Feeling the itch for a change....

[FSCDiablo]

One of the fun things about popsicles and linux is getting to try out different flavors. I've been on Manjaro with KDE as desktop and serving files, Plex, and Pi-hole for my house 24/7 for a couple of years now without a single hiccup. Before that was KDE Neon. which only ever had 1 small issue. Sometime this summer I'm going to upgrade my storage ad while I'm at it I think I'll make a change again.

While Manjaro has been hiccup free I do sometimes feel like upgrading most of the system 1 or two times a month is becoming unnecessary. Yes it's just a click of a few buttons, but outside of security updates most updates aren't honestly adding anything I'll ever notice. So think I'm going to give the venerable old vanilla Debian an install when I get the new drives. It should have a new release out in the next few months. I'm familial with linux enough now I can set it up how I want it just fine. I just want to set it and forget it for a couple of years while just getting security updates when needed. Some apps while update frequently like Steam or Discord but that's okay.

I've been on KDE forever, but I think I'll load up some other DEs on the VM from Deb Testing and see how the others look/feel. Never hurts to look.

Anyone else get that itch every few years too?

 

[cybereality]

I do, and I've tried some different distros, but I always come back to Ubuntu.

Mostly because it is popular, it's easy to find answers if there is ever any problem.

Manjaro was okay, I just like the deb ecosystem better. And Mint was very nice, but the packages were old (I guess this is okay for some people but I like getting new versions when they come out).

KDE Neon is nice and flashy, can't remember why I switched from that back to Ubuntu vanilla. But it's cool to have options.

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

Meh, between bouncing among Linux (mostly Ubuntu/Debian, a bit of CentOS), Mac, and Windows, working with appliances like Proxmox and Free/TrueNAS (looking forward to seeing how TrueNAS Scale turns out), network gear, and an Android phone, I get enough variety without having to jump to another distro.

 

[Lunar]

One of the fun things about popsicles and linux is getting to try out different flavors. I've been on Manjaro with KDE as desktop and serving files, Plex, and Pi-hole for my house 24/7 for a couple of years now without a single hiccup. Before that was KDE Neon. which only ever had 1 small issue. Sometime this summer I'm going to upgrade my storage ad while I'm at it I think I'll make a change again.

While Manjaro has been hiccup free I do sometimes feel like upgrading most of the system 1 or two times a month is becoming unnecessary. Yes it's just a click of a few buttons, but outside of security updates most updates aren't honestly adding anything I'll ever notice. So think I'm going to give the venerable old vanilla Debian an install when I get the new drives. It should have a new release out in the next few months. I'm familial with linux enough now I can set it up how I want it just fine. I just want to set it and forget it for a couple of years while just getting security updates when needed. Some apps while update frequently like Steam or Discord but that's okay.

I've been on KDE forever, but I think I'll load up some other DEs on the VM from Deb Testing and see how the others look/feel. Never hurts to look.

Anyone else get that itch every few years too?

I just recently decided to jump to Fedora after running Ubuntu/PopOS for the last 5 years. I got kind of tired of certain things in Ubuntu, and decided it was time I try an RPM based distro as I've never really used them outside of work. Only been on it for about 2 weeks, but I'm liking it and Gnome 40 quite a bit.

 

[Vermillion]

I used to distro hop with the best of them. Was always interested in the new shiny release of <insertdistrohere>. That's how I learned to hate and despise Mint. It's how I discovered the wonderfulness of Arch. It's how I found Solus and really enjoyed that distro until Ikey abandoned it (Josh and crew who maintain it now are doing a good job but I lost interest when Ikey left). It's how I learned how to get Gentoo to install. It's also how I learned I'll never install Gentoo again. In the end though I always went back to Arch.

I simply find Arch to be faster and far less bloated since the only things installed are things I want installed. Arch is my daily driver and has been now exclusively for probably 3-4 years. I do have a smattering of other distros in the house though. Kids' laptop is Ubuntu MATE (about to bump that to 21.04). Wife's laptop is Elementary OS. Bitwarden_rs (now Vaultwarden), Pi-hole, and Plex are all Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS.

 

[SmokeRngs]

I've always loved checking out new distros even if I rarely changed the main distros I was using. It was nice to see what other distros did, how they looked, how they performed and what they did differently. I don't bother anymore but that has more to do with not having a dedicated machine for testing and testing new distros in VMs is anything but fun. I've used VMs for various reasons over the years and find they can be a great thing but when it comes time to test something new I want it on bare hardware. The experience is simply very different between the two for me. Maybe it's because I haven't done anything with VMs in years but anytime I try to check out a new distro in a VM it's often nothing but trouble. Some distros don't run worth a damn in a VM but run great on bare hardware for me and I've also run into problems where a VM seemed to run fine but the moment I put it on bare hardware problems started cropping up.

There's almost always a major difference in UI response and such when using a VM no matter how many resources I give the VM to use.

