How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

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Hoser Rob
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by Hoser Rob »

I haven't distro hopped for a while, tried a few. Fedora was the worst. The only reason I tried Mint in the first place was that their Xfce version was LTS and Ubuntu wasn't. Found I liked it.

But the Mint 18.3 KDE on my laptop is going EOL in a week so I'm going to try MX very soon. I still cannot believe Mint dropped KDE support. Every other DE I've tried seems amateurish in comparison.
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by sdibaja »

I struggled with the Debian Installer.
Once I finally decided to put a little effort into it I figured it out.
It is now my Preferred installer, easy to do it My Way.
Never looked back. Debian is Great!

everything I want, and not a bunch of cruft.
Secure, and truly Stable for years on end. Never a update error, it always works.

Sorry Clem.

PS: I still install and test lots of things, but Debian is always my daily driver.
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karlchen
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by karlchen »

Hm, actually, my switch from Windows to Linux many, many years later was prepared by
1. SCO Unix
2. Microsoft Xenix (yes, a bad regression from SCO Unix to Microsoft Xenix)
3. SCO Xenix (yes, at that point in time they offered both, Xenix and Unix, before they decided just to sue people with unjustified patent claims)

The first really usable Linux, i.e. one with a graphical desktop, was a little Suse 6.<something> company server with a real KDE.

But it took 4 more years or almost 5, till a little Karmic Koala finally conquered my heart.
Ever since Ubuntu has been around on my machines, even though later on mostly disguised in Minty clothes.

No sooner than 2020, the first directly Debian based distro did not only make its way onto one of my machines, but it might be there to stay ...
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by AZgl1800 »

Hoser Rob wrote: Mon Mar 22, 2021 9:05 am I haven't distro hopped for a while, tried a few. Fedora was the worst. The only reason I tried Mint in the first place was that their Xfce version was LTS and Ubuntu wasn't. Found I liked it.

But the Mint 18.3 KDE on my laptop is going EOL in a week so I'm going to try MX very soon. I still cannot believe Mint dropped KDE support. Every other DE I've tried seems amateurish in comparison.
I looked at KDE,
and by the time I had finally configured it like I wanted it, Cinnamon had already done all that....

so for me, Cinnamon is the only DE that I will use.
I have the others in a VM just to look at and convince myself, I have what I need.
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Swampthing
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by Swampthing »

Red Hat, about 20 years ago.
Ubuntu Studio, couple of years ago.
Linux Mint and I'm staying.
Later i tried Debian, Elementary OS and Ubuntu, but i can't really be bothered with other distributions, because LM has everything I need and it's so user friendly.
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tuxoneseven
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by tuxoneseven »

GNULinux wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 8:14 am i like trying out new distro's (though i never use them for more than a day or two :mrgreen: )
so, what all distors have you tried before/after coming to mint?
and do you still try out new distros just out of curiosity?
I still use many different operating systems at once. I'm surrounded by 6-7 computers on my desk :lol: I use whatever gets the job done with the fewest effort. I've little interest in fixing sysadmin problems, so if there's an issue I just grab another pc
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by sdibaja »

tuxoneseven wrote: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:53 am
GNULinux wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 8:14 am i like trying out new distro's (though i never use them for more than a day or two :mrgreen: )
so, what all distors have you tried before/after coming to mint?
and do you still try out new distros just out of curiosity?
I still use many different operating systems at once. I'm surrounded by 6-7 computers on my desk :lol: I use whatever gets the job done with the fewest effort. I've little interest in fixing sysadmin problems, so if there's an issue I just grab another pc
I am with both of you on that. I too have lots of hardware, and I multi-boot all of them.
the different distros give me ideas that I often adapt to my Daily Driver OS.

The bigger question: Which OS do you use as a fallback "it always works for me"?
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by kenetics »

At least 30 or 40. I've thrown away stacks of CDs.

My first was PCLOS "Big Daddy" and then several Ubuntus.
I ran many Puppies on a netbook and an older 32 bit desktop.

I found Mint in 2006 (It was "Bea" at the time) and that's been my main choice from then on, although I still test different ones now and then as I have several computers (all home built).

You can't beat Mint for reliability and consistency.
Using Mint as primary OS since 2006.
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by Burning Desires 69 »

None Before, Only 1 After,
& That Is Mint Cinnamon. =D

If you don't explore New things, then you'll never know what your missing.
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by RickyRaccoon »

kenetics wrote: Sat Mar 27, 2021 9:16 am You can't beat Mint for reliability and consistency.
Agreed!


I cut my Linux teeth on Mint Cinnamon; but I have to admit that since my previous post in this thread I've been doing some more distro-hopping. Still think Mint Cinnamon is the gold standard for someone coming from Windows, and it's still a daily driver on the family computer (Acer)- but I now also am experimenting again with Lubuntu on it- some bugs to be worked out, and to me that's where Mint Cinnamon really shines- it behaves like it ought to out of the gate, as far as I'm concerned. But for me with computers that are slower or slightly RAM challenged, Mint Cinnamon hasn't always been the most efficient choice.

I now use (for now) MX Linux on my lappy- it performs a little snappier than Cinnamon. I like the look and feel of it and it seems fairly solid. I would have installed Lubuntu on it, to get more snap out of it, but it seems they have no install option for LUKS- there's supposedly work-arounds but seriously, what distro doesn't provide for full-disk encryption out of the box? That's unacceptable and I'm not wasting my time fixing something they should already have in place.

