What would make you change distro?

Last time I did, it was thanks to canonical pushing snaps and other things no one asked for.

When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)

"We now added AI to the kernel"

Other than massive breakage, I'm not sure. Completely reinstalling and reconfiguring my setup is a pain in the ass, in part because of my slow internet connection. But damn if Ubuntu isn't trying to find out.

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've been using openSuSe Tumbleweed on one device or another for quite a while now. Recently I switched my last device, so I'm officially 100% Tumbleweed. NGL, feels pretty good. I would, however, switch under a few circumstances:

• openSuSe releases Tumbleweed clone with systemD alternative (like runit). I've tried Void repeatedly, but unfortunately never really fell in live with it.
• openSuSe releases NixOS style immutable distro (not the current aeon or kalpa) based on Tumbleweed.

Honestly, Tumbleweed is nearly perfect for me. It's just that I've tasted what life without systemD can be like, and I goddamn miss it... I'm totally hooked on openSuSe products though.

I wait and let everyone figure out what the least broken Linux distro is.

Debian is stable. Stable is good, for an operating system; because I actually want to use my computer.

Not play with the operating system for 4-6 hours per day.

Well one day I heard about NixOS... And that's all it took

I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.

I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?

I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.

Saturday for some

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.

The ability to wake up the laptop from sleep.

Damn, do I regret going with Fedora. Anything newer than kernel 6.10 (which I salvaged from Fedora 39) and my laptop doesn't wake up from sleep anymore.

But changing distros is a hassle and idiot me went with a single partition for system and data, so migrating to another distro requires me to actually backup everything, so I haven't done it yet.

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.

There was a power loss, my PC was on UPS for some time and UPS battery started running low. I initiated the shutdown and systemd stopped it because it could not find a network share on the already stopped server. It didn't gave up so I ended with fucked filesystem because the battery died. Switched to systemd free distro the day after.

I used Debian for more than a decade, then tried Arch when I got some near hardware... I did like being a beta tester, so I went for Void.

The only thing that would make me switch to another distro is if Void stops existing.

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.

A whim, usually.

I used ubuntu for 10+ yr and switched because of firefox snap. To fedora. Wow it is so much better here

Using Debian for probably a decade now (before that, various Linux distributions).

IMHO only community driven distributions with great (in size as in quality) communities are worth investing time/energy and learning.

One reason to ditch Debian would be that the software I need to run would not run anymore on it or that there would be a too strong commercial influence on the project. Another reason is for play/entertainment where better options exist (SteamOS) or if I need up to date hardware support (Fedora).

After more than two decades with Linux, I will not play around with non mainstream distributions anymore. Have seen too many come and go, and in the end I would rather do something interesting with my computer than playing around with the Linux distribution of the week.

Pretty pleased with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Only reason for me to change would be if there were a Debian based rolling release distro with the same quality as Tumbleweed.

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.

Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can't fix.

Switched from Fedora to Debian. Here are my reasons:

1. That computer doesn’t need the latest versions. Debian is new enough for me.
2. 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.
3. Can’t be bothered to do much admin work like that.

what or if you have it takes for you to want to switch to a different distro?

Any meaningful difference that improves my use. I'm a pragmatist, not a distro zealot.

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.

The Nix ecosystem would have to fall apart.

Eh, probably if Guix becomes significantly better I'll switch to it (from NixOS). I really like how seriously they take user freedom, bootstrapping (only 357 bytes of binary to bootstrap everything else from source!) and consistent user interfaces (scheme everywhere). But unfortunately the package repo is just not big and mature enough yet, and declarative configuration options are not as good as they are with NixOS. My job is also Nix-related, and that's another major reason I'm staying for now.

It'd just have to stop working. I've been running debian for probably 10 years now and it's problem free. I don't care that it's not up to date in comparison to other distros. It's stable and works.

I like the question. Nothing would make me change. I use Debian for servers and fedora for my desktop. The distro is not what makes it good or not. The window manager does not change the only think that does change is the package manager and how up to date it is.

I only use Debian for servers because the installer makes it super easier to install without a wm.

I use fedora for my desktop because I like the atomic versions and more up to date packages.

I've been settling on Linux Mint more and more as my generic workhorse distro. I have the least amount of issues with it out of the box compared to any other desktop distro.

It's clean, relatively low bloat, includes codecs and drivers for basically everything I've ever needed to use/do, and Cinnamon's only crime as a DE is looking kind of boring. But it's easy to select a new theme, so not really a huge issue either.

I use a bunch of different distros for different purposes, but if you held a gun to my head and made me pick a distro I had to use exclusively for the rest of my life, it would be Mint with Cinnamon.

