What stage are you on?

What stage are you on?

macos because it just works

Went to Arch first off, never moved. It does everything I want and I see no reason to switch.

Ubuntu part 2

The last stage, realizing I don't need to waste my time on that shit because my job does not require it. Wangblows just works, period.

true. I'm at the last stage perfectly happy with Gnome on Fedora 25. Upgrading doesn't break shits anymore and it just wreks.

You missed the stage when one goes back to Windows 7

Ubuntu to Arch to Gentoo (it is unironically the best distro) Gentoo is not even that difficult once you have installed it a few times.

last one but i still hope i will go back to debian once debian devs realize that they should allow PPAs for GPU drivers and productivity software.

Last one. I'm on Fedora 25.
Wayland is a piece of shit, though. Noticeable performance drop compared to X and common things still don't work (VDPAU).

I went Mint->Arch->Ubuntu->Antergos

I'm pretty content with Antergos because it combines simplicity of mint/Ubuntu with the package manager of arch.

>common things still don't work (VDPAU)
Disregard that, I suck cocks.
I fiddled with it a bit and managed to make it work by setting the correct driver in an environmental variable. The piece of shit was trying to load the nVidia driver, even though I have Radeon graphics.

Gentoo
:^)

I'm on the last stage. I use straight Ubuntu. I'll probably hop over to Fedora once GNOME 3.24 is released though.

I don't know if it's the new kernel or not but Fedora 25 + Wayland has GNOME moving pretty snappy. The overview animation has never been smoother for me. I just can't stick with it because of the whole isolated windows thing. You'd think it'll only be little things like Gpick that would be unusable but it extends to dragging and dropping files from a .rar file, even. At least Nautilus 3.24 is providing a fix for not being able to open a sudo session of it on Wayland.

Caldera to Slackware to freebsd to PC BSD to suse.

Spent a lot of time on slackware.

Started with #! and when it died I switched to pure Debian.

On the windows stage nearing the osx stage

Literally the only acceptable distros:

>Fedora
>Void
>Gentoo
>Debian & Devuan

The "clinging to windows 7 until it loses support" stage

The second Ubuntu stage.

Never actually used gentoo or arch,
but I did use openbox and I3 for a while.

Win2016, because just works!

start on slackware, knowing nothing
after several years dual-booting, distro hop for about 2-3 years
all other distros suck
go back to slackware because it just works
also after 24 years it finally has package management and easy-to-set-up multilib and LUKS and repos for almost everything
>literally no reason to use anything else

also
>customize very little because you realize that is not that important
spending 20-30 minutes on initial setup of and 30-300 seconds every so often adding to/modifying an elegant set of WM keybindings, notification/monitoring scripts, handlers for programs that support them, and helper scripts to automate/extend the functionality of common tasks and tools will cumulatively save countless hours in the long run. eye candy is not so worth it, but there is so much more that you can customize than just what your desktop looks like.

Debian stage since before any and all of the other distros from OP's pic even existed. Previous stage was Slackware and RedHat before that.

last stage was my first stage tbqh

>pic related
>the best OS

my path was

vista > 7 > ubuntu > 7 > fedora > 7 > 10 > arch > 10 > sabyon > 10

for a beginner user like me, can you suggest some projects I can do that can automate things to make things easier like you say?

I went from Windows user to Ubuntu and now I'm using suse and I'm actually enjoying customising the look of things, although I've had to spend a lot of time fixing other things like audio driver issues and the like also. I'm learning a lot about how the file system works and interacts. just learned to create links as a workaround to a problem I encountered too.

>Void
>literally the definition of meme
>acceptable
It is as fine as Arch and Gentoo is.

don't think I'm vain enough to be posting in desktop threads at any point though.

Ubuntu part 3
Return of the rice

I'm on the last stage using Ubuntu

Will switch to fedora next release

I skipped all of those and went straight to debain and stayed there

Change Ubuntu-based distro to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and then to Leap. Now have SUSE&Win7 in dualboot and do not want go to Arch/Gentoo stage, cuz it silly and very painful.

