Have you ever been EXCITED by a Linux distro?

Lounge Linux lounge
1

Bear with me; there is no TLDR. :rofl:

I started my Linux journey in 2003. For years, I used either Debian or Fedora. Neither really “excited” me, but I was super happy not to be handcuffed to Windows any longer. I’ve been Windows-free since about 2006. Around 2013, I discovered Arch. After several installation attempts, I finally got her operational. I’ve been in the Arch world, one way or another, ever since.

In 2018, I discovered Antergos. And thought… WOW, Arch but easier to install. Most things “just worked,” sane, common-sense settings, and pretty much ready to go out of the box. Then, about a year later, Antergos ceased operations. While extremely disappointed, I obviously had Arch to move back to. So, I happily kept going with Arch

It wasn’t until 2023 that I noticed this Linux distro called EndeavourOS. After some quick investigation, I discovered that EndeavorOS was basically Antergos rising from the ashes. Excited at the prospect, I immediately downloaded the ISO, popped it on a USB stick, and installed. THAT is when the excitement began. And I never looked back, as EndeavourOS is, and always will be, my PC’s daily driver.

The reason I bring this up is that I think it’s a rarity for something as mundane as an operating system to bring one so much excitement and joy. I mean, I truly look forward to coming home from work and logging on. Whether it’s for work, games, or just mindless content consumption… logging on to EndeavorOS is something I truly do enjoy. And I believe that really is a rarity.

When it happens TWICE, we’re in another dimension. Because, as far as my laptop goes, it happened again. I’ve always considered my laptop an important, yet secondary, computing experience. While EndeavourOS is a joy on my PC with its 27" 2K screen, it loses a bit of that excitement for me on a laptop. For me, EOS is just not the same on a smaller form factor like a laptop. So the search has continued for something that might bring me that PC joy and excitement, but on a 14" ThinkPad T14.

Yep, that happened these past couple weeks. I previously tried Debian and Fedora but really wanted to stick with Arch or something Arch-based. Garuda and CachyOS were fine in their way, but still didn’t quite feel right. Then, on another thread, @cc_spicuous_2 suggested Artix.

Well… BOOM! THAT was the one! I initially tried the runit variant, but had a couple Bluetooth and sound hiccups. Now running Artix OpenRC with KDE Plasma and Wayland session. It’s absolutely perfect on the ThinkPad. That same excitement, and joy packed into a 14" ThinkPad.

So, I guess the bottom line is that I have 2 Linux distros that are truly exciting and, well… important to me. Making getting things done at home or on the go a dream.

  • Yeah, I know. Probably far too long a post, and I’m a nerd. Well, if the shoe fits. :wink: :vulcan_salute:
2

Here we go, the TLDR :winking_face_with_tongue:

Debian + :desktop_computer: = :face_with_diagonal_mouth:
Fedora + :desktop_computer: = :face_exhaling:
Antegros + :desktop_computer: = :partying_face:
Antegros + :headstone: = :sob:
…
EndeavourOS + :desktop_computer: = :partying_face:

Garuda + :laptop: = :distorted_face:
CachyOS + :laptop: = :yawning_face:
Artix + :laptop: = :partying_face:

Just a bit of fun. Your telling is very interesting!

3

Perfect! :rofl:

4

I felt that way after finding EndeavourOS last year.

Prior to that, back in the 90s I ran Mandrake (now Mandriva) and Suse Linux off and on and dabbled with Redhat (which felt too sterile). Then I went Mac for a while. Then Redhat announced a split; RHEL (for enterprise types) and Fedora Core (for the home crowd), and I got excited again. I think I ran Fedora for a couple of years before getting pulled back into Windows (gaming) and lost my way. I found a photo of me teaching my daughter the joys of linux (~2003?) when we were still living in Iceland (she runs Fedora btw).

DSCN0355
DSCN03551600×1200 586 KB

Now I’m home.

