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Alt text: A line plot with 2 axis (confidence vs competence) referencing the Dunning-Kruger effect with various distro logos placed at different points on the line. Starts with mint/ubuntu near (0,0) and progressing through multiple distros to end up with opensuse/fedora at what it calls βthe plateau of sustainabilityβ
I've been in arch for like +2 years, I update every 3 weeks if I feel like it, it just works. If it doesn't I update and it again just works. If the update breaks anything (never happened) I have backups of the last 5 updates and the last 5 days via brtfs.
Idk, i can't believe people crash their PC unless they do stupid stuff. And if you do stupid stuff, the distro doesn't matter. I started in Ubuntu/debian and managed to brick both of those several times. Then went back to windows until I went to arch after my CS major and learning to not do stupid shit, and zero problems since.
Using Debian since around Ham/Slink.. what are all these other icons?
Peasants
spoiler
/j
A couple of weeks in, and I'm probably exactly where my chosen distro (Pop OS) is.
Im using Debian but Iβm definitely at the end of the downward path of the first spike
I'm a tech moron, but I've been on Linux of and on since like 07ish. Full time since 2015ish. Started with Ubuntu way back when, and I've jumped around from distro to distro. I've tried Manjaro, mint, opensuse... God, I can't even tell you what else. I once installed that Miley Cyrus Linux and ran it for like a week as a gag. But from 2015 onward when I went full time I've basically just been in Fedora (including silverblue and Bazzite). I've got Ubuntu running on a mini PC I'm using to set up a server for jellyfin and a few other things. But as far as my daily driver goes, it's almost always fedora. I just fucking love it.
But bear in mind here, I'm a pretty surface level user, so what I love is actually Gnome. Lol
I think for me the wave has more peaks and valleys.
I get to the last stage of good knowledge and decent confidence but then something new comes and I feel I'm ready for punishment again.
My first Valley of despair was Gentoo. 6 months of constantly compiling stuff and rarely using the computer for anything else. But a bit before that it was Fedora. In those early days, updates would continuously break my system.
In that first round I finally settled for Mint for years. After years of stable Linux Mint, I found my self with time and curious for Arch. And yes, that became the new l valley of despair. But eventually my stable instance.
But new things come and Wayland and new sound systems replaced what I had in my installation. Arch was again the valley of despair. And moved to Fedora, which is as stable as stable can be. I was traveling for the last two years so, no time to mess around.
Now back to arch trying to figure out the Wayland/Niri ecosystem. Let's see where I land.
However, in my dual boots I always have a working installation I'm happy with and another which I mess up with.
Put Bazzite alongside mint. I just want to game!
I abandoned SuSE about a decade ago. There were more than enough reasons to do so. I would not put it anywhere close to "competence".
Well I use arch for one of my computers and Debian for all my homelab servers, so I guess I'm at both minimum and near maximum confidence simultaneously.
Fedora Silverblue. My version of "mount stupid" (or "valley of despair") probably.
After running arch for a long time, I just installed the sway community edition of endeavoros on all my machines. It works well, while allowing me to use tiling without having a ton of configuration time.
Been using Kubuntu for 7 years now, after having previously used Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo.
Not sure if that means Kubuntu belongs on the "Plateau of Sustainability" or if I'm just permanently stuck at "trauma-induced return to Ubuntu," LOL
Competence
Started with Redhat 35 years ago, moved to Suse, Gentoo and then all kinds of Ubuntu. Now with Mint but will soon leave for KDE Neon.
The only constant in life is change..
I used Ubuntu and Mint ages ago, used Fedora when I switched to Linux full time a few years ago, and now I'm on Garuda. Basically, I'm aware of "The Valley of Despair" but refuse to enter it. I'm perfectly happy letting distro maintainers do most of the hard work. I have very little interest in raw dogging Arch, but Arch-based distros that put everything together in a nice package are great!
Definitly a minty
But with asperations of a suse
This is about my distro hopping journey. (kinda freaky honestly) Skipping the Red Hat CD's from compusa and some other fun times over the past 20 years ago or so.
-LMDE is my keep going back to distro if I need it to just get out of the way, but have more creature comforts than vanilla debian. Cinnamon is great, it's kde without the issues for me. The driver manager is excellent and just everything from the mint utilities, themes, and polish are lovely.
-MX/void/antix...I've never had the patience to learn not systemd. These are rad, I love the older school window managers and the light weight indie vibe. Maybe I'll stop being lazy and keep screwing with them in vm's and actually learn other init's.
-Manjaro, I wanted to love you so fucking bad, I tried to more than twice and you were a massive disappointment each time. (if it's working for you, cool. But you should really just look at EndeavourOS/Cachy OS, you'll have a way better time)
-Did the Arch from scratch thing. Just to do it. btw, I ran Arch.
-Endeavour/CachyOS are amazing and you'll have a good time for the most part. More complete experience than doing it yourself with much less effort.
-Fedora, ohh fedora. We've wanted to love you forever and ever. Going back to running linux as a Daily driver a few years ago, when I re-visited fedora it was exactly as this picture describes. Ironically, I just installed fedora, replacing cachyos last night. I spent the time to research and translate my arch notes into fedora and so far I'm pretty happy. Bit more fiddling out of the box than the derivative distros obviously. Gaming performance is what I expected once we got settled in and I haven't run into any show stoppers yet.
It really doesn't matter what distro you run. As long as you can install and run the software you need, and interact with it in a way that makes since to you, then have fun. It's your computer.
When I started most of those weren't even around...
Fedora atomic I'm galactic mirror levels of plateau
I am at least at step 2
This accurately traces my evolution...
These days I run Raspbian/Debian on my Pi servers and Fedora everywhere else
Devuan. After bsds.