I started with arch though.

what do you do often?
the most basic is defining aliases for long command lines you have type out
after that, think of any situation in a terminal where you type out a long command line (not necessarily even) with parts that change, and then based on the result of that you do some number of things. that can be replaced by a relatively straightforward shell script.
then you can tie shell scripts to keybindings in your wm/de and make things even faster
a good idea is to make a ~/bin and add it to your path
if there are things you want to automatically happen at specific intervals, make a script and stick it in cron

this was something i wrote recently to speed up taking screencaps. it takes two arguments, first one is the name/path of the file (without the .png), second is optional, if it's r it takes the whole screen instead of just a portion. if the directory doesn't exist, it is created. if the file already exists, numbers are added to the end of the name until it gets to one that doesn't exist yet.
#!/bin/bash
dir=$HOME/$(dirname "$1")
name=$(basename "$1")
[[ $2 = r ]] && opt="-window root"
[[ -e $dir && ! -d $dir ]] && notify-send "$dir is not a directory!" && exit 1
[[ ! -e $dir ]] && mkdir -p "$dir"
while [[ -e $dir/$name$num.png ]] ; do num=$(($num+1)); done
notify-send "saving $([[ -v opt ]] && echo 'root ')to $dir/$name$num.png"
import $opt "$dir/$name$num.png"

then in my window manager i added the following keybindings:
Print :Exec cap img/"$(dmenu -p "capture to img/"

>tfw final stage
>using arch
I'd settle for fedora or ubuntu but I like current hardware too much.

95 > 2000 > xp > vista > 7 > mint > 7 > 10 > ubuntu gnome > arch using gnome > arch with i3

I guess arch is terminal, but we'll see in a few years

This, changing distros is more of a hassle than maintaining Arch/Gentoo will ever be.

that is a useful little script. this is exactly the kind of stuff I want to start doing. hmm... I've got a huge music library that I used to use winamp to organise but maybe I can write a script that organizes every song with the same syntax... make it a little project.

the ripping script has some retarded/wrong lines but it was pretty much the first script i wrote that more than a few lines and i still didn't know bash very well coming from things like perl, and it still works as intended even if it's for the wrong reasons

Windows

Fedora > Arch Cinnamon > Arch i3 > Fedora > Ubuntu

After too many wireless issues on Arch and hidpi issues that no DE was able to solve decently I gave Unity a try. WQHD screen on 14" screen and 1.5 scaling on Unity and shit looks amazing and not totally misplaced unlike Cinnamon or Gnome. Shit just works on Ubuntu and it's still Linux so I don't care anymore. Still can customize with gnome tweak tools so win-win.

Debian -> Ubuntu for one week -> Debian Sid
This was two years ago I believe. Thanks Windows 10.

was about to post this

id3info and id3tag are command-line utilities that can return/set tags. read up on the output options, then look at how you can use things like grep, cut, and awk (a little mini-scripting language of it's own that can process, reformat, extract, and do other things with lines of text that you pass through it.

the only thing is you want to be super careful, especially if you haven't done bash scripting before, because there are a lot of weird little quirks about how bash works and if you do anything that moves/copies/removes files you can accidentally your whole directory. that's how valve "rm -rf /"ed the computers of people using steam on linux

ubuntu > ubuntu mate > manjaro > arch > 1 hour later > w10

Cheers based user. I will look into this. I'll make sure to backup stuff before I mess a round with those utils - perhaps I'll write a backup script.
Am I good at Linux yet?

Same desu

but there's already rsync...

I've done the full circle, i did like Fedora, but I had to go back to Arch before long, I fell in love with the AUR, so Arch is the only distro for me.

looks awesome. seems I don't need to write a backup script then I suppose. Still new but picking stuff up every day.

moving from Windows Linux really is amazing. The utility and power of Linux I guess really starts to show when you begin to harness it. I've only just started but it's stuff like this that makes me want to keep digging, finding new things and learning more.

