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kaon 01-22-2005 11:50 PM

What makes people switch distro?
 
Hi all,

This may appear somewhere in this forum, but I cannot find any tough. :D

As The title of this thread says.
Some reasons that I come up in my mind:
1) The old one is 'bloated', looking for a better responsive OS
2) Want 'excitement', i.e. pain gained from installation.
3) Deprecated/Obsolete OS
4) Availability of ready-to-use software (tough you can compile from scratch :confused:)

Any other thoughts?

Thanks

Mega Man X 01-23-2005 12:22 AM

Hey, this is interesting, but you should have posted as a pool :( (ask a mod to do that if you want a pool over here).

I'd go with all the above. No Linux distro did it for me, so FreeBSD it is... for now :)

frob23 01-23-2005 12:33 AM

It is an interesting question but I suspect it is one with more answers then a poll could possibly contain.

My response would be that they find a distribution that more completely fills their image of a complete system. I have, in my mind, an image of an ideal Unix system (small, clean, organized, logical, etc) and I did some searching until I found something which met those criteria. Other people have different ideas (multimedia, games, samba, web... whatever really) and they seek out a distribution that fills their needs.

JSpired 01-23-2005 12:36 AM

I've switched a few times this year just to sample new things out there. I've gone from Slackware to Suse to Ubuntu. It's not that I'm looking for the perfect OS, but enjoy viewing all available today.

TMH 01-23-2005 12:52 AM

I switched from suse to gentoo because suse was becoming highly stagnant. After reading about the portage system, I gave gentoo a go, and haven't looked back since :)

Megamieuwsel 01-23-2005 02:00 AM

For me : The very same reason I ditched Windows completely -
I can't stand , not knowing the inner workings of my tools.
I used to be able to "work miracles" with DOS , back in the days....

I started with SuSE and while that's a fine Distro for people who want an OS just to work with , getting to know the ins and outs of it isn't really encouraged by it and requires external sources of info; everything is "hidden" behind gui-tools and no clues are given as to what is actually happening.
Too much Windows-like to my taste.
RedHat was even worse in this regard.

For nearly two years I'm with VectorLinux now and so far , it's just right for me : comprehensive , light and a very helpfull community.

Occasionally I make a sidestep to VL's "big daddy" : Slackware , but there's just too much stuff in that one to oversee for me and everytime I try to trim it down , I completely break the system beyond repair(for my meager skills , at least).

As a general rule of thumb I keep : Any distro , that boots into GUI by default is NOT for me.

2damncommon 01-23-2005 05:25 AM

Quote:

What makes people switch distro?
You will need to load a test distro or two on a spare partition to discover the answer to that.

heema 01-23-2005 11:01 AM

I some times change my distro just for the fun of it , i think its a disease :)

i install a distro and make it work 100% for me and my hardware and when everything is going absolutely great , i change it for another one

then the cycle continues :)

maybe its becoming a game for me to get the distro working 100% and as i make it work then the game ends so i find another one. but its sure is fun , exciting and great experience doing it

NOTE : as u could see i am a linux and LQ addict and i am proud of it ;)

tamoneya 01-23-2005 11:10 AM

why not.

I like to try other distros so that i can learn more about linux. By troubleshooting problems that occur in almost every installation i get better every time.

samael26 01-23-2005 11:18 AM

Perhaps another interesting topic would be :

what makes people stick to a distro and don't need to test all the time ?

It seems that Distrowatch is to blame for that : there is something new every day ... ;)

guzzi 01-23-2005 11:23 AM

Distro changes for me come from reading LQ.

Some folks make distros sound really great, so I try them.

Continue to run Slackware on my main box. It's my baby.

trickykid 01-23-2005 11:25 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by samael26
Perhaps another interesting topic would be :

what makes people stick to a distro and don't need to test all the time ?

It seems that Distrowatch is to blame for that : there is something new every day ... ;)

Lets see.. my first distro was TurboLinux 2.0 or something like that. It was one of the hardest distro's I've ever used to get X working.
Then I tried Redhat 6.0. Liked it and stuck with it thru 7.0. I still think 6.2 was their best release to date, very solid during the time, etc. But during that time I used Slackware 7.0 as well and have stuck with it ever since. I try distro's at times but that's on one of my boxes I have just for that purpose, to install and test distro's on at times.

