As an old Jedi Master once said, “[Masters] are what they grow beyond”

😆 This thread was what made me realize I’m at the 20 year mark. Funny how the milestones keep sneaking up. You’d think after doing it for so long getting older would feel more familiar.

I think the ideal is to have some people who gravitate toward the bleeding edge, and some people who gravitate toward the stable center. I think, when the system works well, each group benefits the other. For example, I like debian for my servers because I like my servers to be as stable and low-maintenance as possible, but I am also really fascinated by NixOS and its approach to system administration. Personally I still need to play with it some more before I trust it with a production service, but I could see running a Nix-based distro at some point. And I appreciate all the brave testers out there right now, finding problems and fixing them. What they do makes my life as a simple server manager a lot easier.

Agreed. I found a pleasure in using openbox that I have not found in other DEs. Working with such constrained and frankly crappy hardware made it worth the investment to get the UI as light and functional as it could be, and I’m pleased with the performance I got out of that little machine. It was fun to use. Then it got stolen and I had to start from scratch as I had no backups because I had nothing to back up to, and the task of replicating it all over again seemed daunting, so I decided it was worth getting comfortable with a DE that worked more or less how I wanted it to out of the box. There is something to be said for the ease of defaults, but I’ve never gotten a machine that “just so” , before or since.

How do you like it? I’ve seen it around but never installed it to play with it. Is it helpful in your creative endeavors?

I don’t use the ArchWiki as much as I used to, but I have been in awe of it for a while. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another wiki of similar scope that well put together. It’s quite an achievement in my opinion.

Wisdom from a Jedi born to bring balance to things.

That’s how it should work, I think. All the downstream distros do their crazy experiments, the community identifies what it likes and doesn’t like, and what it likes makes its way upstream to spawn. The further upstream it gets, the wider its influence is felt. Debian is what makes it that far upstream.

It turns out spinning things is really useful and boiling fluids is a convenient way to spin things.

The day I stop distrohopping will be the day I die.

The first linux distro I remember using was Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), so I’m just about at 20 years, maybe a bit less than that; I think it had been released for a while before I decided to give it a go. I tend to stick with debian-based distros, though I’ve used arch variants off and on for my daily driver for years at a time. Still got it kicking around on some machines now, though not any of my daily drivers. Servers are a mix of Debian and Ubuntu Server, machines with UI are either Ubuntu or Mint, or some resource-light version of Ubuntu, depending on the device and the mood when I last reformatted them. I have used Fedora/RedHat/CentOS at various points, but usually because someone was paying me to do so. Same story with OpenSUSE, but even less commonly. I have a few devices running variously dated versions of PostmarketOS, Lineage OS, even one device that still runs CyanogenMod (it does not get internet privileges). I have a few Raspberry PIs that all run Raspbian (or whatever it’s called now).

EDIT: Just remembered I used to use CrunchBang Linux for a long time. I bought the only computer I could afford (a “netbook” with Win 10 Starter), put crunchbang on it (after experimenting with a few distros), and really kinda fell in love with OpenBox. I don’t use it anymore because I don’t like the default settings and haven’t been bothered to set it up properly lately, but I had that netbook set up just so and it worked really well. it was my main and only computer for several years.