What would make you change distro?

I’ve been in Pop!_OS for a lot of years now; and Ubuntu/Mint before that. The lack of updates in Pop!_OS (not Cosmic!) is starting to wear me thin; the U22.04 basis is starting to get a bit threadbare and their App Store has always been broken— but now it seems even more brokener.

The Cosmic Alphas don’t work well on my machine, Wayland is still pretty unstable and some of the apps I have to use just don’t work with it at all. I’ve got way too much to do to go and try to debug it or hack it or even give up and go try another distro. When they take Cosmic out of beta, if it doesn’t work for me I’m just going to drop and go back to hopping. Or worse, I may just go back to MacOS 100% except for when I’m working on some server-side shit.

Last time I did, it was thanks to canonical pushing snaps and other things no one asked for.

Same here. I had been sticking to Ubuntu flavours for over 15 years.
- I stuck with Ubuntu over a decade, but eventually Arch had several packages I was interested in that Ubuntu did not, plus the Arch wiki. I wanted to use Sway with several rofi/dmenu type utils, and Arch had a lot more of those packaged.
Same. I had been using Ubuntu for over a decade for all of my Desktops, but had used CENTOS/Rocky for servers. Now I switched to Fedora for desktop which simplifies things since now only my Raspberry Pis use deb vs rpm.
Snap is super frustrating and the gate-keeping of updates and features behind the Pro subscription is annoying. I don't want to have an account if I dint have to. It's just one more privacy violation waiting to happen with no real benefit to me even if it is free for personal use.

When the Distro starts talking about enterprise features during the installation process (looking at you canonical)

"We now added AI to the kernel"

This would be 100% valid
Weird Al: Kernel Drivers
A parody kernel of Linux USB Support

Other than massive breakage, I'm not sure. Completely reinstalling and reconfiguring my setup is a pain in the ass, in part because of my slow internet connection. But damn if Ubuntu isn't trying to find out.

Just use Mint.
- How exactly am I going to do that without completely reinstalling?

I've changed distro's a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.

Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.

The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).

Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.

Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.

Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.

Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.

Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.

I really appreciate this well detailed response! 30 years of changing distros is pretty amazing you must know a lot

I've been using openSuSe Tumbleweed on one device or another for quite a while now. Recently I switched my last device, so I'm officially 100% Tumbleweed. NGL, feels pretty good. I would, however, switch under a few circumstances:

openSuSe releases Tumbleweed clone with systemD alternative (like runit). I've tried Void repeatedly, but unfortunately never really fell in live with it.
openSuSe releases NixOS style immutable distro (not the current aeon or kalpa) based on Tumbleweed.

Honestly, Tumbleweed is nearly perfect for me. It's just that I've tasted what life without systemD can be like, and I goddamn miss it... I'm totally hooked on openSuSe products though.

Out of curiosity how is life without systemd better? What does it taste like?
- Boot times. I am the kind of person who shuts my computer (may it be a laptop or desktop) down, whenever I'm not using it. With systemD, boot times are generally kind of annoying; runit, however, completely changes this. It really feels amazing to turn a Void Linux system on, and have it boot in seconds, with just one screen of logs. On top of that, if you're doing a arch-style install (like the Void Linux minimal install), runit is just much nicer and more ergonomic. The main point is really boot time though, which I think is improved due to adhering to the Unix philosophy and having much less bloat. Using a runit system reminds you of how bloated and slow (and kinda convoluted) systemD is.
  I'm also the kinda guy who spends hours optimizing my neovim config (~80 plugins, including LSP) for 20 millisecond start-up times. In the end, I still use Tumbleweed though.

I wait and let everyone figure out what the least broken Linux distro is.

Debian is stable. Stable is good, for an operating system; because I actually want to use my computer.

Not play with the operating system for 4-6 hours per day.

I tried so hard to get Debian working on my new build. Problem being: it's a new build. Debian's glacial pacing meant my hardware won't see support for a while. I might try again when Trixie finally releases, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
So I guess my answer is... I'll distro hop when stability & support reach equal levels.
- Trixie is usable right now. My server is running it. The final release is expected this summer.

