On servers: Red Hat -> Debian (with a brief detour through Ubuntu Server for a couple of years).
On desktop: Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro.
Switched away from Red Hat around 2004 after RHL was discontinued and split into RHEL and Fedora. You may think Fedora would’ve been a more obvious choice but it was still new in 2004 while Debian had 10 years under its belt. We also migrated the servers at work to Debian around that time and I had used Debian at school in the '90s so it made a lot of sense to use it at home.
Ubuntu on desktop was a fucking revelation when it came out (on CDs shipped free to your home 😃) in 2004. Early days Ubuntu was soooo good that I stayed with it until 2020, long after the magic was gone.
I mean I would’ve probably left eventually anyway given the whole snap and privacy and so on debacles but what really put me off was how it would almost never upgrade cleanly once you’ve added a bunch of 3rd party repos (which you wanted to do all the time on a desktop PC). Eventually I got so sick of it that I was determined to find a rolling distro where upgrades would never be a problem.
Tried a bunch of them during stay at home during the pandemic and settled on Manjaro + XFCE on the desktop and a fresh install of Debian stable + Docker on the server as a happy medium between “hands off” and “up to date”. I’m at a point where I like my Linux machines to just work and to need zero maintenance so I can put the time into other things instead.
I didn’t realize WHAT the problem was, assumed it was just Linux in general. But that’s my experience with Ubuntu, too.
Been with it since the beginning, it was one of my earlier introductions to Linux. But I could NEVER upgrade cleanly. I was always reinstalling. And yeah there are easier ways to do that too but for a noob I struggled.
That kept me dual booting Windows, or for a good number of years running mainly Windows.
But last year I went atomic fedora bluefin on my new laptop, and I love it.
Slightly more restricted, and a couple issues with flatpaks, but the stability is top tier.
I still run Debian on my prox VMs, and I keep a win 10 ltsc VM on there too for the rare program that doesn’t play nice, but otherwise I’m all Linux now.
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit I got from a CD out of a magazine from barnes and noble and it blew my mind. I had so much fun learning everything about Linux and I think I even got oblivion running on WINE, which was a nightmare compared to how easy games run on proton nowadays.
Those were the glory years for sure. Now I run Arch and want a “just werks” experience. It’s why I use unRAID for my server.
How is Unraid? I’ve been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I’ve been wondering what I should install on it.
I’d like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they’d put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it’s not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn’t need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
I love it for ease of use. It’s very straightforward, has given me few (if any) problems over the years on the OS level. The only real issues I ran into were specific to individual docker images. I like that I can open a web UI and jump right into the shell if needed. It’s very easy to install docker images and VMs
However, there is a caveat about how it stores data I suppose. Your use case of mirroring drives is not possible on unRAID. Instead, it uses one drive for parity and redundancy, or you can do dual parity if you’re really concerned about data loss. Basically how this works is your largest drive stores all the information about all the other drives to rebuild the data in case of drive failure, including the parity drive itself can be rebuilt if it fails. So say you had a 12 TB parity drive and a dozen or so other drives for the array. All of those drives can be literally anything so long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity. They can be 12 TB, 8 TB, 500 MB, old drives you shucked out of external storage cases, whatever. And you can add / remove these at will. The parity does not count to your max amount of storage, think of it like a mirror but for every other drive
Dual parity is an extra level of redundancy. It’s basically like say you had a drive fail, and in those couple days where you order a new one or whatever, or when the data is rebuilding itself, if another drive fails, your data is still in tact. I don’t bother because this would be such a rare occurrence. I do know data rebuilds are very high read/writes for days on a drive so it can be high stress on the drive so that’s why the extra protection exists, but I still think it’s overkill unless it’s like irreplaceable data you can’t lose (remember 3-2-1 backups in those cases)
On servers: Red Hat -> Debian (with a brief detour through Ubuntu Server for a couple of years).
On desktop: Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Manjaro.
