We've got to come up with a different acronym. What says old and stable?
"I use Debian, lol (lots of love)"

I once heard someone say that Debian is like the sound Dads make when getting off the couch. I’ve never felt so seen.

(I absolutely run Debian, lol)

I reverted back to Mint when remote sound stopped working in Remmina.

Yeah, I ran arch through college, it broke 3 times over 4 years, basically each time because Nvidia updated. Now that I don't have the time to fuss with spending a couple of hours chrooting in and fixing Nvidia stuff, I just swapped to endeavorOS sway community edition (and made sure none of my PCs have Nvidia anything in them) and haven't had an issue yet.

That doesn't happen. When it breaks, it's always recoverable, and it very very very rarely breaks (>10 years Arch user here, never lost sleep about it)

I used to do much distro hopping coming from gentoo and settling down with endeavour. My tip for all of you: use lvm for everything outside boot, root and swap (vms, home, games). That way a complete reinstall just takes minutes.

I'd guess that keeping configs in Ansible would reduce that setup time to an hour or two.

Skill issue.

I've been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

It's all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that's not what you want, stick to Debian.

One huge advantage of a rolling distro is that generally only one thing can break at a time :)

whats dist-upgrade? this is the first time ive heard of it

I see your 6 year old python version and raise you RHEL5 running python 2.5 in 2022.

That thing didn't even have a base Exception class.

I wonder if there's a package manager that does just that, I want the real bleeding edge!

Yeah, but he has stated that he really doesn't have an opinion. He just happened to install Fedora on the family PC a long time ago and now he neither wants to deal with two separate distros, nor switch the whole household over.

fence and then grass and then dirt and rocks

I'm in this post and I don't like it

To me it kinda depends on what hardware/distro.

Currently running MX on multiple systems for more than a year now and it’s been pretty smooth sailing.

I do remember, however, using fedora and whatnot ages ago having exactly what you describe.

If you want something more stable you might wanna look at debian, opensuse,… (I’m sure someone more knowledgeable will complete this list). They might not be as flashy but you can depend on those and get some work done.

Either keep things minimal or keep the complex stuff isolated.

Big up for Tumbleweed, i run it on servers.

Best feeling ever.

Did you install the actual nvidia drivers or were you just using the default nouveau driver?

nvidia drivers are good performance-wise, you should have installed the proprietary ones because mint comes with nouveau, which does not perform well at all. if you did that, let's talk about L3 cache. ironically gaming on low end hardware is worse on linux because apparently proton needs quite a bit of that cache. my previous cpu (9600kf) had 9 MB and it was hopeless, current one has almost 100 and performance is not an issue anymore.

btw pop os comes with proprietary nvidia drivers so you don't need to think about it all, but because they ship it with their half-done cosmic de, can't recommend it to newcomers anymore..

Opensuse Tumbleweed is my way to go and I am pretty happy. Also do have an NVIDIA Card..

I’m just waiting for win 11 to fail catastrophically in me. That will definitely give me the time to install Linux… checks notes… Debian?

Tumbleweed and Nvidia Proprietary drivers worked really well for my games. There is Bazzite that's ready to go for gaming too.

What games specifically? Some distros require a bit more driver installation, so maybe that was part of it (was running an rtx 2070 super on linux until a few months ago on linux, didn't have any issues with frame rates). The poor driver support is mostly on laptops, as they sometimes have issues switching between integrated and discrete graphics.

On my system I am using kde x11 instead of wayland for the same reason. Last time I tried wayland I was getting half of the framerate compared to x11.

At some point I want to switch to a gaming-oriented distros and see if it's magically better there.

ironic.gif

other distros don't?

Most recently I switched from Debian because the version of plasma I was running had a bunch of little issues running wayland on my Nvidia card (bought when i was running windows, will be going amd... Someday). The new version of plasma had a bunch of Nvidia specific fixes that wouldn't make it down to my system for months.

Tbh, I also kinda like the little issues that i occasionally have with rolling release distros. I learn a lot from having to fix things and it keeps me sharp.