5

No, I have never been “excited” by a Linux distro. I’ve used computers since 1980 (a TRS-80 Model 1), and I’ve always viewed an OS as a tool to get things done. Every OS I’ve used has fulfilled that requirement.

6

Not really excited, but relieved.

Back in the '00s I was running a small web hosting firm when Red Hat split into RHEL and Fedora. At my level, I couldn’t really afford RHEL licenses, but I didn’t want to run a hosting business on a testing distro, which is how Fedora was billed at the time. Then I discovered CentOS, a re-badged RHEL, and still free for commercial use.

Now, long after selling that business and retiring from my day job, finding the Arch ecosystem scratched an itch I didn’t know I had.

My thoughts exactly. I can’t figure out if the theming is by Fisher-Price or Playmobil.

7

That post reads like a comment from the Borg just before… “resistance is futile.”

8

Back in the early noughties when Linux was my hobby, it was always exciting to try out a new distro, but now that I use Linux to get things done, it’s not so exciting.

9

But that’s exactly part of what makes it exciting… for me anyway. My last week’s reports for work were done on my Artix laptop. On the days I can work from home, the EndeavourOS PC fits that bill.

Like I said… maybe I’m just an old nerd. :zany_face:

10

Nothing to be ashamed of

11

Maybe I’ve been using it too long to get excited about it any more. Or maybe, it’s my medication.

That’s what makes it great for me, but not exciting.

12

I was and I actual be excited every day the computer displays an “A” when I hit the “A”-key. But for being excited just when I installed the OperatingSystem I think it’s somewhat like the number of the day in this video:

Back in the days I was excited about RedHat, S.u.S.E, Mandrake and KDE 3. The next ones were Antergos, EndeavourOS and one of those Fedora spins with a ton of multimedia stuff with a plasma shell and preinstalled apps for every thing you need for music and video.
What I miss most is SAP from work, that excited me more than anything else. But maybe I only missed my medicine this morning, who knows. :thinking:

13

I have this excitement everytime I do a complete fresh reinstall. Still to this day.

14

I’ll be perfectly honest and say that I have been excited about Linux since first discovering it in 2005.

Started with Knoppix, moved on to Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and pretty much everything in-between.

And moving recently in the past 3 years to EOS (and now also dabbling with vanilla Arch), I still feel that same sense of excitement and wonder.

I guess I really am an old, romantic idealist.

15

DEBIAN

I get very EXCITED whenever I run

sudo apt apdate

and it says:

There is one package to update

:star_struck:

16

I think it was in my pre-Linux times, when I saw an online article about Zorin OS.
It must have been around 2020, when Zorin was getting way less attention than it does now.
It came to me as a very pretty and attractive Linux distro, but I wasn’t convinced to switch from Windows just then.
And eventually, I started my Linux adventure with Mint, which was way more grounded in Linux community.

I don’t think I can recall that feeling ever again.

17

Pure excitement, no, but relieve thanks to EndeavourOS.
I started my Linux journey on Arch (with AwesomeWM, kinda crazy, ik) but always had issues with the Wi-Fi in my lecture hall. My laptop connected, but was unbearable slow. I could not fix it, and it was only ever this specific Wi-Fi.

Eventually, a friend of mine introduced me to EndeavourOS. I installed it, enjoyed Calamaris and the software selection screen and the Wi-Fi worked like a charm. I don’t know what EOS did that I with Arch couldn’t, but it was a relieve for sure. Since then, at least one of my devices has been running EOS constantly.

As UncleSpellbinder, my laptop is a secondary but important device, as I need it for my studies. I view it much more like an appliance than a computer. Hence, it currently has Bluefin installed, but I’m looking forward to changing that in the near future. Maybe it will be EOS again, although EOS is not quite appliance-level for me, but a bit more of a tinkerers distro. But of course, EOS still runs on my computer (from which I’m writing right now).

