What brought you to them? Was it their ease of use, their design choices, or something else?(Or did W10’s EOL push you to them?)
I’ll be moving this to the Lounge.
I don’t see this discussion as “affecting the official Ubuntu flavours”
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Oh, I didn’t see the lounge earlier. Thank you!
I’m primarily a gamer, so the common recommendation is to choose a gaming-focused distribution. I tried several, but none gave me the balance of stability I was looking for.
Ubuntu has. Its documentation is excellent, which makes it much easier to find reliable information and make informed decisions without having to navigate conflicting advice. Once I had everything set up, it became an operating system I could simply use instead of continually managing.
A stable base also makes future decisions easier. If work ever starts creeping into my personal desktop workflow, I know I can spin up a virtual machine without feeling like I’m building on top of an unstable foundation.
My first Linux was Ubuntu 14. I upgraded to 16, but when they nuked Unity in 18, I switched to Mint. I considered trying the Ubuntu Unity distro, but it’s currently in limbo. Then I found that you can have the Unity desktop on any Ubuntu, except maybe not the latest. So I reinstalled 16, upgraded it to 18 (thus keeping the Unity desktop as an option). You can also just install 18 and then Unity, but I like doing it this way.
I tried updating 18 to 20 recently, but lost the Ubuntu Purple boot screen. It’s black and hard for me to read on 18. I tried to get it back, but only broke Grub in the process. So I again went through the process of installing 16, upgrading to 18, and now I’m back where I was.
I do have ESM enabled, so I’m safe until 2028. Don’t know what I’ll do at that point. Maybe the Unity distro will be back on its feet by then.
I used GNOME since 2009, loved Unity when it came out, then gradually started to want something different once Ubuntu switched to modern GNOME. I briefly tried Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop, but just didn’t adapt well to it.
Then came KDE through Kubuntu, and I think I hadn’t ever fallen in love with a user interface so fast. It’s extensive customizability was exactly what I had been missing from the GNOME 2 days. I also really liked the clean design language that’s just flashy enough to look modern without getting too flashy. The KDE software was also so much more powerful than their GNOME equivalents. I still have Ubuntu GNOME installed on my spare laptop, but Plasma has been my daily driver for years now.