Well one day I heard about NixOS... And that's all it took

Sell it to me, please

I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.

I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?

I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.

I love my Tumbleweed install. It is rolling and new while also being rock solid. But I do have the itch to try new stuff which j do sometimes
- Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.
  I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high
- Love me some tumbleweed. Snapper ready to go on on top of everything is also very nice to have.
would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained
I saw too much while turning the corpse they kicked over the fence into a unitedLinux we could ship and support.
The horrors.
If the entire company died and absolutely new people made a new company by the same name with none of the former staff or principals involved, then I would consider suse. The taint goes so deep I would not consider even a new source drop with the same staff.
- I'm not familiar with any of what you're saying. Would you care to expand on it a little bit? Also, which distro do you use instead?
Same scenario as mine.

Saturday for some

Similar to other users - repos go down or corporate stuff starts to creep in.

As long as I get to maintain agency over my system I’m pretty content.

An operating system is a means to an end. I'm not looking to critique a package manager, I'm looking to get work done. If it can support the applications I need it's perfect.

There was a power loss, my PC was on UPS for some time and UPS battery started running low. I initiated the shutdown and systemd stopped it because it could not find a network share on the already stopped server. It didn't gave up so I ended with fucked filesystem because the battery died. Switched to systemd free distro the day after.

That sucks!
I'm on Ubuntu, which I admit is not a popular option around here. But when my power goes out I use apcupsd and a network component to alert my attached or networked Ubuntu machines. When the power first goes out all of my non-essential machines automatically shut down gracefully. When the backup batteries get low enough (I have several separate APC units around the house) my essential machines also shut down automatically.
When the power comes back up one of my machines automatically powers up and runs a few checks before turning most of my other stuff back on.
I have very few power issues which last long enough for my batteries to run out, but when I do the only evidence is a few alerts and the fact that I have to log back into everything. All of my windows restore on my GUI machines, and no filesystem issues occur. It's more seamless than when I ran Windows, granted that was 25 years ago.
I'm similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.
- For servers, yes. But I want full control on desktop.
- I'm similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.
  You say that like it's a feature we never had before. I used apcupsd to save my homelab server many, maaany times during blackouts in NJ, and I was there from 1999.
Switched to systemd free distro the day after.
PCLinuxOS?
Tell me more about how lennart's cancer killed your machine too.
- It was Ubuntu. Switched to Artix...
  Systemd has its own OOM killer which was killing my VMs as soon as there is more than 50% of RAM in use.

I used to distro hop all the time until I settled on Tumbleweed. I used that for eight years until Suse bared their corporate teeth and I got fed up with being two generations behind on the Nvidia drivers. I've been using EndeavourOS for almost a year and don't see me moving any time soon.

Huh? Nvidia even have their own Tumbleweed repository.
- Yeah I know. You'd think it would be bang up to date, but that wasn't the case. I think it has been updated now though.

The ability to wake up the laptop from sleep.

Damn, do I regret going with Fedora. Anything newer than kernel 6.10 (which I salvaged from Fedora 39) and my laptop doesn't wake up from sleep anymore.

But changing distros is a hassle and idiot me went with a single partition for system and data, so migrating to another distro requires me to actually backup everything, so I haven't done it yet.

I've been settling on Linux Mint more and more as my generic workhorse distro. I have the least amount of issues with it out of the box compared to any other desktop distro.

It's clean, relatively low bloat, includes codecs and drivers for basically everything I've ever needed to use/do, and Cinnamon's only crime as a DE is looking kind of boring. But it's easy to select a new theme, so not really a huge issue either.

I use a bunch of different distros for different purposes, but if you held a gun to my head and made me pick a distro I had to use exclusively for the rest of my life, it would be Mint with Cinnamon.

If something was to replace it, it would have to be even cleaner, simpler to setup, and have even better general stability and compatibility.

A whim, usually.

I used Debian for more than a decade, then tried Arch when I got some near hardware... I did like being a beta tester, so I went for Void.

The only thing that would make me switch to another distro is if Void stops existing.

Currently switching my desktops from alpine to void just for the fun of it. Servers will always be alpine but void just feels right on the desktop!