18

A bit of a lack of TLDR for me too. I was excited with linux to learn something new after I had been using Windows all my life prior, I also had a lot of determination to learn as much as I could about linux, since I was quite an advanced Windows user and worked in IT so I done a lot of advanced tasks on it and wanted to replicate everything I done there in Linux so it wasn’t going to be an instant switch like for example if I only used a PC for web browsing.
I have actually found it fun to find alternative software to the point I only use 2 programs that I used on Windows, and I have also grown a love for the terminal and terminal or TUI applications and have deleted many graphical applications in favour of doing those tasks in the terminal instead.

That started with EndeavourOS after I initially tested 10 different distros or so and different desktop environments, and EndeavourOS looked great since it was based on Arch.

I then wanted to learn more so I moved to Arch and installed via the manual terminal and was successful first time and later began customising my install for encrypted root and data and having everything set up exactly how I want it the manual way.

And now I use Artix Linux with Dinit init system, although I install it manually the same way as Arch from scratch. And I have learned about customising KDE plasma, fastfetch, zshrc etc from threads here too to personalise and make my usage more efficient.

Not now but in the future, one possible OS I could look to testing next is Void and openBSD, there are others too though.

So currently my system is Artix, dinit, Ly login manager/ or TTY, and Limine bootloader. I made this install to be the one to swap out everything for my own pickings.

Linux has been an exciting journey to learn stuff, and my PC is still my tool to do work, although a customised “bespoke” tool I crafted for myself, rather than Windows one size fits all, and understand it’s workings incredibly well to maintain it and use it well, other than the many other things left to understand.

But the reason Linux for me in particular was exciting so far was it was more than just the OS I selected, It also got me down many privacy and security knowledge, making scripts, encryption as default, cryptographic info, selecting non-big tech services such as email, plus many others (I have over 260,000 words worth of notes gathers by two years) and many of that originated initially from this forum itself and then i branched out to learn more, beforehand I never done any of this and kind of just used Windows as is but Linux kick started changing how I see or use an OS with a freedom to choose rather than use what I was given. It’s even kind of changed my future job prospects as I am now obtaining Linux qualifications and branching out from there to other sectors. So I would say this forum and Linux is something I will remember forever in memory, and has changed my future an a big way I have yet to see. The community aspect of Linux is something I appreciate too, as a small side note.

19

I was excited when i used Pop! OS in 2021 but after a few months of using i was bored with it, same with Zorin OS. Back in 2021 i also discovered EndeavourOS but was afraid to install it, because people on the zorin forums said “arch based is a rolling release and it breaks many times”. Because of that i kept using Pop! OS. Till i got annoyed by all the late updates from nvidia and kernel updates, i took of the iso from the endeavour site and flashed my notebooks.

Man man man the feeling, so excited and so now and then i still am. The notebooks are running like new. I am just a normal user, i can manage things and if i don’t know something i just ask here in the hope a experienced user can help.

20

There are some similarities to my Linux journey … :wink:

  • Beginning approx. 1995 or 1996 first experiments with SuSE 4 or 6, ongoing to the 2000s, never with success.
  • Approx. 2007 first mostly successful install with openSuse 10.3, only the installation of an IMAP server did not work, most clients still with Windows.
  • In 2009 start with Ubuntu 9.04 and transition of all clients to windows; “server” with DNS, DHCP, NIS, NFS, proxy, apache, IMAP, postfix etc.
  • In 2012 switch to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
  • In 2016 massive problems with upgrades to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
  • In december 2018 first installation of Antergos after watching c’t uplink 25.1 (including frustrating tests with Manjaro, Fedora and some more) and in beginning of 2019 installation of Antergos on several other clients.
  • In August 2019 installation of first EOS client.
  • In January 2020 switch of the “server” to EOS too, with now LDAP, NFS, IMAP, postfix, DNS, DHCP, etc.
  • Never looked back … :tada: