Did you ever make a big distro leap?
So have you ever took a distro hop that turned out to be an olympic leap? Why did you move to something considerably different? How did it work out?
I don't want this to be a "what distro for me?" thing. I want to hear about how others have made a change to a really different linux if they ever have made such a change. Myself I am facing challenge to change to something derived from another distro, pkg mgmt, and possibly a change in DE. Complicating it is trying out with XFCE is different depending on what distro. In some performance is great and in others a dog for a lighter desktop. Myself, this change is because a dependable distro that has been a good daily driver for years is using Snap heavily and it is changing the performance of my most-used apps to a dog on my very modest laptop. New laptop is not in the cards. Even KDE is quite light on some distros but a burden on others. The choices are just too many for me as I have been linuxing around 20 years and seek something more familiar. But have been playing with shiny objects. Could this really be an itch? Oh, did you end up going back to your ex? |
my "olympic leap" were Arch linux, i have used it as a daily Distro and it has been pretty solid one.
one time i messed up my installation when i fat-fingered one command and bcus of that i destroyed it. i just reinstalled it and i am using still that same Arch installation. Arch has one of the best wiki's available also. |
Yep, done that. Went from Mandrake to suse to compile LFS, then HLFS, then Kevux(Yes, Kevux)! Then I promoted myself to Slackware, slamd-12.2 & back to slackware ever since.
It's ok. You might tear hair out, or jump up and down for a while, but it's ok really. Do back things up or have a powerful live usb key. I had Tomsrtbt all the days of the floppy drive. |
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Ubuntu to Slackware, from doing lttle more than apt-get install to hunting down and compiling required dependencies deciding for myself what optional deps I wanted/needed etc etc, hellava culture shock, but well worth it. Now I use LFS as my main OS.
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I can't answer this question here, because we shouldn't talk dirty.
I not only made a lot of distro hop, but I wanted to keep/save my extremely important and useful settings. It was always lost and had to be recreated from scratch again and again. Finally I gave up. I could never go back, basically I just lost my previous workspace several times. To be honest there were HPUX, SunOS, RedHat, Solaris, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian, Sco Unix, Sinix, cygwin amongst others. the most important thing is not the distro itself, but the DE, which means almost everything, like menus, keyboard shortcuts and a lot of other changes. The only thing that survived everything that is still in use is my vimrc. |
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I agree about the DE, I am pretty comfortable with KDE and it was my first but XFCE in some of the distros is nice and clean- I can make it pretty with reasonable consistency. I don't have the resources for all-out flashy eye-candy but I like to personalize my ride. It will just feel strange to have a new distro, DE and pkg mgmt all rolled up in one dive to the deep-end of the pool (for me, I am short) |
I used various members of the Red Hat family for two decades, apart from a brief (one month) foray into Debian, which I hated. Then when I needed a new computer four years ago I made a careful study, did some testing, and ended up with something completely different — PCLinuxOS. Happy ending!
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Yes, I've done a bit of distro-hopping. I did brief stints with RedHat (cli only), Ubuntu, Arch and Gentoo before finding a real home with Crux. I stayed with Crux until they stopped supporting 32-bit systems, then switched to Debian where I stayed for quite a while. I really liked the Debian net-install option. When I moved to 64-bit, it was Debian plus LFS plus Crux for quite a while. I avoided Slackware because it had a reputation for being difficult, but when I finally decided to tackle it, I found it a very friendly system and it's my main one now.
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I went from command line Red Hat that came in a book, hosting Samba and a music server on 386s to Debian scratch. I liked the plasma desktop, as its desktop slideshow feature will parse all the subfolders of your images directory. Don't know why that isn't universal. Nothing else will do.
I have tried Manjaro, Fedora, Slackware (not for me), Mint. Arch (still no GUI yet), Knoppix, Parrot OS, Kali (not allowed to register on their forum), BlackArch, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Neptune, and Tails. None of this adventuring would happen with a 14,400 modem, that's for sure. Learned quite a lot trying to get hardware to work, wifi in particular. Arch has a great WIKI, although I end up with multitudes of pages open trying to follow the core of a problem. I figure Arch was my biggest step to the wild side. Sometimes one wants to tinker, other times one just wants to use the computer. |
For me it was Slackware to Debian, nearly two decades ago. Note that I was using Slackware simply because it was the first distro I was able to install successfully; otherwise, I knew nothing about it other than that it was a Linux. I can't even remember how I stumbled across it.
I had Slackware on my laptop--putting it on my laptop, which was my primary computer, was really when I committed to Linux--and went to install a newer version (this was before DVDs became common) and the second CD refused to load, so I installed Debian. The Debian web install worked just fine and so did the Debian OS. (I learned about six months later that my CD drive was on its last legs, as was that particular computer.) I forget exactly why I picked Debian, probably because by then I was already a member of LQ and had learned some stuff. Over the next six months, I came to be really fond of Debian. Slackware and Debian remain my two favorite distros, with Mageia a close third. Later on, I learned about VirtualBox thanks to a Linux podcast that has since pod faded and have used that to play with many distros. I think the podcaster was based in Belgium and called himself Dmitri, but I will always be grateful to him for introducing me to VB. And that's my ramble down memory lane for what it's worth. |
Apart from distro hopping at the start of my journey, I stayed with Debian based distros, until they forced systemd on everyone, & went to Devuan, (a no systemd version of Debian).
Now, I have returned to antiX, because it is less resource hungry, which suits my purchase of some thin client computers better. However I do also use BSD sometimes, NetBSD & OpenBSD mainly. |
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