How many distros did you try before finding, *the one?*

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Curious to learn how many distros everyone tried, before finding "the one" to use as a daily driver? Also, is your personal use, daily driver install, different from one that you use for work, if you have fully migrated to Linux?

So far, I've tried about 13 distros as I look toward migrating away from Microsoft. Coming from a "Windows power user" background I do like openSUSE and Ubuntu MATE, but have found Mint to be the closest match for me so far, which is what I am using as my personal use, daily driver on my laptop...for now. I am using VirtualBox to install numerous distros to keep on hand for comparison.

Interestingly, I found myself right off the bat, looking for a user-friendly DE, not for myself so much, but one that I can start relatives out on, if they ever want to migrate away from MS, so Mint fits that bill perfectly, as my relatives are not very technically savvy. Probably like many other people here, I am the family "tech support guru" who gets called, when something goes wrong with their Windows installs, so I wonder if a beginner Mint install for them would reduce calls for help, since most of my family just read emails, and post silly stuff on Facebook. With the problems Microsoft's new carpet-bombing Windows Update mechanism in Win 7 is certain to invoke, I suspect the volume of calls for help I receive will soon be increasing.

Also, I personally must have a fully-active desktop, if I am going to consider Linux as an OS replacement for my workstation. There are days, when I find myself creating or throwing a hundred, sometimes even two hundred files right on my desktop while working. I spent a few hours using openSUSE in a VM to do some light work and found that having to use the Home directory instead of the Desktop for temporary file management when working would literally break me in short order. :-)

I'm sure as time goes on, and I become more comfortable with Linux I'll work toward migrating my workstation away from Windows, so I'll also be trying out many other distros to find one that fits as a replacement for that.

All in all, I am having fun with Linux so far. :-)

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Well, I'm currently a Windows 10 user, hoping to move to Linux soon because it has many benefits over windows and it is a very popular OS in the tech industry, I'm working towards becoming a server administrator so it would be very beneficial to get to grips with Linux sooner rather than later. Not too sure which version or 'flavour' of Linux to get though, people direct me towards Ubuntu because it's relatively simple to use when coming from a Windows background. But I think I'd rather go for Linux Mint.

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You normally go through phases. You distro hoop find sth you like and stay there for a while. Then either something changes in what you use or a new feature comes up to another distro that you really like and go through another phase of hooping.

I suppose you used opensuse with gnome. gnome is tile based and is not design to be use that way. I use Debian with gnome for my work exactly because i used to not have anything on the desktop. Thus Gnome serves me perfectly for productivity. If you really like opensuse and you want to have an army of stuff in your desktop you should use it with KDE.

You can have mint with mate as well. Which is basically ubuntu mate plus the mint applications.

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I started with Unix in the mid 90's and moved to free/BSD for a few years before jumping into linux - Slackware and Debian. Then around 2002/3 Gentoo and Arch linux were founded and I became a Gentoo developer for around seven years. I used Arch and Gentoo interchangeably and both exclusively for a long time, that is unti I discovered Bedrock linux.

I will say though that all of my colleagues and myself use BSD, windows and linux equally. Not sure where this "migrating my workstation away from Windows" nonsense comes from. I have only really seen this mentality on these forums which is no suprise really considering it's mainly american students who think quain and wendell are IT experts lol.

So anyway, BSD is the most popular OS these days, with most developers using Swift or Rust, so maybe buy a Mac if you want to be one of the cool kids.

You will want CentOS.

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More of a migrate all your data and media away from Windows kind of guy myself :) I still do not have a one. More of several that seem to work well for different tasks.

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Main Rig:

2006-2011: Ubuntu 6.10 to Ubuntu 10.10 - Gnome 2 Desktop
2011 to 2013: Linux Mint 11 to 14 - MATE Desktop
2013 to present day: Arch Linux - MATE desktop

Laptop:

Random order: Ubuntu MATE 16.04, Fedora 23, OpenSuse Tumbleweed, Manjaro, Antergos, Arch Linux, Linux Mint

Virtual Box:

Random order: Zorin OS, Chakra Linux, PearOS, Elementary OS, Manjaro, Antergos, Bridge Linux, Arch Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, EstoUbuntu.

Basically i like to test different distros to see whats different, whats worse, whats better.

I really like Arch Linux though. Initial setup took some time, but once it was done, its just matter of running updates and being always up to date. Ofc there have been few package conflicts a long the way, but those are easy to resolve. Nothing Major has been broken, unlike with Ubuntu distro version updates where everything got broken and had to fix for days to not loose my data.

