and I don’t need to fiddle around with much.

Gentoo for personal experimentation

Mint for work & recommending to beginners

Debian for personal production, work, & pretty much everything else

Arch for my PC and laptop, Debian for all my servers, VMs, LXCs, etc.

I settled on two.

1. Arch for my desktop, because there I like having an always up-to-date system with the latest drivers and libraries so that I can always try the latest versions of whatever it is I want to play with next. Pacman is also a pretty good package manager, and almost any piece of software that is not in the default repos can be found in the AUR. For the rest, I also like that Arch just gets out of your way and lets you configure your system how you want.

2. Debian for anything that runs unattended, like all my homelab services. It’s well tested, offers feature stability, has long-enough support, and doesn’t do weird things every other release like forcing snaps or netplan or cloud-init on you. Those “boring” qualities make it the perfect base to run something for a long time that doesn’t scream for attention all the time.

I’ve been using Ubuntu since 12.04 LTS, and old habits die hard. There have been many attempts by my peers to steer me toward Arch and NixOS, but Ubuntu suits my needs and I am used to it after a decade

Beginning: Ubuntu.
Until today: Arch

Why? I found in Arch updated software that I was interested at that time, I liked the rolling distro, minimalism, AUR.

I’m happy with my TWM (DWM) and multiplexer (tmux).

I did install other distros in old hardware like Slitaz, Debían that needs 32 bit.

I’m interested right now in things like Alpine and Void, because small and functional in Termux or older hardware. And some distrobox (similar to proot-distro in Termux).

Now learning a little bit of Groff with markdown (pandoc) to create PDF, for a small and fast typesetting. I haven’t found a way to convert markdown to pdf using MOM macros in Groff.

My journey was:

• Mandrake/Mandriva
• Debian (v2.4)
• Ubuntu (v6.04)
• Debian (8)
• Arch Linux
• NixOS

I left Debian for Ubuntu when it simply worked better and left Ubuntu when it became too restrictive and weird. I need a working system but my freedom to experiment. Then I discovered arch and never looked back. Still kept Debian on servers.

Currently using arch on desktop machines and nixos on my servers. But I use nix for Dev environments and dotfiles even on arch.

Not sure if I’ll stay with NixOS but for now that seems like the direction I’m going to. Still love Arch Linux for it’s freedom though, but I’m getting older and don’t have the time to fiddle with everything.

Stopped hopping when I realized most distros are just debian with certain things pre-installed or pre-configured. Decided to compare base distros, and settled on Gentoo for its powerful features, transparency and customizability.

• Ubuntu
• Opensuse
• Linux Mint
• Fedora
• Manjaro
• Endeavour OS

I distrohopped so many times I can’t even remember everything I used.

Now I’m just on Fedora for my desktops, and Rocky on my server. Everything (mostly) works, so I’m fine with it.

Windows -> MacOS -> Manjaro -> Arch

I’m in love with arch so I won’t be switching anytime soon.

I hopped around in Debian-Land for a while before switching to Manjaro, converting it to Arch later on.

Now I stay with Arch because it just works and doesn’t break on me.

Up until last year I would have said Ubuntu. It was qualitatively the best desktop choice when I started with it in the aughts, and is still one of the few distros that has a reasonable out of the box install option with LVM. But I recently tried a Silverblue variant and NixOS, and I like what I see. Once I’m comfortable enough I will switch, I’m tired of the ensnapification and the Pro nag screens.

Windows