I still miss the old Athlon x2 4000+ barebones system I put together years ago during the Intel Core2 era. It was used almost exclusively as a testbed system for distro hopping and software and configuration experimenting. It was the most successful way I had to test different distros and a lot of fun. And when I say barebones, I mean barebones. I used the onboard video from the micro-ATX motherboard, only had 1GB of RAM and a small, older and rather slow hard drive with absolutely no add in cards and with a slight bump in voltage went from the stock 2.1Ghz to 2.8Ghz 100% stable. The hardware wasn't even in a case but sat on the motherboard box.

The only downside was needing to burn a lot of CDs/DVDs for all the different distros I went through for curiosity's sake or testing. Still, it was one of the best impulse buys I ever made.

 

[FSCDiablo]

Was looking back through some old threads here and saw this one from a year ago. I did finally switch over to Debian 11 a couple of months ago. Started a new job last summer so changing took a back seat for awhile. I had no real problems with Manjaro outside of the more often need to do large system updates. I would recommend Manjaro to anyone to try.

Deb 11 has a version of KDE that works well enough for me I can live without the constant updates. The only minor issue is that it always adds my monitor's HDMI as a sound device even if I disable it (that was resolved in a later release of Plasma). True to form I find Deb 11 stable as it should be. My desktop is also file/plex/pi-hole server so it runs 24/7. No problems running non-stop with only 2 kernel update reboots and a couple of Plasma restarts when I saw some updates I thought may need it. Process and mem usage is always stable. Updates are not too frequent and usually very small.

I don't really need to stay bleeding edge these days. I just need a solid desktop without much fuss and so far Deb 11 has fit that bill.

 

[Mazzspeed]

Still running KDE Neon. There's small bugs at times, but they're usually rectified quickly and every OS suffers from such issues.

As long as the OS stays out of my way and respects me as the user/owner of the system, I'm happy.

 

[Vermillion]

I'm still on Arch. Will never leave it.

All other systems are Ubuntu server LTS with the exception of the family laptop which is Ubuntu MATE LTS. So they'll all get bumped next month to 22.04. Ubuntu server is just simply rock solid and just works. Runs my Plex, Pi-hole, Vaultwarden, and Grocy.

 

[FSCDiablo]

My PC finally bit the dust after 7 years; I'm assuming it's the mobo (no post). So it gave me reason to upgrade into a new box with 5900x, 6700xt, and x570 board.

I was able to boot into Debian, but there were issues. With little time to play, I just ended up loading up Kubuntu instead. Everything is running well out of the box. Loaded up a couple of benchmarks, zenmonitor3 and everything is running within expectations. We'll see how it goes, no complaints so far.

 

[KarsusTG]

My PC finally bit the dust after 7 years; I'm assuming it's the mobo (no post). So it gave me reason to upgrade into a new box with 5900x, 6700xt, and x570 board.

I was able to boot into Debian, but there were issues. With little time to play, I just ended up loading up Kubuntu instead. Everything is running well out of the box. Loaded up a couple of benchmarks, zenmonitor3 and everything is running within expectations. We'll see how it goes, no complaints so far.

I used to love trying different distros and see how they do things. I have got to the point where I just want my stuff to work reliably, have rock solid stability, and require me to put in as little effort as possible for setup and maintenance. My threadripper desktop has been running MX linux for years and since it is basically debian it has been rock solid.

Personally, I would just install fedora and be done with it. It's basically the best all-around distro you can get.

 

[Mazzspeed]

KDE Neon has been improving in leaps and bounds as of late. At this rate I can't see myself ever distro hopping again.

 

[FSCDiablo]

I started running into some little issues with Kubuntu that were already getting on my nerves a bit. Not saving background on multi monitor/desktop. Screens moving between monitors after screen idle, and a few more. Thanks to KarsusTG mentioning Fedora (which I haven't looked at in 10+ years) I read up a bit on it and decided to load it up. I'm giving their Gnome desktop a try as it's the default (I've been on KDE for years). I honestly don't need to tweak the looks too much in any distro I just like dark themes and an overall nice look and I'm happy.

I'm pretty impressed so far. Installation was painless and used btrfs by default which I prefer. Moved over a couple VMs on VBox with no hassle. Transferred Firefox profile fine. Added my 4 drive media RAID and added to fstab no problem. Couple desktop options got things set for now; might play more later. Plex server moved over with a couple of headaches remembering what permissions I needed there. RAM usage is higher than my Debian KDE desktop but I'm trying to let that go since I have 32GB anyway. Steam and a test game installed/tested no problem (Epic/GOG yet to go). Found instructions to install codecs and whatnot, no problem. Overall everything was smoother and easier than I expected.

I'm going to play with it on Gnome for awhile and adjust to the workflow. A little different than KDE but so far so good. If it gets on my nerves I'll give the Spins a try. Big thumbs up overall, Fedora is a polished distribution.