I used ubuntu for 10+ yr and switched because of firefox snap. To fedora. Wow it is so much better here

I am
Glad you had the courage to try something new
Impressed you had your limit and stuck to it
Relieved as a former security person that you're improving package validation and will reap the rewards even if you don't notice
Disappointed it wasn't before some seriously sketchy shit has gone down with RH and trickled down to fedora.
Finally
Overjoyed as fuck if it seemed like an easy switch, but please correct me there.
- Could you elaborate on the sketchy shit? I am literally about to switch from openSUSE to Fedora, is there anything I should be aware of? Thanks for your time.

Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can't fix.

Using Debian for probably a decade now (before that, various Linux distributions).

IMHO only community driven distributions with great (in size as in quality) communities are worth investing time/energy and learning.

One reason to ditch Debian would be that the software I need to run would not run anymore on it or that there would be a too strong commercial influence on the project. Another reason is for play/entertainment where better options exist (SteamOS) or if I need up to date hardware support (Fedora).

After more than two decades with Linux, I will not play around with non mainstream distributions anymore. Have seen too many come and go, and in the end I would rather do something interesting with my computer than playing around with the Linux distribution of the week.

Debian for about two decades: It would take something pretty major to shift me - probably a hostile takeover, major policy shift or commercialisation, none of which is likely.

At worked we shifted from Centos to Rocky for the obvious reason, and are happy with the choice so far.

Same here, it's less about the month to month technical changes and waaay more about general policy and major development decisions.

The Nix ecosystem would have to fall apart.

Right? My flake is pretty complex at this point. I use it for over 6 computers, my storage server, compute servers, VPS etc etc. Been perfectly stable for over 3 years. I update with the release cycle every 6 months. Never needed more than a small change here or there and it usually warns me of the depreciations ahead of time.
Thankfully I've only needed to roll back twice and it was perfect. Lost no data and kept working while I waited for a fix. If my flake ever blows up completely I'll switch.... but I dobt that will happen lol
Did they settle that confusing governance drama that happened a little while ago?
As a outsider looking in, I thought that was very much the "falling apart" moment
- I agree! I was certainly starting to look into forks or other alternatives, but it was "settled". Eelco stepped down and a constitutional assembly was created to develop a governance structure.
  https://github.com/NixOS/nix-constitutional-assembly?tab=readme-ov-file

Switched from Fedora to Debian. Here are my reasons:

That computer doesn’t need the latest versions. Debian is new enough for me.
The update GUI has been broken for years. I fixed it once, but then it broke again after a year. I’ve been installing updates from the terminal, because I can’t trust the GUI. I realized I appreciate reliability, and that’s exactly what Debian is all about.
Can’t be bothered to do much admin work like that.

what or if you have it takes for you to want to switch to a different distro?

Any meaningful difference that improves my use. I'm a pragmatist, not a distro zealot.

Pretty pleased with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Only reason for me to change would be if there were a Debian based rolling release distro with the same quality as Tumbleweed.

I've been using Artix Linux for 5 years. Its great, minimal, and does everything I need for my day to day tasks.

If I were to ever change, it'd probably be because the devs could no longer maintain it. In which case I'd probably just hop to Gentoo.

Eh, probably if Guix becomes significantly better I'll switch to it (from NixOS). I really like how seriously they take user freedom, bootstrapping (only 357 bytes of binary to bootstrap everything else from source!) and consistent user interfaces (scheme everywhere). But unfortunately the package repo is just not big and mature enough yet, and declarative configuration options are not as good as they are with NixOS. My job is also Nix-related, and that's another major reason I'm staying for now.

Nix-related job - do tell!
- I'm doing Nix consulting-type jobs - it can mean anything from simply packaging some stuff for Nix and making a devShell to refactoring existing Nix-based infra (which can be hundreds of thousands of SLOC) to building entirely new developer UX, CI/CD and even production deployments on Nix/NixOS. I've also been paid to implement some cool features into Nix itself, fix bugs, etc. I'm really quite happy with the job, even though it could probably pay more :)

It'd just have to stop working. I've been running debian for probably 10 years now and it's problem free. I don't care that it's not up to date in comparison to other distros. It's stable and works.

