On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 03:54:21AM -0500, Steve Litt via Talk wrote:
I've used a Linux daily driver since March 2001, and when it comes to distros, I'm one of the most monogamous Linux users on earth. I used Mandrake/Mandriva 2001-2008, and Void Linux 2015 to today and beyond.
But from 1998-2001, and again 2008-2015, I out-hopped any frog. Starting with Redhat 5.1 in 1998, back when Redhat was an exemplary steward of Free Software, I then tried and failed with Debian, went with Caldara, then Corel Linux, and finally just after Y2K, Mandrake, which had everything I needed.
By 2006 Mandrake was getting kind of shaky and unstable with Xfce, especially Kmail, so I started looking seriously into OpenBSD, which, running the same software, was *ROCK* stable. For about a year my main laptop ran OpenBSD while my Daily Driver Desktop (DDD) ran Mandrake or Mandriva or whatever it was called by then.
Somewhere around 2008 I switched to Ubuntu to get away from the increasingly twitchy Mandriva, but believe it or not I found Ubuntu not to be tolerant enough of different hardware, so I began the process of switching to Mint by installing Mint on each of my three children's computers. I was all set to convert my daily driver when Mint's Clem Lefebvre said that supporters of Israel weren't welcome. I promptly converted the kids to Ubuntu and canceled my plans for Mint.
Ubuntu would have been a perfect distro for me in 1998-2004, but by late 2013 I was sick and tired of working around all of its training wheel restrictions, so I switched to Debian in very early 2014, just in time for the systemd civil war. On first hearing of systemd, I thought it as a joke, a hoax. Nobody would build or accept software so gratuitously entangled, huge and demodularized. On finding out it was true, and that the "Wheezy" version was the last to use sysvinit, with "Jessie" scheduled to be a systemd version. As a guy who has made his living repairing electronics and software, and as a guy who bossed his computer rather than letting his computer boss him, I knew I couldn't have such monolithic entanglement on my computer, so I stayed on "Wheezy" well into 2015 while evaluating the few remaining alternatives after the whole Redhat derived world and the whole Debian derived world went systemd.
Trying distro after distro, I was favoring OpenBSD until finding out that OpenBSD had no way to do hardware acceleration of VM guests, eliminating the possibility of using my favorite trick for running software my distro didn't offer, namely, running an appliance for that software with a distro that offered it. I was actually considering moving to a (barf) Mac. Note that Devuan was not yet being distributed in early 2015. Then I discovered Void, asked whether there was any intention of them going systemd in the future, there wasn't, and so even though it was a running release and I'd had big troubles with rolling releases Gentoo, Funtoo and Arch, I made the switch in mid 2015.
My first 8 weeks with Void were brutal. XBPS packager instead of the APT and RPM I'd used before, almost no training wheels, and a prioritization of shellscripts over configuration: A prioritization I'd dreamed of, but when diving in I realized how much I'd depended on training wheels in the past.
As time went on and I got accustomed to the Void mindset, it got easier and easier for me. Void's not perfect, and I'm always eyeballing other distros and BSDs, but to get a comparable DIY friendly distro I'd probably need to switch to Slackware, and I'm not ready for a package manager that makes me trial and error dependencies on software installation. And my research tells me that OpenBSD *still* lacks hardware accelerated VM guests. Meanwhile, on 7/26/2025 Funtoo stopped being a formal project and limps on in "hobby mode". And with Gentoo offering systemd as an option, I worry that they'll start shipping software requiring systemd. Note that Gentoo's default init is OpenRC, and they also offer runit and s6, so maybe I'm just being paranoid.
So I've used Void Linux for ten years and counting, but getting to that point required a lot of distro hopping.
I started out with SLS in 1993, then slackware in 94, redhat 2.0 around 95 using a few versions of that until the bugs started to get too annoying, then went to Debian around 1998 and still using it. Have also used OpenSUSE at work since that is what the standard environment is there. It has no redeeming qualities what so ever to recommend it. I have poked at Mint, Ubuntu and Centos, but not cared to use any of them as an actual installation. To me the quality of the packaging and the package management system is probably the most important part, along with selection of packages available. I expect upgrades to work, and to be able to use the system for years without a reinstall. And I tend to be running Sid and still don't seem to get things breaking on me, even if I would fully deserve it. -- Len Sorensen