why did you change distros?

. . .
Also, I've heard strange things about Slackware and package management. That it either requires manual dependency installing or more compiling. . . .

Re: Slackware, rumors abound -- do not necessarily believe it until trying it. I would suggest starting with Salix which has slapt-get as one package manager -- it makes what you may have heard regarding dependency problems a lie.
 


I tried several distros, (Ubuntu...works very well)
and many others , nearly all I could find
but I settled on Zorin, it seems to me to work just like Ubuntu (it is based on Ubuntu)

but looks a little more like your traditional O/S
 
I think I may just be more comfortable with Arch at this point. I loved Slackware and if I was to pick another distro it would probably be Slack (or Crunchbang although I haven't tried it. Might test it out today :))

I think pacman compares with apt-get although I just found it easier to edit/update the mirrorlists for pacman and customize its functionality. With RPM-based distros I always found it less convenient to have separate programs for managing packages (rpm) and installing new packages (yum or yast) versus a pacman or apt-get where it is all in one.

I think for those control-freaks in all of us I just like that Arch comes out of the box with the minimal requirements for a working system. If I'm going to be using one GUI I don't need/want 5 different DMs on my machine and there is no "standard" setup so you can literally just install the packages you need with less chance of conflicts down the line.

@Luis Pena does highlight the drawbacks though. You do have to diligently keep an Arch system up to date, although I've only had one update issue in my years using Arch which forced me to downgrade the kernel from cache, but even that was fixed with a couple commands (once I knew what I was doing heh)

@MikeyD i agree with the points you made. arch is a very awesome distro but it does have some setbacks. Although i have to say arch is my favorite distro.
 
actually I change me distro, I am using Ubuntu regular, it does all the things I wand and I more easily fixed my scanner with it than Zorin or Mint

so I think I will stick with this...I am using 13.10 32 bit
 
Started out with Ubuntu 9.04, then tried Mint, Black Panther, Blag, (which I really liked but it went dormant) Fuduntu, (which I also liked and it EOL'd) Used EasyPeasey and that too went EOS, (seems like I can really pick'em) tried Ubuntu 12.04, too many "system errors" now using a new FSF called GDNewHat....based on Fedora, which I like, it is fast, and works great. Hopefully, this will last longer.
 
Fuduntu, (which I also liked and it EOL'd)
Nice to see another ex-Fuduntu user. That was one of my favorite distros it is too bad it EOLed. I think it was the name, I saw a thread by one of the creators and everyone was bashing the name of the distro since it wasn't Ubuntu-based. I think they moved on to another project but I heard that didn't go far. I heard they worked on something called FuSE and other said cloverleaf? Not sure if either ever got far I haven't heard much about either (FuSE linux just pulls up a filesystem type...) They make good distros but really need to come up with a better naming scheme :p
 
Fuduntu crew was going to do FuSE, then changed it to Cloverleaf, then gave up.
If you liked that one, you should try GDNewHat. I have been using it about a week, and other than not seeing the wireless card in this Gateway One, it works perfectly. I tried it via CD on my HP laptop, saw that card immediately, hooked right up. I am going to put it on my Asus EeePC netbook when I get time, that has Blag on it at the moment. I am just hoping the team does not give up on NewHat. Their website does not have much info on it, but they are updating changes and improvements daily.
 
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i used to love using Arch Gnu/Linux so much but there are a couple reasons why i stopped using it. ...
1. Sometimes it breaks after an update, like pacman package manager would just break
For several years, I observed that people who use Arch Linux 1) seem to be very skilful in the Linux arts and 2) really love Arch Linux. So I switched my downstairs machine to Arch a couple years ago and ran it for over a year. But I agree with Luis--often when I updated, something broke and I had to go search the wiki and find out what magic you had to do to get it to work again. I got very tired of that, especially on my downstairs machine which I often use as just a terminal to my upstairs machine, and a box to surf the web on while I'm eating.

I'm still fairly new to Arch.
Don't blame yourself.
It seems like if I update with Pacman -Syu, a side effect is it mutes my audio channel. I have to run alsamixer to reopen the channel.
Yeah, that was one of the problems. In fact, it finally got to the point that it couldn't find my audio device. I couldn't make any sound come out of my PC speakers at all. Very annoying.

Before Arch, I ran PCLinuxOS downstairs which I found to be very stable, rarely requiring a reboot. (I can't remember whether if it was PCLinuxOS or NetBSD which I ran for over a year without rebooting.) So I wiped Arch and reinstalled PCLinuxOS. Now uptime reports it's been up 104 days since it booted. I don't think I've even logged out during that time.
 
I tried a lot of different distros, but when I moved to arch I stopped switching, I currently have a dual boot with Ubuntu because 14.04, but arch I'd where I settled it really just suites me.
 
I also went with Ubuntu...seems to work well wirh my printer/scanner
 
I haven't used 'buntu since early '09 - don't like the direction it went it, nor the ethos and attitude of canonical ltd... I went to Debian for quite a few years and it was the distro which really introduced me to what a GNU/Linux system is all about. Switched to Slackware a couple of years ago and now run that exclusively. I can't really see the need to change to anything else - in fact I tried to switch back to Debian earlier last year and ended up back with Slackware.

I've also dual booted with FreeBSD in the past and currently running OpenBSD which I much prefer due to it's policy of adherence to FOSS principles.
 
Like many of you guys, I started with Ubuntu (10.04 to be exact) and after using it for about 2 years I decided to switch just because it was getting slow because of Unity and my old gateway couldn't handle it very well. So I tried a crap ton of different lightweight and old computer distros to find that Crunchbang worked the best on my hardware. So I suck with that until I got my new* computer. I threw Debian on that because I was gonna use it as a server but decide to just use it as a desktop. I didn't have much luck with Debian on my hard so I switched back to Ubuntu, and that was worse! Then I installed Manjaro.

Manjaro has been great. I've been using it for about 8 months and I've only had one problem with it. Had to use old Puppy Linux to fix it ;)

My all time favorite distro is Slackware, which I dual-boot with on my desktop. I have never had any problems with it and it just worked so well. I use it mainly for programming (what little I can do) and for playing around and learning about Linux. Manjaro makes it easier to get programs that I need for school because of pacman and yaourt. Also, steam runs right out of the box on Manjaro which is fantastic.
 
I started originally with Ubuntu, started to dislike unity, and one day switched to Debian which I stayed with for a while, tried Elementary OS but got sick of bugs which leaves me to Arch Linux which is currently my favorite. It starts with a very minimal installation and I build all of it how I like. Takes a lot of work to get everything running how I like it but I like the simplicity. Reason I switched is so I could pick and choose and really build my OS how I want it.
 
I started with SUSE. I was fine, but I started having problems with KDE, even though I preferred KDE 3.x over Gnome 2.x which were available at the time.

I picked up two clients when I was consulting, and they were both Ubuntu based. I switched for "compatibility purposes" - they were small businesses, and I did not want to spend time learning distro differences.

Since then, I've just stuck with Ubunutu. I'm sure there are other distros I would like better that would have less overhead, etc - but Ubunutu is good enough. It's working for me now, and I know / now how to resolve the issues I'm likely to run into.

It's like always buying the same brand of car - it may not be "the best", but after a few you know the issues, you know the maintenance routine, and you pretty much know what you're in for.
 
I am still using Ubuntu since Maverick Meerkat (10.10), and I love Ubuntu.
 

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