Was a Ubuntu user from 9.10 until 20.04; snap shittyness caused me to hop around for a while. Settled on Mint a few years ago.

It's stable, gets out of my way and lets me get my work done.

Similar here. Left Red Hat for Ubuntu Warty because reviews suggested it was great (it was). Left Ubuntu for Debian because of snaps (not so great). Left Debian for Fedora because immutable sounded like less system admin and more using apps (it is).
It has been a really long time (20? years) since I've been on nix. Kind of torn by Mint and Deb. I want the ease ootb but the flexibility of Deb.

I like the question. Nothing would make me change. I use Debian for servers and fedora for my desktop. The distro is not what makes it good or not. The window manager does not change the only think that does change is the package manager and how up to date it is.

I only use Debian for servers because the installer makes it super easier to install without a wm.

I use fedora for my desktop because I like the atomic versions and more up to date packages.

At this point i think nix would have to die. I like the declaritive way of doing things, and invested a lot of time in learning how to use it.

I've been using Arch (BTW) for a few years now. I would only consider switching to something non-Arch if they started enshittifying like Windows. I don't see that happening though.

I made the jump from Manjaro when a bunch of their maintained repos started to ... corrode? for lack of a better term, other than that I tend to adapt to whatever my workplace chooses, last place loved Ubuntu, current workplace is all about RHEL, so i'm not going to argue

The repo servers going down or some unacceptable change to the system defaults. Starting to distribute my browser (or anything else) as only snaps / flatpaks would absolutely do it. Yeah, I'm looking squarely at you, Ubuntu.

I used Fedora KDE from 2012 to 2023, then I moved to Fedora Kinoite because I like the idea of atomic distros. Don't know if that counts though since its mostly the same software, just delivered slightly differently (however you could argue that is the case for all distros)

What did that change for you ? more stable ? peace of mind ?
- I started fiddling with toolbox and distrobox and really liked being able to install random stuff and build dependencies in those containers and then purge them when I was done. It keeps the system clean. The ostree distros take that mentality to the whole system.
  I also then found I liked the appliance like nature and the ability to rebase. I will sometimes rebase to the rawhide branch to try new stuff out, and then rebase back to stable. I see some people feel the read only file system is going to be an issue, but I have not had to screw with it since the very early days. I truly believe this is where most distros should be headed.

Dropped Ubuntu because of snaps.

Dropped Manjaro because updating anything on it was too annoying and potentially destructive if you didn't read through every changelog.

Currently on bluefin because everything is working smoothly on it. Also have a Bazzite setup which I'm not as happy with as I am with bluefin but not to the point of thinking of dropping it.

I got the impression Mint isn't best for KDE. For the reasons you mentioned, I guess, because it's not been set up with all those options right for KDE.
I'm also on Mint, and happy to stick with it for some time, but sometimes I've wondered about going back to OpenSUSE, or even trying KDE's own distro. But by then I start thinking about Nix and Guix also, as well as old faithful Arch. Then it's too much choice and I remember how nicely Mint works for me and the family!

I've been running Slackware for a long time and have no intention of switching unless Pat steps down and Slackware goes down with him. As long as my base install receives updates, I'm good. I take care of the rest.

I went Gentoo to Debian to Arch.

Gentoo took too much time to maintain. (Not just compile time. But also human time editing config files).

Debian was great, until I had new hardware that needed a recent kernel and Wayland. i tried testing but that wasn't stable enough and took too much of my time maintaining.

I'm using arch now. i would only switch if they do something egregious (push ads, malware or snap)

Probably nothing. I'm currently in the process of starting to distrohop a lot. I want to try out lots of distros, for fun and in order to recommend distros to other people. I will probably eventually settle on arch or nixos though, the customization seams really awesome.

Been running Manjaro for years. Don't really know what would make me change.

I guess maybe if I suddenly started getting more and more dependency errors when upgrading packages from the AUR it would make me consider jumping to put Arch.

But right not that's not the case. So the benefit of switching is out weighed by the pain in the ass of having to say Everything up again.

