Linux distro hopping

When I look at a new Linux distro I look for something genuinely different. Let's take a look at some options outside the mainstream:

NixOS is for psychopaths. I'm glad that all totalitarian experiments for the "perfect" distro have their encounter with reality. I'll never understand this obsession with cleanliness in the so-called "immutable" distros either. I don't mind getting my hands dirty!

I used Gentoo for like 2 or 3 weeks a long time ago but I didn't find Portage to be a real improvement over BSD ports. I don't mind compiling kernel & base but the graphics stack is a huge PITA and processors weren't that fast then.

Alpine uses OpenRC but you need some Glibc packages. Otherwise you're stuck with Busybox which doesn't care about security and their Bugzilla is always down.

I should give Void Linux a second try. They have a better approach than Portage for ports.

I haven't had time for Arch. They may have the best documentation but I'm not interested in learning about Systemd unless I'm paid for it. The recent udisks2, PAM & systemd exploits made me realize that all the bloatware dependencies used for desktop environments in Linux are a gold mine for security bug bounty hunters.
 
I like Void. It's a little bit of a nuisance on a bhyve VM, but it can be worked around. (It won't boot after the first reboot, you have to mess with Grub and rename grubx64.efi to bootx64.efi, but aside from that, the only other issue I had with it was when I hadn't updated for a looooong time, and I had to use different mirrors. But it's improving as well. For example, you used to have to redo the mirrors after installation, now you can choose closest mirrors during install. You might find it worth a look.
 
I have used and installed most major distros and many minor ones. (anyone remember YOPER?).
It helped me be able to at least be familiar with numerous distros, but really, it just helped me be able to hop between debian and RHEL based distros with greater ease.
Also wasted a lot of time I will never get back.
 
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Ok mine didn't end that well , im not happy with arch because there aren't challenges and im happy with freebsd because there are challenges which would frustrate me and force me to go back to linux , honestly i have explored linux so much that i have done LFS also and it was good but i just hope that my SSD doesn't die
i used Arch , Debian , AxOS , fedora , manjaro , gentoo , LFS , endeavouros , ubuntu , nyarch , and so many more distros i can't remember.... lol
i actually started my journey with arch when i was 9 years old and then moved to gentoo to get better FPS in minecraft but my mom insisted on getting back to windows because she didn't want me to be a psycho doing everything from the terminal , reminded her of MS DOS.... it was quite an adventure
 
I'm considering ZFS as a hard-requirement. I'll write off any distro that makes it hard to install it.

So I may end up trying some of these newer Arch-based distros after all. CachyOS makes it easy and sweet.
 
rbranco said:
I'm considering ZFS as a hard-requirement. I'll write off any distro that makes it hard to install it.
Click to expand...
I'm hoping openSUSE supports it; I like using their Live image on USB with persistence! I used it to undo a loader.conf change on a FreeBSD install when I had root UFS.
 
Heh, and for me, Cachy won't install on a bhyve VM, freezes at what seems to be a fairly common place, which I've already forgotten. I was just idly curious as it's apparently an Arch variant, and I usually just install these to play around a little bit.
 
Espionage724 said:
I'm hoping openSUSE supports it; I like using their Live image on USB with persistence! I used it to undo a loader.conf change on a FreeBSD install when I had root UFS.
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In openSUSE it's easier than Fedora. You can choose the -longterm (LTS) versions of the kernel & zfs-kmod packages. It's all documented in https://en.opensuse.org/OpenZFS

Also https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting Started/openSUSE/index.html#root-on-zfs

Ubuntu has it in the installer but they now ship the latest kernel which is not officially supported by OpenZFS. There's an unofficial PPA but I trust openSUSE's Open Build Service more. I have an unfinished PR to add ZFS tests in openQA.
 
considering the amount of time it takes to absorb and process everyone's "special sauce" in their particular distro, distro jumping isn't an effective use of time. I stayed with the big two: red-hat (centos and fedora) and Debian...once distros became relatively stable. Before that I toyed with slackware, but did most of my critical work on BSDi (bsdOS)
 
History of which distributions I use?