I have MX on the Acer but it's not a daily driver. I have Lubuntu on the Acer and it's pretty darn snappy but I have a font problem when running the NVIDIA driver which as far as I'm concerned ought not to be- it's going to be fixable but if Mint can run it right without borking the system font DPI, other distros can do it. Mint remains the one I conduct all my business on, and use to manipulate files and work on graphics and audio, and that's not likely to change, because it's just hard to beat Mint Cinnamon to me.

My homebrew is sluggish with Mint Cinnamon- quad core Celeron, but a low-power chip loping along at a leisurely 1.6 GHz. For anything that needs a lot of 3D rendering antiX is the must-have on that machine, Mint Cinnamon really eats at the GPU performance even using the NVIDIA proprietary driver. I don't care for Mint XFCE; never have- and it's still not going to match the stripped-down antiX. I'm fiddling with Lubuntu as a possible daily driver for it for non-graphics intensive uses- a compromise between ease of use and speed. antiX is just too stripped down and arcane to want to use all the time- Mint has spoiled me!

I was configuring my spare desktop for a friend (who decided to go in a different direction so not now) and it's an Emachine with a wickedly anemic AMD notebook processor, an E-350 dual-core 1.6 GHz and slow compared to an Intel in the same class, and really, the only realistic distro that doesn't have you waiting in front of the screen, but is still noob-friendly (to an extent) is the Lubuntu. Has plenty of RAM but that CPU was a sorry thing when it sat new on Walmart's shelf. If I use it for myself as a backup, it'll have to be Lubuntu, or nothing.

So I'm branching out in a few directions based on the machines I have. If I were to go out and get a brand-new desktop or laptop with modern performance, of course I'm installing Mint Cinnamon; that's a no-brainer for me. But in the real world with my real machines, I find myself mixing and matching and bouncing between those four distros.
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by Michael_Hathaway »

1978, enrolled in college, I was 8 years old. I began programming in Apple Dos. We had 8086/8088s. Killed most of the computers at my school with the infamous del *.*|y command. Got a visit from the FBI. I wasn't allowed to touch a computer until I was 18. My parents shipped me off to Ireland to stay with my cousins. Went back to college at 18, became an engineer a few years later. Played with Slackware. I played with the early Ubuntu, which was an ugly brown and just a frame. Too many distributions. I was big into KDE, a fan of Jonathan Riddell. Canonical came in, started to take over things. There was a movement to Mint, so I went to that and never left. I never got involved with anything until about 2018 when I got fed up with Microsoft and I decided to start helping Windows users transition to Linux using Mint. This way I can give the finger to Microsoft and Canonical at the same time. :D
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by ivar »

Mandrake was my first venture into linux, downloaded it @work during a weekend after we upgraded from 64k dialup to 64k leased line, lol! About 1999 I think.
Played around with it and broke it before really getting familiar with it, e.g by installing lightweigh windows managers without fully understanding what I was doing, :D

Next was ubuntu "breezy badger" , I think I mostly used it to play Mah-jong. Then found Knoppix LiveCD which I used as a rescue CD to salvage user files from pcs with borked windows installations.
Fast forward to last year, my brother had put mint on the media pc at our shared summer house to replace a flaky win10 install. I liked what I saw so put mint on a retired Intel NUC from work, which later got some server stuff (Influx/Grafana) installed. It worked fine so I did another one for home use, this time with Ubuntu server with GUI. It didnt work the same as the mint one, I found the desktop environment confusing and software installed as Snap packages to be more hassle to configure. My next nuc server will get Mint, for ease of use + familiarity.
At last , raspberry pI OS on a PI 4 and on a small HP Atom powered netbook. Also got Kali linux for the PI, not gotten around to try it out yet.

Next distros to try out will most likely be Debian for some server stuff, and Manjaro if I suddenly find a suitable laptop sitting idle
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by motoryzen »

1. Ubuntu
2. Vanilla Arch
3. Manjaro Cinnamon and XFCE
4. Linux Lite
5. Feren OS
6. Zorin OS
7. and most recently on my laptop for the moment...Antix Linux ( VERY ...low/light ram and cpu usage...very basic looking and functioning..but damn...great for REALLY low/old hardware but you don't want the insanity of trying to get internet working with Puppy Linux. It is based on Debian yet you have multiple version of it you can select ...- such as core- if you want to "build up" ...sor of a vanilla arch approach from what it sounds like to me )

https://antixlinux.com/about/
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by MurphCID »

Mandrake Linux 7.0
Ubuntu
Mint.

Since then: Many, always come back to Mint.
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by legacypowers »

openSUSE was my first distro back in 2008 i guess, i really liked YaST2.
After a long time without using linux i installed Debian when Windows 7 support ended.
Then i bought a new laptop and the kernel in Debian wasn't playing nice with the hardware, so i installed LM MATE Edition, then when my old SSD failed i installed LM Cinnamon(which on my experience feels more polished than MATE)
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Re: How many distro's have you tried before and after coming to mint?

Post by dm999 »

Only a couple before, including Ubuntu which I just find plain ugly.

Since then I've always got a live USB on the go and have looked at dozens of OS's, not that I'm looking for a replacement to Mint but because I'm inquisitive. Currently I'm playing with Feren OS.

I'll stick with my zippy Mint XFCE for the time being, but now that KDE has become lighter on resources I wish that Mint still did KDE...
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