Better compatibility with Intel Arc cards, for one. Actually that would be a really big one.

I'm on Ubuntu. I had my Intel card work pretty well in Blender 3D,except it couldn't do BVH calculations in cycles, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make it work, because the thing that is supposed to make it work breaks the render kernels for Blender.

Alright... But it still rendered faster than my GTX 1060.

But then I also realised I couldn't boot up any UE5 game because somehow it was convinced my card isn't DX12 compatible. Also major artefacting issues in Oblivion Remastered.

Right... So I decided to go from Ubuntu LTS to Ubuntu 25.04, because the cutting edge MESA drivers needs a newer kernel, and the newer kernel is supposedly more Intel card friendly, which might fix my BVH calculation issues with Blender as well.

UE5 games run now, except for Oblivion Remastered, which still has graphical artefacting. But Intel didn't have render kernels for Ubuntu 25.04 yet, so I couldn't render with cycles at all until they updated their repo.

They eventually updated their repo a week or two ago. But the render kernels don't load at all in Blender 3D, telling me "Oh this is meant for OneAPI compatible cards", yes, what the fuck do you think an Intel Arc A770 is!?!

So... Uh... Yeah, if there is a distro put there without all of this, that would be very great.

Are you using the snap or flatpak versions of blender?
- Neither. Debian package installed with apt.
I had my Intel card work pretty well in Blender 3D,except it couldn’t do BVH calculations in cycles, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it work, because the thing that is supposed to make it work breaks the render kernels for Blender.
BVH building is always done on CPU (unless that changed)
- Well, apparently for Intel cards you can use "embree" to build BVH. But it requires a component of OneAPI.

Nothing could get me to switch off gentoo at this point. It's so flexible that you can use package managers from other distros (if you're crazy and like to create problems for yourself). Creating your own packages is very easy with their ebuild system. In terms of the packages they offer the USE flags are an absolute killer feature that let you install only the parts of the program you want. They even have binary versions of larger programs like firefox or rust that you can install if you don't want to compile them.

Well technically with compilers like Rust, you need a Rust compiler to actually compile Rust for you. That's likely why they give binaries for such a thing.
Firefox though is a nice convenience.
- I thought the rustc package bootstrapped itself like gcc does?

Not sure... I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I'd rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool... but I really don't want to use a weird language for making packages, I'm just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.

Nix becomes extremely easy once you get the hang of the language. Much more straightforward then some cryptic bash
I half the point of package managers was so you could easily uninstall them. Do package managers usually not fully uninstall?
- From what I understand the package managers remove files they themselves created but not files created by the application itself like config files and other stuff

Modern desktop enviroment design, and seamless updates like in macOS

If all the mirrors for pacman somehow got taken down, probably would switch to something corporate like Ubuntu.

Snap getting installed, ads when starting a shell. Basically the reasons I ditched Kubuntu.

Kubuntu has Ads? Dear god
- Yep, a little text ad for Ubuntu premium services in the motd/welcome message and apt output if I recall. Here's an article about it: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/10/ubuntu-pro-terminal-ad
I feel this so much, if you want that experience you may as well be using Windows! What did you switch to?
- Exactly! EndeavourOS, my first Arch distro. It's nice and easy to use, although Arch package updates are very different from say Debian. They don't differentiate between security fixes and typo fixes so you're either updating all the time like me or updating less frequently and being vulnerable. And then there's also the issue of rarely broken bleeding edge packages; I had to pin a bunch to prevent upgrading from KDE 5 to 6 for a while.

I'm on Bazzite, so I may be tempted to switch to SteamOS on at least one of my devices, but Bazzite covers pretty much all my bases currently, both for gaming and work. I have a laptop with EndeavourOS and I love it, been using it for about 2-3 years there, but I'm switching laptops soon to a framework so I'll also go with Bazzite there for consistency and due to the official support it has with framework laptops.

Honestly the experience I've had with these distros so far leaves me wishing for nothing more, and now with immutability and distro box I kinda don't see the point in changing to anything else unless Bazzite development dies out or they make a painfully stupid decision, which doesn't seem to be the case so far!

