Subj : Distrohopping
To   : All
From : esc
Date : Tue Aug 22 2023 21:57:11

Well, in the spirit of some of the recent linux conversations, I figured I'd give a little writeup on my recent experience.

So, typically I am an Arch loyalist, but I do distrohop a bit. Recently I was using Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu, actually) and was quite happy with it "just working" but naturally that wasn't enough for me, and I decided it was time to experiment.

I should mention I have two main computers. Both are laptops. One of them is in the "Ultrabook" category with a huge LCD, full keyboard with numpad, and an NVidia dGPU along with the Intel iGPU. The other computer is a simple slimbook ultraportable by Lenovo.

Both work well and are modern computers. No issues. The Ultrabook has Alder Lake processor, the Lenovo has Skylake. So you can tell by the family that these are recent machines.

Anyway, I am happily using Arch on the Ultrabook. However, I wanted to experiment with the Lenovo. First, I tried installing Windows 11 just to see what the whole experience is like these days, and...even on a highly provisioned machine, it completely runs like shit. I can't /stand/ it. It felt like adware-as-an-OS. It's terrible and I cannot believe Microsoft ships this thing to people. It's very disorganized and incoherent. The icons all have seemingly random stylings, the file manager right-click menu makes no sense, the OneDrive integration taking over your personal directories without even asking...ugh. It's terrible.

So I was watching a few YouTube reviews and folks were singing praises about Debian 12. I decided to give it a go. The installation process was pretty straightforward, but my wifi card went into powersave mode and there was no way for me to disable it, so it kind of took forever. I left the defaults and ended up booting into Gnome on Wayland.

Gnome is utter trash. It is so fucking terrible in every way. Why do distros still ship this as their default OS? It's slower than KDE Plasma (the other "big" DE), has far fewer features, relies too much on extensions to do basic things, and the theming is so complicated you can easily break shit and have an ugly desktop. No thank you.

So here I sit pondering my next move. I have basically narrowed it down to:

1. Just take it on the chin, give up, and reinstall Arch and call it a day
2. Reinstall Debian but with a different DE and see how it goes
3. Reinstall Kubuntu, since I already have an Arch dedicated machine
4. Try NixOS, a declarative and immutable OS
5. Try ClearLinux, a distro built by Intel, with some unique features
6. Maybe...Qubes? For the #security? Could be fun. Could be frustrating though.

Thoughts?

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