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I think i have tried arround 40 distro´s since last year.
Still have not made a final decission yet.
The main problem is that the "perfect" distro pretty much doesnt exists.

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I read about Open Suse, Debian ,Ubunutu, Knopix and i came to conclusion that Fedora was best option for me, because it always tried to have new software inside it and tried to achieve that everything i always up to date.

And i did use shitload of distro's to try them out and learn if they added something i didn't know or that was amazing, but i always came back to Fedora.

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I pretty much just used Ubuntu with different user environments, then tried Mint and now I am on manjaro xfce and I don't feel that at this point i will be moving away from manjaro. I still use ubuntu server for my servers, apart from my vm host which is running proxmox on debian.

So server setup is debian with proxmox installed and all the vm's are ubuntu except for the one that is manjaro for my away from home vm.

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Given that most of are like minded. Here you go!

Qubes Homepage

Tour of Qubes

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I went through probably a solid 20-30 distros before ending up on opensuse tumbleweed.

Fedora is definitely in second place.

The trick with opensuse is you have to learn all the ins and outs of the installer.

You can actually have home and root as 1 partition and use your desktop. You can pretty much ignore all of opensuses recommendations and set it up to be a fairly standard linux installation.

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Every distro can have root and home as 1 partition. these days it doesn't matter(bigger disks) but it just for reasons that if the home map was full that your root still functions.

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I know, but opensuse doesn't really make it apparent in their installer.

Most new users feel like they need to use opensuse's recommended partitioning scheme.

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ah. then i said nothing. Probably read it wrong.

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Using Manjaro xfce now and I have been using it for 3 months now, have not had a desire to dual boot into windows 10 even to play the games I really like that only work on windows right now.
Distros I have tried
Redhat in the 90's did try an distro before this do not remember the name it lasted less then a week before I went back to windows.
Mint Mate xfce and Ubuntu Kbuntu Xbuntu Ubuntu Mate in the 2000's
Manjaro xfce now is my prime OS
A month ago gave tumbleweed a try it installed and was working then would not startup one day and I went back to Manjaro. From what I can tell for tumbleweed I should have setup the partitions myself, I think something went wrong with the partitions it setup.
Gave Manjaro KDE a try did not like KDE so that was deleted. Now that hard drive is waiting for the next experiment. May go back to tumbleweed and give it a try again and see where it goes.
Very happy with Manjaro xfce nice fast and clean, nothing fancy. For me an OS just does what I tell it to do and I do not need to see fireworks when it does it.
Windows 10 made me a Manjaro user. Need that on a t-shirt the Manjaro logo flushing the windows logo down the toilet drain.

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Fuck man I still don't have the one. I want a distro for laptops for a laptop thats 5:4 with a mobile RX480 in it that has the same interface as the PS3 on one worspace that acts as the app launcher and it launches apps to separate worspaces, all in an environment that uses pacman and has .deb compatibility with heavy wine integration to run windows apps.

Too bad that won't exist until I make it, and the laptop. LOL.

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I gave linux a try a few years, ago when I bought magazine with a live cd that had like 12 distros on it. Because i never actually installed any of them and only tried them for a few minutes each, im not going to count them. I only installed one distro before i found the closest thing the perfect one. The first distro being ubuntu gnome 15.04 and the almost perfect one being arch. Now I also want to give other distros like fedora a try but because i like arch and i feel like im not going to switch anyways, ive got no real motivation to try them out :(

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Ah okay, thanks thirdmortal

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I have not yet found "The One", in my mind there isn't really a Neo distro for me. Once I've got my 3D printer up and running, I have a project for a miniature mATX Linux workstation that I can use to tinker around. I have never been comfortable using it as a daily driver before, certainly not on my main machine, and especially not as a full replacement for windows.

Linux will get there one day, don't get me wrong, but it is not this day.

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I tried first Ubuntu with Unity, and this was a long time ago and I started to see how more user-friendly Ubuntu was becoming. What is a good thing. And if I recalled I tried a few variations of it too, so GNOME, ect. Then after that I tried Mint, after that I stopped using Linux for a few years. After getting into 3D production one of the places I was contracted at used RHEL as their OS, and I loved how stable and rock solid it was. So after that I went home and started using CentOS as my 'production work' OS, and this was also trying Fedora first, but I liked the stability of CentOS.

So up until today: CentOS for my Production Machine.
Fedora for my laptop what I just did a few days ago @Eden said I should give it another spin for my everyday OS.