If gentoo stopped being maintained, I guess I'd find something else.

Having more time to spend learning a new distro

For the 'I use ... BTW' meme to say something else.

No, actually, I can't think of anything. I'm pretty comfortable with it at this point. Been running it since 2013...

All I need is a sudden jolt of "I need to test other distros", distro hop for a day or 2,and then end up back in my distro of choice. This happens every couple of months give or take.

the creation of a non-kodi htpc/media center alternative that works like a smart TV OS and works on a raspberry pi would get me to change my streaming device.

i stream jellyfin from a home server, and jellyfin on kodi is painful to use :(

an OS that can be controlled with tv-controller buttons and has an interface similar to any of the other players in this space would make me throw away my nvidia shield tv in a heartbeat

It is? What issues are you having?
I've used the Jellycon plugin for a while and it worked amazing.
- kodi is really good for local media, but none of my media is local. instead of using the smartTV-style jellyfin UI, jellyfin indexes the media from the server and throws up a text-only list of media in a folder structure. if i rip another movie, it needs to be indexed.
  though it is pulling the index and functioning as expected, it makes the experience feel like browsing in dolphin for spreadsheets instead of getting ready for movie night.
  the experience was bad enough where i just plugged the old streaming stick back in and hid my failur. i didnt tell the wife about my experience (she hates the streaming stick and wanted an OSS option). i said i would deliver one, so she thinks i just haven't done it yet. :(

My first distro was debian and why I switched was that I wanted up to date packages.

I ditched FreeBSD and Slackware when I got tired of installing everything from scratch on every major release. Compiling stuff from source was interesting for learning and seeing how amazing open source can be, but it wasn't fun long term.

Then I ditched Ubuntu because there was always something not working on laptops, usually related to hibernation/sleep and/or webcam/wireless. I was frustrated with how little care was put into making sure such basic things would simply work.

I'm currently very satisfied with Mint. Everything just works out of the box and Mint X is a lovely theme for old folks like me, who appreciate a proper good looking desktop and can't understand what all the hype is with dark/flat themed UIs these days.

Ubuntu 20.04 running out of support. Things start to break slowly now and I sure as hell will not go with the corporate asshattery anymore. Might switch to arch but still deciding.

Previously? Some schmuck changing all the windows to be left-handed, immediately before a long-term-support feature freeze.

Zero percent surprised by many other comments throwing shade at Ubuntu.

if gentoo decided ti bake spyware into every package that i cant removr thatd be a deal breaker

I usually try out a couple of new distros whenever I am either setting up a new computer, or something happens with my current machine that requires a fresh OS anyway.

I've been married to Pop!_OS for a couple of years now. however, for the past couple of months I've been booting exclusively into KDE Plasma on my desktop computer; almost everything works really well for me in that environment, except the built-in Pop!_OS stuff itself, such as the pop shop, does not work very well. so I might end up switching to a distribution that's built around KDE, such as KDE Neon.

I'm also pretty curious about the Nix package manager and the concept of immutable desktop systems, so I guess I might try NixOS at some point? I don't know much about it yet.

I relatively recently (a year or so?) switched from Ubuntu to Debian.

I felt like Ubuntu was bloating up and that sadly those decisions were done through the enshitification process. I went then "back to basics" and I don't regret it at all.

I had the (wrong) preconception that Debian was "behind" or "slow" for "new" stuff but truth is, despite being "stable" most of what I care about is already in, even for things like gaming in VR. For the rest if I need something "edgy" then I can get the software via another mean than the package manager.

So... what made me change is a desire for more minimalism and the ability to test safely (files saved).

On my laptops: Debian -> Fedora. Mostly because I couldn't reliably use my external display on Debian, and because I ~~needed~~ wanted shiny new things. Also new hardware.

On my gaming rig: Manjaro -> Nobara -> Bazzite. I left Manjaro because the system was slowly getting worse with each update, and I wanted to game, not maintain my system. I ditched Nobara after a botched version upgrade. Bazzite is fine for now.

