linuxmemes

WSLinux

Mint Cinnamon. Fight me.

Distro wars, like the old vi vs emacs wars (showing my age, I know) is not entirely serious. I never understood sportsball fandom, but it's kind of like that. Debian is my home team; if you use Fedora, you're from out-of-town.

This is dumb because it's making it out to seem like there are Super Distro Wars and not just folks calling out bad decision makers like Ubuntu and Manjaro, and non-free-as-in-beer distros like Zorin and Elementary

I'm pretty sure outside of those two categories nobody really cares

I had to ditch my girlfriend because she became an arch elitist. Debian ftw.

Put any distro in front of me and provided I don't need to master it, I'm good. Ubuntu is fine. Debian is fine. RedHat is fine. Fedora is fine. I even have a tiny low-end system that is using Bohdi. Whatever. We're all using mostly the same kernel anyway.

90% of what I do is in a container anyway so it almost doesn't matter; half the time that means Alpine, but not really. That includes both consuming products from upstream as well as software development. I also practically live in the terminal, so I couldn't care less what GUI subsystem is in play, even while I'm using it.

I've been a Windows... Let's say a power-user, no expert but I could install it, find a way to troubleshoot most problems. Then at high school a friend lent me a bit outdated Knoppix CD. I never managed to make ppp work on that so no internet, but I loved the old KDE. Somewhat later, when we had a normal DSL line with a proper router, I got Fedora. Then Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian for a while...

Finally I found Gentoo. And there I am, some 10 years later, still on that. After a bit of a bumpy road of the first install (no automation, but the handbook is very helpful if you know the basic Linux and HW terms) it was almost flawless. I remember two problems, and both of them were my own fault. The first one was some testing kernel version that had a bug where small files on ext3 filesystem would get randomly corrupted. The second was when I was trying to remove some hidden files, mangled the command and ran basically rm -rf /* (seriously, don't do that, it will delete everything on your system). I reinstalled the system (I had data on a different drive that either wasn't mounted atm or it didn't reach them before I Ctrl-c'd that command.) and all was well.

Finally I did last clean install when I bought new (used) Ryzen build to replace my old i5-2500k, I would've had to recompile world anyway and I had pretty much dependency hell of my own making at that point (I was testing tons of unstable stuff, new Plasma 5 from testing repo and so on).

Now I'm running mostly stable system with only bunch of packages unmasked from testing and there are no problems with that. I never had that with any other distro. No matter if Deb based, rpm based, sooner or later I inevitably ran into some variant of "I need a package that's not in basic repo, and the package I found requires a version of some library that's not available as well" or something like that. In Gentoo, the packages either compile against the version you have installed, or if not possible, you can have more versions installed at the same time in different slots. Also if you need something that's not available in repo, you can just write a text file that downloads and compiles the version you need and it integrates in the package manager automatically, no need to create whole Deb/rpm package.

Nobara! switched 2 days ago, deleted my Windows partition 3 hours ago because it's smooth sailing and quite the different experience compared to bashing my head against debian jessie ages ago.

Edit: the final nail in the coffin were the fking backported ads in the start menu. seriously, wtf.

Just curious does anyone actually care about what distro people use or more just a meme?