Switched away from Red Hat around 2004 after RHL was discontinued and split into RHEL and Fedora. You may think Fedora would’ve been a more obvious choice but it was still new in 2004 while Debian had 10 years under its belt. We also migrated the servers at work to Debian around that time and I had used Debian at school in the '90s so it made a lot of sense to use it at home.
Ubuntu on desktop was a fucking revelation when it came out (on CDs shipped free to your home 😃) in 2004. Early days Ubuntu was soooo good that I stayed with it until 2020, long after the magic was gone.
I mean I would’ve probably left eventually anyway given the whole snap and privacy and so on debacles but what really put me off was how it would almost never upgrade cleanly once you’ve added a bunch of 3rd party repos (which you wanted to do all the time on a desktop PC). Eventually I got so sick of it that I was determined to find a rolling distro where upgrades would never be a problem.
Tried a bunch of them during stay at home during the pandemic and settled on Manjaro + XFCE on the desktop and a fresh install of Debian stable + Docker on the server as a happy medium between “hands off” and “up to date”. I’m at a point where I like my Linux machines to just work and to need zero maintenance so I can put the time into other things instead.
I didn’t realize WHAT the problem was, assumed it was just Linux in general. But that’s my experience with Ubuntu, too.
Been with it since the beginning, it was one of my earlier introductions to Linux. But I could NEVER upgrade cleanly. I was always reinstalling. And yeah there are easier ways to do that too but for a noob I struggled.
That kept me dual booting Windows, or for a good number of years running mainly Windows.
But last year I went atomic fedora bluefin on my new laptop, and I love it. Slightly more restricted, and a couple issues with flatpaks, but the stability is top tier.
I still run Debian on my prox VMs, and I keep a win 10 ltsc VM on there too for the rare program that doesn’t play nice, but otherwise I’m all Linux now.
My first Linux experience was Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit I got from a CD out of a magazine from barnes and noble and it blew my mind. I had so much fun learning everything about Linux and I think I even got oblivion running on WINE, which was a nightmare compared to how easy games run on proton nowadays.
Those were the glory years for sure. Now I run Arch and want a “just werks” experience. It’s why I use unRAID for my server.
How is Unraid? I’ve been meaning to build a backup PC for my folks out of spare parts and I’ve been wondering what I should install on it.
I’d like it to start with a couple of mirrored HDDs, and have two writable Samba shares. One for random stuff and discardable stuff like music and movies, and one for important files where they’d put their photos and documents and which would get incremental backups with something like borg.
I can set this up on Debian ofc but it’s not a bad idea for it to be an OS that doesn’t need arcane knowledge to add/replace HDDs when needed.
I love it for ease of use. It’s very straightforward, has given me few (if any) problems over the years on the OS level. The only real issues I ran into were specific to individual docker images. I like that I can open a web UI and jump right into the shell if needed. It’s very easy to install docker images and VMs
However, there is a caveat about how it stores data I suppose. Your use case of mirroring drives is not possible on unRAID. Instead, it uses one drive for parity and redundancy, or you can do dual parity if you’re really concerned about data loss. Basically how this works is your largest drive stores all the information about all the other drives to rebuild the data in case of drive failure, including the parity drive itself can be rebuilt if it fails. So say you had a 12 TB parity drive and a dozen or so other drives for the array. All of those drives can be literally anything so long as they are the same size or smaller than the parity. They can be 12 TB, 8 TB, 500 MB, old drives you shucked out of external storage cases, whatever. And you can add / remove these at will. The parity does not count to your max amount of storage, think of it like a mirror but for every other drive
Dual parity is an extra level of redundancy. It’s basically like say you had a drive fail, and in those couple days where you order a new one or whatever, or when the data is rebuilding itself, if another drive fails, your data is still in tact. I don’t bother because this would be such a rare occurrence. I do know data rebuilds are very high read/writes for days on a drive so it can be high stress on the drive so that’s why the extra protection exists, but I still think it’s overkill unless it’s like irreplaceable data you can’t lose (remember 3-2-1 backups in those cases)