A few months on, and I’ve still been wasting time distro hopping…
So I’ve now went back to Linux Mint, which does pretty much all that I need it to do.
And wiped tens of Gbs worth of various Linux live ISOs…
Much better for me to stick with what I find works well, without any real issues (is any distro perfect? that I doubt), and actually use my system, especially since my photography club is starting up again after 2 years of Covid restrictions… Much more productive to have a system to use, for photo editing, rather than wasting time swapping distros out left, right and centre.
Hm. I wouldn’t call it a waste of time.
I bet that you have also learned something new
during your hoppings
(is any distro perfect? that I doubt)
Presumably not.
For the diligent hopper, there are a few ways to
get a bit closer to Nirvana, for instance by
tailoring a Calculate Linux to one’s needs and
then spawn off a personal Live USB/install from that.
I’ve now went back to Linux Mint
More or less the same for me, however, in my case
I want back to good old Manjaro.
But that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone…
I got the itch again: fetched another distro, and
fired up my test suite, among other things clocking
darktable’s with/without openCL handling of a certain image.
Ooooh. Now, that was a surprise:
Manjaro kde 4.535/2.060 (seconds, without/with openCL)
“Mystery distro” kde 4.058/1.573 (seconds, without/with openCL)
No, the test conditions are not fully identical.
Manjaro runs without swap, and is on a much faster NVMe.
Both have Nvidia proprietary drivers, but not certain that
the versions are identical.
Great fun, eh?
[For the time being, I’ll let the “Mystery distro” be anonymous;
have to perform some additional tests. I promise full disclosure
later…]
My fear isn’t that they break, and anyway, even with a LTS release, you have updates that can break things badly: kernel, video driver… (even though so far this never happened).
My problem is more the sudden disappearance of (or incompatibility with) something I use a lot. At least with the LTS system I can see if/when I make the jump or not, and can plan the replacement of the critical functionality. OTOH recent versions of software I use may require a recent distro, so I can get stuck between the distro anvil and the application hammer.
Flatpak can help you maintain an updated software suite in an LTS distro, even if you still miss out on everything else. Besides that I think Fedora is a really good example of stability and updates just in time. In modern times software has been getting updated more and more frequently, and I don’t believe LTS distros make sense for desktop platforms anymore(in the majority of the cases), but good for servers. I run arch for my personal PC but fedora for work, and am thinking of adopting fedora for everything.
Although one issue with flatpaks, is they are sandboxed and isolated from each other. So while if you running Darktable as a native package, and Gimp as a native package, then you can use the darktable lua script to export an image straight to editing in Gimp, and up it comes opened automagically in Gimp. Not so if either darktable or gimp or both are flatpacks.
That “Mystery Distro” sounds intriguing. I’m still keen to go across to a distro which uses KDE, as although Cinnamon is generally painless to use, it is lacking in features somewhat.
But I always have a bad experience on Kubuntu… Recently a “feature” is you cannot open the Software Sources from Discover, as it does not recognise the sudo password… Apparantly its a bug that Ubuntu has known about since the release of the 22.04LTS, but even with 22.04.1 released, it’s still a bug which is present…
With regards to Fedora, here’s an interesting blog on using Fedora 36 KDE spin as a digital illustration workstation… So quite possibly an ideal choice for a photo editing rig…
I was distro hoping, too. That is many years ago now.
By its time"build your own linux" was a big thing. So I tried gentoo after all. It also has its pain, but I stuck to it ever since and I am rather happy, even nowadays it seems not true anymore, that self compiled software is way faster.
Thanks for this blog post, after hopping around for a couple of years and trying and testing many distro’s I came to the same conclusion. Another distro I would consider is OpenSuse Leap…
I was wrong! It was not the distro per se that
produced the heavy speed increase in darktable.
Well, indirectly it was, but the culprit turned out to
be Nvidia’s proprietary driver.
Manjaro uses driver version 515.65.01.
The “new” distro I tried used version 470.141.03,
i.e. an older version — and that older version
is much faster for darktable/openCL.
(24% faster with openCL, 11% faster without openCL.)
So present plans are to keep Manjaro, but to downgrade
that driver.
Anyway, another reason for me to stop Distro Hoping, is my photography club has started up again, after 2 years of being online via Zoom.
So rather than spend an entire season with the club, struggling to get photos processed / edited in time for the monthly competition hand in due to wasting time Distro Hoping, I figure what would be better for me, is to stick with what works. And that is good old Linux Mint.
Distro Hoping. Definition. Where you hop from distro to distro, hoping that the next distro, will be your final choice.
May I kindly object? Or at least change the wording a trifle: Where you hop from distro to distro,
hoping that the next distro will be
somewhat better than the previous one.
Using your version, your hobby will die when you reach Nirvana.
In my case it will still prosper
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden – Presently back at Manjaro –
I used to have distro hopping fever too. Eventually Slackware cured it for me, though life events probably had an influence too. I’ve been using Slackware for the last 6.5 years now.