Now its Slackware at home and Redhat/CentOS at work. We're switching alot of our non-production servers to CentOS since Redhat raised their prices, kind of silly to buy 80k worth of licenses and support when we only made 2 phone calls and one email to their support team over the past 2 years. The email incident we sent, the admin who sent it found the solution after about a half hour googling for it.

So the sales representative was shocked when we told him we were going from like 100 licenses down to 15.. ;)

Mathiasdm 01-23-2005 11:53 AM

Re: What makes people switch distro?
 
Quote:

Originally posted by kaon
Hi all,

This may appear somewhere in this forum, but I cannot find any tough. :D

As The title of this thread says.
Some reasons that I come up in my mind:
1) The old one is 'bloated', looking for a better responsive OS
2) Want 'excitement', i.e. pain gained from installation.
3) Deprecated/Obsolete OS
4) Availability of ready-to-use software (tough you can compile from scratch :confused:)

Any other thoughts?

Thanks

Well, I switched from VectorLinux to Slackware, because...
1. Slackware felt more like 'the real deal'. It gave me more options to do what I wanted to. Vectorlinux aims more for the newbies.
2. Slackware seems/is faster on my old computer.

krock923 01-23-2005 02:44 PM

Is there a way to try out a new distro without trashing the old one? I run redhat 9 on a computer with a single hard drive. Recently, I've been noticing that redhat 9 is quite out of date. Maybe I just need a kernel upgrade (although I don't really know how to do that either) but maybe it's time to give something else a try.

rksprst 01-23-2005 05:24 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by krock923
Is there a way to try out a new distro without trashing the old one? I run redhat 9 on a computer with a single hard drive. Recently, I've been noticing that redhat 9 is quite out of date. Maybe I just need a kernel upgrade (although I don't really know how to do that either) but maybe it's time to give something else a try.
you can use vmware to put on a new distro without trashing the old one

about why i haven't chaned distros
mandrake works great for me and everything is configured and customized so much that theres no way im going to give it up
now, if i could keep all settings..just change disto... then new distro everyday;)

IBall 01-24-2005 12:49 AM

If I had a suitable internet connection, with enough download limit I would change distros regularly. As it is, I have to get distros from the covers of magazines. Hence it costs money to change distro, which I don't have :)

--Ian

Capt_Caveman 01-24-2005 01:30 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by krock923
Is there a way to try out a new distro without trashing the old one?
A number of distros now offer 'live' versions that are on a bootable cdrom. They'll run slower than a hd installed system, but you still can get a general idea of the "look and feel".

cs-cam 01-24-2005 03:20 AM

A good way is to put your /home on a seperate partition, you'll loose a lot of your programs but you keep all your settings o you just have to reinstall them :)

However I'm very happy with Arch and don't plan on changing any time soon.

Bill Cosby 01-24-2005 05:02 AM

I've been with Slackware for half a year, but now I want to take advantage of my AMD64 and so I was looking for an alternative. Being a Slack I couldn't go with something like Fedora or Suse, so I choose Gentoo, I also have a need for always having the newest apps, so Gentoo is what I want, and since it's something like LSF I think I won't change it anytime soon, because I have more decissons to make with Gentoo than choosing a distro, so I am pretty occupied for the next years I hope.

Never touch a running system!

chup 01-24-2005 06:37 AM

I started with Mandrake, and when I got sick of all the bloat I thought, ok, I'll try to uninstall kde and if that screws up the comp I'll install Gentoo. It did screw up, and I installed Gentoo. After some time I thought, hmm, maybe the new Mandrake would be nice to try. Then I got annoyed with it very soon, it didn't ran smooth on my comp. I then tried Suse 9.2, which also ran like crap on my comp. So, now I'm back to Gentoo :) Suse is still on another comp though. I switched from Gentoo first because I was tired of editing configuration files etc, but then I found the GUIs more annoying so I went back :D

SeT 01-24-2005 08:28 AM

My reson for switching used to be out of date software on the installs I had. Last couple times has been to follow what I'm using at work. I installed RH9 and had that for a few months until redhat came out and said that they wouldn't support basic Linux now - you had to buy rhes to get support so we switched to suse at work. still have to buy support but it's much cheaper and buy as you need it. Ended up liking Suse a lot more anyway

sumedhk 01-26-2005 04:06 AM

I was using suse with kde for a long time but now my lab has forced me to work with debian n gnome


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