Lol, I had the same Nobara issue recently. Had to completely reinstall 😭... Installed openSuSe Tumbleweed instead, which I can highly recommend though.

Moved away from Ubuntu due to SNAP. Never looked back.

I don't care about my distro. The choice I make when decicing on a distribution is entirely based on use case. I have LMDE on my server. I have Mint Cinnamon on my macbook. I use arch when I'm doing minimal installs for basic functionality. I don't have a distro of choice for ARM, I've used rasbian and I use muOS on my rg35xxsp. I've been looking at learning gentoo and deploying that for raspberry pi as I have some projects in mind for some micro arcade cabinets and want as little overhead as possible in regards to background processes

Shadow updating their Linux app to support anything other than Ubuntu 20.04...
It's the only reason I use it, and it's weird and bad that they only support that distro and version (which has reached EOL). I've talked to them about it and all they say is "We see the need from users for support of newer Ubuntu versions and other distros" which is such a nothingburger of an answer. I spent three days with several other distros and Ubuntu versions trying to figure out a fix but sadly never found one. I just wanna use Linux Mint or anything other than Ubuntu, especially a 5 year old version.

Ubuntu 20.04, and doesn't work on other Ubuntu versions? Sounds like it's compiled against old libraries.
If you want to try something more advanced, you might be able to get it to work in Nix or Flatpak. Both are ways to use the exact software libraries with an application. Both would be quite steep leaning to do! Even docker might solve the problem; still not an easy solution though, and might be harder to get hardware features working.

Having broken lts-kernel and broken 6.15. At the same time. But the zen kernel saved me. So I guess if it was 3 broken kernels at the same time I would switch distro, haha. Lts was broken amdgpu kernel module, worse then sleep issue for mainline.

The slightest praise for another distro / other feature that I fixate on for a month. I tend to hop.

I'd start mixing it up if I got a new computer and could play around more on my current laptop.

I'm on Nobara for 3 years now after spending a year on manjaro. Nobara is pretty sweet, performance is top of the line, its stable and I get packages decently fast.

But I hate not being able to use discover to update.

So I'd switch if something had a cooler fetch logo and was able to fix that.

I'm familiar with the linux system ive done gentoo and arch but why I use distros like nobara and fedora is because i can't be fucked to keep up with what the latest optimisation are and then implement them.

I use Fedora Asahi Remix currently, and I want to switch to NixOS but am uncertain about the MacBook support, and even if it was good switching would take longer than it's worth unless my current installation stops working for whatever reason

Despite using MX only for a relatively short time, just messing around in a VM for a long period of time would increase my odds of switching to something else*.

*when I need to switch to something else or find something a lot better

Hardware bugs/support, and Snap.

Its mostly if I see the distro as unmaintainable (looking at gentoo), too much of a hassle to keep updated (Like tumbleweed on a PC i just about never use), or generally not fit for my purpose (If it dosent have packages I need, forces flatpaks, or is generally built in a way I dont find it comfortable to use

Why is tumbleweed to much of a Hassel to keep updated? You can update it once a decade and still be up and running.
- When the PC is connected to a Beamer you can only See at might, and when its night you dont have 10 minutes + reboot time because your friend wants to watch netflix, even having to update once in a decade is too many updates

I'm attracted by Alpine Linux, but it lacks an official way to use glibc for the programs that unfortunately use some glibc extension...

This is an image someone else posted here. Asking if there was a desktop environment that looked like that. There wasn't really.

For the record, I run Linux Mint Xfce with Chicago95. Honestly it was a mistake, the vibes of the UI are nice but it still feels kinda Linuxy (as in, held together with duct tape) and I keep roling up Firefox by mistake. SerenityOS or FreeBSD, something Unix-like, may be more what I'm looking for.

If your looking for a diffrent desktop experiance the OS doesnt matter outside of if it has packages or not. You might want to try KDE plasma with custom themes if your not a fan of the way xfce works. Although xfce is also extreamly customizable in the way it works too if you take some time to read the docs
- Yeah XFCE is great ! I tried KDE 6 to give it a try and compare but I guess I spent to much time in the CLI to bother about all the GUI knobs KDE provides !!!