Just curious to know if anyone has been using the same distro for multiple years/decades and what or if you have it takes for you to want to switch to a different distro?
Debian for about two decades: It would take something pretty major to shift me - probably a hostile takeover, major policy shift or commercialisation, none of which is likely.
At worked we shifted from Centos to Rocky for the obvious reason, and are happy with the choice so far.
Same here, it’s less about the month to month technical changes and waaay more about general policy and major development decisions.
Switched from Fedora to Debian. Here are my reasons:
- That computer doesn’t need the latest versions. Debian is new enough for me.
- The update GUI has been broken for years. I fixed it once, but then it broke again after a year. I’ve been installing updates from the terminal, because I can’t trust the GUI. I realized I appreciate reliability, and that’s exactly what Debian is all about.
- Can’t be bothered to do much admin work like that.
I’ve been using Artix Linux for 5 years. Its great, minimal, and does everything I need for my day to day tasks.
If I were to ever change, it’d probably be because the devs could no longer maintain it. In which case I’d probably just hop to Gentoo.
Similar to other users - repos go down or corporate stuff starts to creep in.
As long as I get to maintain agency over my system I’m pretty content.
An operating system is a means to an end. I’m not looking to critique a package manager, I’m looking to get work done. If it can support the applications I need it’s perfect.
Last time I did, it was thanks to canonical pushing snaps and other things no one asked for.
Same here. I had been sticking to Ubuntu flavours for over 15 years.
The repo servers going down or some unacceptable change to the system defaults. Starting to distribute my browser (or anything else) as only snaps / flatpaks would absolutely do it. Yeah, I’m looking squarely at you, Ubuntu.
I’ve changed distro’s a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.
Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.
The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).
Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.
Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.
Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.
Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.
Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.
I really appreciate this well detailed response! 30 years of changing distros is pretty amazing you must know a lot
Having more time to spend learning a new distro
I made the jump from Manjaro when a bunch of their maintained repos started to … corrode? for lack of a better term, other than that I tend to adapt to whatever my workplace chooses, last place loved Ubuntu, current workplace is all about RHEL, so i’m not going to argue
When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)
Previously? Some schmuck changing all the windows to be left-handed, immediately before a long-term-support feature freeze.
Zero percent surprised by many other comments throwing shade at Ubuntu.
Dropped Ubuntu because of snaps.
Dropped Manjaro because updating anything on it was too annoying and potentially destructive if you didn’t read through every changelog.
Currently on bluefin because everything is working smoothly on it. Also have a Bazzite setup which I’m not as happy with as I am with bluefin but not to the point of thinking of dropping it.
On my laptops: Debian -> Fedora. Mostly because I couldn’t reliably use my external display on Debian, and because I
neededwanted shiny new things. Also new hardware.On my gaming rig: Manjaro -> Nobara -> Bazzite. I left Manjaro because the system was slowly getting worse with each update, and I wanted to game, not maintain my system. I ditched Nobara after a botched version upgrade. Bazzite is fine for now.
Lol, I had the same Nobara issue recently. Had to completely reinstall 😭… Installed openSuSe Tumbleweed instead, which I can highly recommend though.
I used to distro hop all the time until I settled on Tumbleweed. I used that for eight years until Suse bared their corporate teeth and I got fed up with being two generations behind on the Nvidia drivers. I’ve been using EndeavourOS for almost a year and don’t see me moving any time soon.
Huh? Nvidia even have their own Tumbleweed repository.
Yeah I know. You’d think it would be bang up to date, but that wasn’t the case. I think it has been updated now though.
Now that you say it I remember there being something along those lines. Yeah, by now it has been fixed.
