This is kind of the anti-distro hopping thread. How long have you stayed on a single Linux distribution for your main PC? What about servers?
I’ve been on Debian on and off since 2021, but finally committed to the platform since April of this year.
Before that I was on OpenBSD from 2011 - 2021 for my desktop.
Prior to that, FreeBSD for many years, followed by a few years of distro-hopping various Linux distros (Slackware, Arch, Fedora, simplyMEPIS, and ZenWalk from memory).
How long have you been on your distribution? Do we have anybody here who has been on their current distro for more than a decade?
I’ve been on ubuntu for quite some time now. Experimented with it from 12.04 onward and then fully embraced it since 14.04. I always use the LTS version and it has been rock solid the entire time. I’ve run kububtu or lubuntu on low end laptops and secondary machines, but nothing comes quite close to normal ubuntu’s stability and ergonomics. It’s very polished.
I do miss some unity features, like the top bar of windows merging with the top panel (the one with the clocks). Having that extra screenspace was always very useful on modern 16:9 screens. If you open Firefox and look at the size of the web view compared to the screen size, you’ll know what I mean.
The recent move to snaps is actually a welcome one security wise. I much prefer closed source software to be bundled as snaps. The startup time for snap programs is drastically better with the newer versions too, so I don’t mind it at all on my systems, modern or low end.
The only pet peeve with snaps is that Firefox can’t open local files right now. It stops me from using local documentation generated by Rust’s cargo and rustup tools.
I initially started out with Puppy Linux on a stick, experimented with fedora at some point and even considered trying arch. But at the end of the day there is only so much time and effort I am willing to spend on my productive system. Ubuntu LTS has just been the perfect fit throughout. So yeah, it’s been 10 solid years of ubuntu!
You’re the first time I’ve read about snaps being good and fast to start up. On my kids machines, I had problems with Firefox snaps updating and then not launching after updates, and after several times of this consistent behavior, I got fed up and just installed Debian with Flatpaks.
I’m glad it’s working for you.
Yeah, the reception of snaps is very mixed if we’re being honest. But they work surprisingly well for me, considering that pretty much no piece of software was written for a capabilty-based permission system. Unlike mobile OSs like Android, where it’s been possible to give fine grained access to all kinds of system data, sensors and so on for quite a while. Most apps also keep working with refuced functionality if you don’t allow some permissions.