If you have been using Linux for +10 years, what are you using now?
Been using Linux for over a decade, and last few years Ubuntu (on desktops/laptops), plus Debian on servers, but been looking to switch to something less “Canonical”-y for a long time (since the Amazon search fiasco, pretty much).
Appreciate recommendations or just an interesting discussion about people’s experiences, there are no wrong answers.
Edit: Thanks for the lots of interesting answers and discussions. I will try a few of the suggestions in a VM.
I’m surprised this shite is the most popular distro, let’s start with that.
Really? They did a ton of work to make Linux accessible to the masses, have an active and helpful community to help out if you get stuck, works really well out of the box on most hardware and you’re pretty much guaranteed there’s going to be a compatible deb available for it if you’re looking for software outside normal repos. Seems like a no brainer tbh.
You’re correct, if that’s true. I wasn’t following them since almost twenty years ago. They were great at the time, all these free CDs you could get, I’ve ordered some as a kid and they really arrived, that was magic. I have some gratitude for that.
What I don’t like is quite a number of very questionable decisions they made over these years after. That’s why I am surprised someone thinks they are a great distro. You want Deb, why not go with Debian? Especially on a server. I truly have no idea who are the people who install Ubuntu on a server.
In my experience, Fedora just works. And hence, I recommend it to everyone. Ubuntu, not. Snap alone made me not considering it ever again.
None of which makes the distro shite. The things I remember them getting shit for are:
Unity/mir
Upstart
Snaps
Amazon ads
Advertising their premium version.
Of all of those the Amazon thing is the only one I have a strong objection to. The rest I can’t say I’ve even particularly noticed the changes if I’m honest and most other Ubuntu users probably haven’t either. They seem to get a lot of crap for “doing their own thing all the time” which seems odd coming from the Linux community.
I came to Ubuntu initially because it was the new hotness, I’ve never really had an issue with it functionally in 12 years or so, so no real need to change.
Why not deb? Why not any number of other distros? I do run deb on my NAS as it goes and I’m not trying to stan for Ubuntu (honestly) but it gets a lot of undeserved hate. It’s not a super exciting distro or anything but it tends to work fine for me.