The origin is that I tried to get BSDi, but they weren't ready, and there were problems with X, and finding the exactly correct Tseng ETxxxx card that was the only one supported in BSDi. So while waiting for that, I tried Linux, in about 1994. Using the SLS distribution, on a 386-40 (initially without 387, and initially with 4MB of RAM). Worked great, although X was painfully slow, until I got the 387 in there (for font rendering), and 16MB of RAM. In those days, I didn't have a CDROM reader yet, so install was done from floppies, about 30 of them. The floppies were created in the office, because it had good internet bandwidth (at home it was 9600 or 56K baud over a modem).

Then switched from SLS to Slackware, then to RedHat (long before they split into Fedora vs. RHEL), then installed OpenBSD as a firewall. In the last decade, I think I've only installed and used Debian.
 
kent_dorfman766 said:
considering the amount of time it takes to absorb and process everyone's "special sauce" in their particular distro, distro jumping isn't an effective use of time. I stayed with the big two: red-hat (centos and fedora) and Debian...once distros became relatively stable. Before that I toyed with slackware, but did most of my critical work on BSDi (bsdOS)
Click to expand...
I have to agree with this. It's either a special sauce of one of those two, or even more special sauce and much less infrastructure. Fedora and Debian attract the bulk of people working on linux DEs, probably because they too prefer to maximize their efforts.

Sadly, it feels like Mac is the new Windows, Fedora is the new Mac, and Debian is just effing annoying to work with. Everything takes research, Fedora just *works. My issue is with the direction it's *working in these days, it just has that corporate feel that made me turn from Windows over a decade ago to begin with. Mixed with a bunch of idealism about random things when I'm just trying to watch a youtube video while I fill out a spreadsheet.

Which means FreeBSD is the new Linux. Which may bring its share of problems in the short to medium. I doubt I will be the last of this new migration wave. Like all the people moving from California to Florida, but then wanting to turn Florida into California.

But I think the governance structure and history of FreeBSD vis a vis Linux will give it a special resilience. Let's hope.

I started with Ubuntu Gnome back when it looked like Cinammon does now, after it ws suggested to me by my programmer uncle. Must have been 15 years ago? Things were buggier, but fun, but buggy enough that I would return to Windows every so often. Then 5 years or so ago I decided to try Fedora, and that stuck. I think if I hade done that from the beginning, it may have stuck from the beginning. But I let myself be swayed by the narrative that "Fedora is for servers, Debian is for users." The things people say.

Also used #! for a few years, that was a lot of fun.
 
sinc the late 90s, as my personal computers: Red Hat -> Debian -> Gentoo -> Linux Mint -> Debian. At my clients: Ubuntu -> Amazon Linux + Debian, Yocto. Now I use mostly Debian, for my own stuff as well as at my jobs. It has turned out to be the most reliable, stable, secure, best documented Linux distribution out there, and a great community.
 
I started with Linux just over 2 years ago and went with Zorin OS - can't remember why - probably because it was supposedly good for beginners; and it was fine. I don't think I had even heard of distro-hopping at that time. A few months ago I went with Ubuntu to kick the training wheels off of my Linux adventure. I found Ubuntu to be totally unreliable and quickly switched to Debian. No complaints with Debian. It's been a breeze. I got the FreeBSD bug about the time I got rid of Ubuntu and have been playing with it since then. FreeBSD has been a big challenge for me but I think I'm starting to get it now. I don't want two different systems. I'm using FreeBSD now way more than Debian. There's plenty for me to learn with FreeBSD without any more distro-hopping. Time will tell.
 
Gave Devuan a look recently, because I liked the cut of their jib. Then I startd typing "apt-get" and remembering all the bad times and skipped.

dnf is so simple. Actually, using pkg feels a lot like using dnf. Debian is like an eternal garage band. They made it big and have millions, but they still play in the garage.
 
rbranco said:
I'm considering ZFS as a hard-requirement. I'll write off any distro that makes it hard to install it.

So I may end up trying some of these newer Arch-based distros after all. CachyOS makes it easy and sweet.
Click to expand...
I used CachyOS for a little bit. ZFS support was fine, worked well. My CPU supports v3 architecture and it was subjectively snappier.
 
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