I started with Ubuntu, and also liked to tinker a lot, when I had too much spare time, I went to Debian, Gentoo, Sabayon, Arch (in that order, note how I grew tired of compiling and wasted time, with each hop, I started to look for precompiled again).
Finally I read a comment Linus said about Ubuntu that really clicked with me and made sense, I needed to work and be productive with little hassle, need the most compatibility and focusing on my work, not fighting the distro to make it do what I want. So it was Ubuntu, it just works. Simple as that.
I don't regret using those other distros, they taught me a lot though, but I think it's a natural transition to simplicity after you see it's not worth the extra milliseconds of performance, at least for a user that besides being a developer, does the usual things with his PC.
At least for development, needed bits are more likely to "just work" on Ubuntu, in my experience, more than any other distribution, even Debian or Fedora.
Mostly, I want to get stuff done, and want the least friction when using new bits. That is what you get from the mainstream.
I gave Debian a last shot before going back to Ubuntu because I liked the idea robustness, but even with the "less stable" Debian I was missing a lot of the bleeding edge and features I needed at that moment in my day to day job, I felt crimped at times and having to revert back to, you guessed it, compiling from source and installing a parallel version. Ubuntu has really been stable for me, I think the Debian idea of robustness is not really meant for the end user, but more oriented towards servers and other target audience, definitely not a developer's distro IMO, because we need to be on top of the latest most of the time.
Usability-wise, there's always something ready-made for Ubuntu; commands, binaries and tutorials are Ubuntu-first because it's the consumers distro, that's what I wanted, if I needed a program I don't wanna know the inner workings, I want to copy paste the command, install and keep on moving with my thing.
Awesome. Right now I'm leaning Debian, and got a working install up on my hardware in no time at all, but I think I just need to have this experience for myself as I use it more. There's a decent chance I'll end up on Ubuntu for similar reasons, we'll see.
Experience is never bad, at the end of the day it's what you feel most comfortable with. Debian for me is right there next to Ubuntu in terms of what I need, so it's a close choice.
I have to agree. I'm now tempted to switch from Gentoo to Ubuntu, namely because Gentoo is a time sink... and I'm wasting my time. On my laptops, I'm using a flavored version of Ubuntu called Xubuntu, using the XFCE desktop environment. I've used KDE and Gnome -- they've moved too far from "Choose reasonable defaults with a large base of options, don't yank 'em away, don't think you know better than me, and don't get in the way of me doing what I need to do."
I think I'm switching soon, probably with my next hardware swap.
I started with Ubuntu, and also liked to tinker a lot, when I had too much spare time, I went to Debian, Gentoo, Sabayon, Arch (in that order, note how I grew tired of compiling and wasted time, with each hop, I started to look for precompiled again).
Finally I read a comment Linus said about Ubuntu that really clicked with me and made sense, I needed to work and be productive with little hassle, need the most compatibility and focusing on my work, not fighting the distro to make it do what I want. So it was Ubuntu, it just works. Simple as that.
I don't regret using those other distros, they taught me a lot though, but I think it's a natural transition to simplicity after you see it's not worth the extra milliseconds of performance, at least for a user that besides being a developer, does the usual things with his PC.
Very relatable. Is the usability gap between Debian and Ubuntu really that large?
At least for development, needed bits are more likely to "just work" on Ubuntu, in my experience, more than any other distribution, even Debian or Fedora.
Mostly, I want to get stuff done, and want the least friction when using new bits. That is what you get from the mainstream.
I gave Debian a last shot before going back to Ubuntu because I liked the idea robustness, but even with the "less stable" Debian I was missing a lot of the bleeding edge and features I needed at that moment in my day to day job, I felt crimped at times and having to revert back to, you guessed it, compiling from source and installing a parallel version. Ubuntu has really been stable for me, I think the Debian idea of robustness is not really meant for the end user, but more oriented towards servers and other target audience, definitely not a developer's distro IMO, because we need to be on top of the latest most of the time.
Usability-wise, there's always something ready-made for Ubuntu; commands, binaries and tutorials are Ubuntu-first because it's the consumers distro, that's what I wanted, if I needed a program I don't wanna know the inner workings, I want to copy paste the command, install and keep on moving with my thing.
Awesome. Right now I'm leaning Debian, and got a working install up on my hardware in no time at all, but I think I just need to have this experience for myself as I use it more. There's a decent chance I'll end up on Ubuntu for similar reasons, we'll see.
Experience is never bad, at the end of the day it's what you feel most comfortable with. Debian for me is right there next to Ubuntu in terms of what I need, so it's a close choice.
I have to agree. I'm now tempted to switch from Gentoo to Ubuntu, namely because Gentoo is a time sink... and I'm wasting my time. On my laptops, I'm using a flavored version of Ubuntu called Xubuntu, using the XFCE desktop environment. I've used KDE and Gnome -- they've moved too far from "Choose reasonable defaults with a large base of options, don't yank 'em away, don't think you know better than me, and don't get in the way of me doing what I need to do."
I think I'm switching soon, probably with my next hardware swap.
A small update. I switched.
Why? I use Chrome Remote Desktop. Gentoo had a package for it that needed a maintainer to keep it up. I had a problem a filed a bug.
The response was to remove the CRD package.
That broke the camel's back. I switched that day.