I have been using it since 2006 until today. Since a few years I have Ubuntu Studio because they have a good set of audio/video/photo/graphics programs. But the main reason for Ubuntu studio was the fact that they already had good audio support for Linux by default (real-time kernel, Jack, various audio programs etc.) which was very good for my work in local radio station. I didn’t have to configure anything, everything worked as it should immediately after the installation/upgrade.
If I compare that with the time when I was still using Windows, it’s almost like a great luxury - you install an operating system and immediately have all kinds of application software with which you can work straight away. This is maintained from the outside, by distribution maintainers and renewed by regular upgrade intervals without you as a user having to do anything except apply these upgrades. What a privilege! And you can even use it for free!
And it’s still like that today. I install updates regularly and only use the LTS version which is offered every 2 years. If you need the latest version of any software there are plenty of ppa sources.
And, as I said above, I have been running Arch Linux for almost a decade with very few problems. And of those few problems, just about every one has been due to me trying to do something stupid.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me the likelihood of doing something stupid increases with the amount of stuff I have to do, so my ideal distro is one that allows me to do everything, but requires that I do very, very little. Then I can pick what I want to do.
My impression of Arch is that it requires (and of course allows) a very hands-on approach. I get that some people like this.
Back in the day, a colleague of mine remarked that there were no Linux “users”, just Linux “installers/tweakers”. Arch is just keeping up with the tradition.
In the past 15 years I have installed Linux about 50 times and various versions of Windows approximately 10 times. Generally the Linux installs (again, 90% Debian and (X)Ubuntu) have been super-smooth. The only occasional issue was the video or wifi card being unsuppored by the installer or even the latest kernel. These resolved quickly though later on, and workarounds are possible (good old Debian text-based netinst…). And installation is so fast… I answer the prompts, go and have a coffee, and with a fast net connection I have a desktop and can start transferring files.
In contrast, my Windows installs have been a pain in the neck about 50% the time. Windows XP was notoriously picky, but Windows 10 was the ultimate nightmare. Installer hanging. Or rebooting continuously. Mysterious 0xWHATEVER error codes that I had to look up. Even when it works, it takes a lot of reboots for mysterious reasons.
The truth is that 99% of home users never install Windows, so they don’t experience this. Machines come with Windows preinstalled, and after any kind of repair the service center usually re-images the disk with it.
There is a bit of it that’s about “tweaking” and being able to avoid bloat, but as much of it is about being able to “understand” how my system works. Having built it myself, and having packages that are as close as possible to their upstream counterparts, means that if/when it does go wrong I know what to do to fix it (or at least where to go for help). With Windows and to a lesser extent Mint (when I used to use it) I was much more dependent on hack-and-hope methods of fixing things and copy/pasting stuff from forums.
Learning is always a useful thing, but for me being able to dig into some internals is also valuable for practical reasons. It’s not that I want to tweak Linux. It is usually the last thing I want. It’s just that if there is a problem, I can look at logfiles, find a useful error message, look for a solution, and if it is experimental test it out, or find a workaround.
Windows and OS X do not work perfectly all the time either. And when that happens, my options are rather limited. Practically you cannot make it a warranty issue with anyone, either the hardware manufacturer (who will tell you to first reinstall the driver, then reinstall the OS, and then you are on your own), and don’t even dream about taking it up with the company which provided the OS (“We are sorry to hear you are experiencing problems. Please open an issue at [our tech support site] that will be quietly ignored after we have ascertained that you actually plugged in your computer.”)
Before getting my current Windows 11 laptop two years ago (which I have to admit has been pretty stable from a software POV, so far at least) I ran Xubuntu for several years and it was great. However, if (rhetorically) they’re moving to snap across the board I’ll have to look elsewhere should I return to Linux.
At the risk of sounding like a Microsoft fan – which I most assuredly am not – in the past I’d say I’ve had to apply as about as much “hack and hope” to Linux as to Windows… often in the context of app compatibility. We won’t mention client-side NFS breakage just about every time I upgraded Ubuntu.
Maybe I’ve just been unlucky. To be fair I like to tinker… I just like my tinkering to not impact functionality! LOL
Had Arch break after an update for the first time in years the other week, easy fix though just had to run mkinitcpio -p, for some reason it hadn’t run properly. It’s mostly a very stable OS though that’s never been buggy and gives great performance. The same can’t be said for Arch based distros, not had a good experience with one yet. Buggy, unstable and don’t perform as well in my experience. So I don’t like them being marketed as user friendly and more stable. I’m fine with people using what they want and I know many have good experiences but want people to know what they may be in for and be prepared for it. A world of pain.
Arch is just more messing around installing it and getting it set up properly, once it is set up you don’t need to tinker again if you don’t want and it’s as straightforward as anything else to use from there. The same as Arch based distros though you need to be prepared for what might happen.
I use it for my personal PC, actually EndeavourOS because after a few ‘classic’ installs I was lazy and went the GUI route. It did teach me about all the pieces that go into having a functional operating system, how to fix common issues, got me into vim, etc. For me it has been mostly stable, besides a few issues here and there with nvidia, most caused by me by using beta driver. With dkms it has been mostly solid and stable.
For my home server I was running openSUSE Leap but just changed to Debian this past weekend. OpenSUSE is a special beast and did a few things differently, which I wasn’t a big fan of.
For work I use ubuntu due to it’s overall compatibility with everything and general stability.
My biggest gripe with linux now is nvidia unfortunately… With multiple monitors, plasma is not that smooth specially on X11. Compared to an intel igpu, it’s night and day. It’s fine on Wayland but it has some other graphical bugs that haven’t been fixed yet, even on bleeding edge.
I still use linux because, it’s configurable and free(as in speech) and it never hard crashed on me#* and does not impose me as much bloat as other OS.
I use gentoo but I think I’d be better off on Arch, I set it up for a friend and it seems straight forward and configurable. On the other hand, after 13 years of using gentoo I have an ok knowledge of how it works but compiling everything on rather low spec machine is time consuming and feels like a waste of power (electricity). In the end I do not think I get an equivalent perf boost in return as I did not go full optimisation nerd with PGO or other hard core stuff.
#* after spending a few years on ubuntu mandrake and slackware, I did lost my first gentoo system to careless testing when I was inexperienced back in 2012. Ever ever since, and the system changed medias (from hard drives to SSDs) and hardware (from X2 athlon to core 2 duo to my current i5) without ever needing to be set up again / re installed !
clind-darkroom /home/clind/ # head /var/log/emerge.log
1353597666: Started emerge on: Nov 22, 2012 16:21:05
1353597666: *** emerge gentoo-sources
1353597668: >>> emerge (1 of 1) sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-3.5.7 to /
1353597668: === (1 of 1) Cleaning (sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-3.5.7::/usr/portage/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources/gentoo-sources-3.5.7.ebuild)
1353597669: *** Finished. Cleaning up…
PS : yeah, I do not logrotate on my personal desktop
Mint is based on Ubuntu and they hate snap too. No snap packages come pre installed and I think don’t even show up in software store without manual configuration. If you’re looking to jump ship and want something similar, it’s a great option for dummies like me who do actually want and expect to use a Linux distribution the same way as Mac or Windows - plug and play.
I don’t mind playing with a computer, in fact I actually like to play. But I want to play because I want to play, not because i have to. I’ve had more than enough having to “play” after two+ decades in IT.
The first Linux distro I ever tried was SLS (Soft Landing Systems Linux) in probably 1993 or so. I ordered in on CD. It was terrible – Stuff was missing, in the wrong place, half of it didn’t work, stuff wouldn’t build and the documentation was poor. But then a few years later I bought (in a box, no less!) Red Hat 4.5 and got hooked. Then I found Slackware. Then KDE 2. In 2000 I ordered a new computer from Indelible Blue, dual-boot between Win98 and Red Hat 9 (IIRC). The computer was good and IB built it well but it taught me that dual boot was more of a pain than benefit. Then alone came VirtualBox. For a while I played with CentOS since we ran a lot of RHEL (and CentOS itself) at work. But I got tired of being either tied to older packages or dealing with dependency hell. That’s when I tried Ubuntu. Unity was kinda yucky to me, but Xubuntu was slick. Once I got familiar with apt, ppas, etc., I was set.
But with photography I’ve gotten really attached to a non-destructive workflow (i.e., adjustment layers) and I don’t personally care too much for Krita, so … that’s largely why I’m back on Windows.
To your point, I’ve tried Mint in a VM at it seemed great. Whatever Linux I choose I go for LTS releases.
I’ve had more than enough having to “play” after two+ decades in IT.