 

[KarsusTG]

I started running into some little issues with Kubuntu that were already getting on my nerves a bit. Not saving background on multi monitor/desktop. Screens moving between monitors after screen idle, and a few more. Thanks to KarsusTG mentioning Fedora (which I haven't looked at in 10+ years) I read up a bit on it and decided to load it up. I'm giving their Gnome desktop a try as it's the default (I've been on KDE for years). I honestly don't need to tweak the looks too much in any distro I just like dark themes and an overall nice look and I'm happy.

I'm pretty impressed so far. Installation was painless and used btrfs by default which I prefer. Moved over a couple VMs on VBox with no hassle. Transferred Firefox profile fine. Added my 4 drive media RAID and added to fstab no problem. Couple desktop options got things set for now; might play more later. Plex server moved over with a couple of headaches remembering what permissions I needed there. RAM usage is higher than my Debian KDE desktop but I'm trying to let that go since I have 32GB anyway. Steam and a test game installed/tested no problem (Epic/GOG yet to go). Found instructions to install codecs and whatnot, no problem. Overall everything was smoother and easier than I expected.

I'm going to play with it on Gnome for awhile and adjust to the workflow. A little different than KDE but so far so good. If it gets on my nerves I'll give the Spins a try. Big thumbs up overall, Fedora is a polished distribution.

Ya, they really have a lot of the kinks worked out. Fedora + AMD GPU is as close to "it just works" as you can get on linux desktop at the moment. You are not on a laptop but Fedora has made linux on most laptops relatively painless which has never been the case in the past.

 

[FSCDiablo]

Ran across the Nobara project after looking around more at Fedora. Made by Glorius Eggroll and friends to make a more gaming ready version of Fedora. Looks interesting, but so far haven't had any problems gaming with regular Fedora. So far my games have all worked with default proton, but I have also added GEs proton. I've added Steam and Heroic Launcher for Epic/GOG games. Really liking Heroic Launcher which I hadn't used before. I had always launched the Epic and GOG launchers directly via Lutris which I never liked, but Heroic is 100x better.

https://nobaraproject.org/

So far so good still with Fedora. No complaints at all. Gnome takes some getting used to and I've added a couple things via extensions, but overall trying not too and work with gnome the way it is.

 

[Mazzspeed]

I started running into some little issues with Kubuntu that were already getting on my nerves a bit.

Bear in mind that KDE Neon is made by the KDE developers themselves, it's not really comparable to Kubuntu. In comparison KDE Neon receives DE updates faster than Kubuntu, including bugfixes. Furthermore while KDE Neon is based on Ubuntu LTS, there are actually slight differences under the hood (for example, 'sudo apt update' is replaced by 'sudo pkcon update' and you don't need to 'sudo apt update' before doing an upgrade or after adding a PPA). KDE Neon is also a fairly bare bones distro compared to other packaged distro's, for example it doesn't come with Libre Office installed out of the box.

All in all, my experience regarding KDE Neon has been solid. No issues to report at all. Even 4k fractional scaling under X11 works perfectly, it actually works better than fractional scaling under Windows.

 

[FSCDiablo]

I used KDE Neon a few years ago and it was good. Back then I think there was only one major issue I had which was an update that affected the bootloader and was unable to boot after upgrade. I'd have no problem recommending Neon to anyone.

So far so good with Fedora. With my new system being all AMD and using Gnome and Wayland has been flawless. I added a couple of tweaks to Gnome but overall trying to learn to do it with Gnomes workflow. One of the pro's of Linux is you can change it how you like if you don't like it. All of my games I've tested so far on Steam, and GoG/Epic via Heroic have worked perfectly. I just installed Red Dead Redemption 2 on Steam with GE Proton and not a single hiccup so far.

I really like Debian's KDE as well. So stable. I still use it on my VM for vpn/transmission. It just runs and runs rarely needing updates, and stable memory usage below 800MB.

 

[ThatITGuy]

Ran across the Nobara project after looking around more at Fedora. Made by Glorius Eggroll and friends to make a more gaming ready version of Fedora. Looks interesting, but so far haven't had any problems gaming with regular Fedora. So far my games have all worked with default proton, but I have also added GEs proton. I've added Steam and Heroic Launcher for Epic/GOG games. Really liking Heroic Launcher which I hadn't used before. I had always launched the Epic and GOG launchers directly via Lutris which I never liked, but Heroic is 100x better.

https://nobaraproject.org/

So far so good still with Fedora. No complaints at all. Gnome takes some getting used to and I've added a couple things via extensions, but overall trying not too and work with gnome the way it is.

Why Heroic over Lutris? I have never branched out too far from Steam on Linux, but am looking to expand a bit. I have a number of games on GoG and Epic I would not mind playing on this new machine I just loaded with KDE Neon Fedora spin. How does Heroic handle games with embedded launchers (i.er. 2K games and Ubisoft Connect)?

 

[FSCDiablo]

Heroic doesn't use the launchers for Epic/GoG to then launch the games, you put in your login info and it pulls the games info into a native app. I always found the windows launchers slow and clunky through Lutris. Changing Wine versions and settings per game is simple. To my knowledge it only works with Epic/GoG, not others like 2K or Ubisoft unfortunately.