Distro Hopping

Date:

A year and half ago I ended a two year experiment using Windows as my daily driver OS. In short, I felt WSL had too many wrinkles that annoyed me. I switched back to Linux and it was like coming home after being away for too long.

Since then I've tried a number of distros and desktop environments, and I believe I have finally settled on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition. Getting there took some time though, I tried a number of alternatives, and this is my condensed experience:

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is the most popular distro, and it is therefore well supported hardware wise, and most software is available in some sort of .deb form. However, I'm not a fan of snaps, and I did get annoyed by Gnomes lack of customizability.

EndeavourOS / i3

My next stop was EndeavourOS. I have used Arch Linux a lot in the past and like a lot about it, but I didn't want something that required manual installs. At the same time I returned to i3, which I've used a lot in the past.

In the end this setup required too much mucking about with config files. Small things didn't work, and I'm not nearly as amused by fixing things like screen resolutions as I used to be.

Fedora

After Endeavour, I wanted the rolling release but with a stable twist, and supposedly Fedora should be a good answer. Fedora was the first Linux distro I used some 20+ years ago, and I still have scars from RPM Hell. But it turns out Fedora is quite nice these days; easy to install and frequent updates.

However, I got tired of Gnome again, and installed KDE. Much like Fedora, I had old, bad experiences using it, but it turns out KDE is really good these days. The old cartoonish styling is gone, and it is very customizable. I also like the pragmatic tiling options that are available out of the box.

But no happiness lasts forever. Fedoras rolling releases means that the kernel is updated quite often, which means a lot of restarting. So I liked KDE, but maybe not a rolling release?

Kubuntu

Kubuntu is downstream from Ubuntu, and just replaces the desktop environment. Just like Ubuntu there is an LTS version available, so I tried that. But as a Ubuntu derivative, Kubuntu uses snaps which are really annoying.

Pop!_OS

So to get rid of the snaps I installed Pop!_OS, which is a nice distro that also is downstream of Ubuntu, but the snaps are removed in favor of Flatpak. I immediately installed KDE as the desktop environment, and it worked for a while. Eventually it became evident that KDE does not receive much love from the Pop!_OS maintainers, and I totally understand that given that they are writing their own desktop environment, Cosmic.

Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop

So I am back to Fedora, using the KDE Spin. Yes, it still updates the kernel frequently, but I find it is the best compromise out there for me. I have two computers, one stationary and a Framework Laptop, and Fedora installs cleanly on both and there is minimal amount of fidgeting to get stuff working.

I should probably point out that all this reinstalling is not as hard as it sounds, I have my laptop config stored as an Ansible configuration, so setting stuff up is, almost, just running a script.