If something was to replace it, it would have to be even cleaner, simpler to setup, and have even better general stability and compatibility.

At this point i think nix would have to die. I like the declaritive way of doing things, and invested a lot of time in learning how to use it.

Snap getting installed, ads when starting a shell. Basically the reasons I ditched Kubuntu.

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 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

the creation of a non-kodi htpc/media center alternative that works like a smart TV OS and works on a raspberry pi would get me to change my streaming device.

i stream jellyfin from a home server, and jellyfin on kodi is painful to use :(

an OS that can be controlled with tv-controller buttons and has an interface similar to any of the other players in this space would make me throw away my nvidia shield tv in a heartbeat

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.

I went Gentoo to Debian to Arch.

Gentoo took too much time to maintain. (Not just compile time. But also human time editing config files).

Debian was great, until I had new hardware that needed a recent kernel and Wayland. i tried testing but that wasn't stable enough and took too much of my time maintaining.

I'm using arch now. i would only switch if they do something egregious (push ads, malware or snap)

I've been running Slackware for a long time and have no intention of switching unless Pat steps down and Slackware goes down with him. As long as my base install receives updates, I'm good. I take care of the rest.

Been running Manjaro for years. Don't really know what would make me change.

I guess maybe if I suddenly started getting more and more dependency errors when upgrading packages from the AUR it would make me consider jumping to put Arch.

But right not that's not the case. So the benefit of switching is out weighed by the pain in the ass of having to say Everything up again.

I've been using Arch (BTW) for a few years now. I would only consider switching to something non-Arch if they started enshittifying like Windows. I don't see that happening though.

Better compatibility with Intel Arc cards, for one. Actually that would be a really big one.

I'm on Ubuntu. I had my Intel card work pretty well in Blender 3D,except it couldn't do BVH calculations in cycles, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make it work, because the thing that is supposed to make it work breaks the render kernels for Blender.

Alright... But it still rendered faster than my GTX 1060.

But then I also realised I couldn't boot up any UE5 game because somehow it was convinced my card isn't DX12 compatible. Also major artefacting issues in Oblivion Remastered.

Right... So I decided to go from Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu 25.04, because the cutting edge MESA drivers needs a newer kernel, and the newer kernel is supposedly more Intel card friendly, which might fix my BVH calculation issues with Blender as well.

UE5 games run now, except for Oblivion Remastered, which still has graphical artefacting. But Intel didn't have render kernels for Ubuntu 25.04 yet, so I couldn't render with cycles at all until they updated their repo.

They eventually updated their repo a week or two ago. But the render kernels don't load at all in Blender 3D, telling me "Oh this is meant for OneAPI compatible cards", yes, what the fuck do you think an Intel Arc A770 is!?!

So... Uh... Yeah, if there is a distro put there without all of this, that would be very great.

Modern desktop enviroment design, and seamless updates like in macOS

I used Fedora KDE from 2012 to 2023, then I moved to Fedora Kinoite because I like the idea of atomic distros. Don't know if that counts though since its mostly the same software, just delivered slightly differently (however you could argue that is the case for all distros)

Not sure... I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I'd rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool... but I really don't want to use a weird language for making packages, I'm just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.

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.

All I need is a sudden jolt of "I need to test other distros", distro hop for a day or 2,and then end up back in my distro of choice. This happens every couple of months give or take.

if gentoo decided ti bake spyware into every package that i cant removr thatd be a deal breaker

I'm on Bazzite, so I may be tempted to switch to SteamOS on at least one of my devices, but Bazzite covers pretty much all my bases currently, both for gaming and work. I have a laptop with EndeavourOS and I love it, been using it for about 2-3 years there, but I'm switching laptops soon to a framework so I'll also go with Bazzite there for consistency and due to the official support it has with framework laptops.

Honestly the experience I've had with these distros so far leaves me wishing for nothing more, and now with immutability and distro box I kinda don't see the point in changing to anything else unless Bazzite development dies out or they make a painfully stupid decision, which doesn't seem to be the case so far!

I ditched FreeBSD and Slackware when I got tired of installing everything from scratch on every major release. Compiling stuff from source was interesting for learning and seeing how amazing open source can be, but it wasn't fun long term.

Then I ditched Ubuntu because there was always something not working on laptops, usually related to hibernation/sleep and/or webcam/wireless. I was frustrated with how little care was put into making sure such basic things would simply work.

I'm currently very satisfied with Mint. Everything just works out of the box and Mint X is a lovely theme for old folks like me, who appreciate a proper good looking desktop and can't understand what all the hype is with dark/flat themed UIs these days.

Moved away from Ubuntu due to SNAP. Never looked back.