>started with debian
>sticked with debian
>still using debian

Mint is garbage though.

Eh, I guess at or close to the end. Went from Ubuntu to Arch, tinkered a bit with Gentoo (never used it on my primary machine). Then I used Trisquel for a while and decided Debian would be better because Trisquel is dead. Been using Debian on my laptop for about a month now I guess, with Ubuntu on my desktop because it just werks.

Started with Ubuntu and its derivatives. Moved around to debian and Raspbian. Neither had enough hard compatibility or usability of Ubuntu. Went back to Ubuntu and am currently using MATE 16.04.

Arch a shit and for autists where time is meaningless to them.

Debian primarily because arch maintainers are faggots and no segregation of nonfree software.

my debian hypervisor has like 3 fedora 25 machines running and I will admit that out of the box, fedora does do some things right.

Strict SELinux policies, firewalld, etc.

but dealing with those things on a latptop/desktop isn't really fun.

MATE is pretty cozy, isn't it?

use solus or ikea injects you with his cum from his big shiny budgie

Ubuntu (7.04 is when I started using Linux exclusively) -> Suse -> Arch -> Manjaro -> Void -> Fedora -> macOS

started with debian
the one I used for the longest time without hopping was Fedora (almost 6 releases).

debian again, this time stable.

Might switch to *buntu LTS when I upgrade my computorb but for as long as I'm stuck on the current one I feel no reason to reinstall the system for no reason.

This is so important. Keep at it user. You're gonna go far with that shine in your eye. Not even being a troll about this. I keep looking at Linux but am too scared to take the plunge and learn.

Godspeed.

who else started here?

the last one. i'm using linux since 2002 (redhat 8) and mostly had redhat, fedora, gentoo and ubuntu. sticked with ubuntu because it just werks fine and has great mainstream support out of the box. my time is too valuable to fuck around with shit like gentoo or arch on a desktop setup.

I'm sticking to Gentoo and everytime I have to deal with Ubuntu on desktop I reinforce my hate towards systemd.
Debian is cool though. I find it on most of the servers I administer.

Last one, Debian. I went Ubuntu > Fedora > Arc > Debian.

yeah it's really hard for me to explain to my windows friends the basic power and flexibility of unix shell. for instance, this scans a directory for images matching a minimum size (1920x1080 by default) and creates links to them in a separate directory, easy way to filter images that could be used as wallpapers
#!/bin/bash
# requires imagemagick
# sets first/second argument to directories you want to use
img_dir="$1"
wall_dir="$2"

# self explanatory
MIN_WIDTH=${3:-1920}
MIN_HEIGHT=${4:-1080}

# file extensions to check for (separated by | because they will be used in regex)
FILE_TYPES='jpg|gif|png'

shopt -s globstar extglob nocaseglob

if [[ -d $img_dir && -d $wall_dir && -w $wall_dir ]]
then
for img in "$img_dir"/**/*.@($FILE_TYPES); do
width=$(identify -format "%w" -- "$img[0]")
height=$(identify -format "%h" -- "$img[0]")
dir=$(dirname -- "${img#$img_dir/}")
[[ -e $wall_dir/$dir ]] || mkdir -p "$wall_dir/$dir"
action=Skipped
[[ $width -ge $MIN_WIDTH && $height -ge $MIN_HEIGHT ]] && ln -sr "$img" "$wall_dir" && action=Added
echo "$action $img (${width}x$height)"
done
else echo "$0 [min width (1920)] [min height (1080)]"
fi


started and finished. the only real direction to from Slackware is BSD or plan9

Last stage, with Fedora on desktops (though I may also try it on Raspberry) where I use XFCE, out of laziness for better things like FVWM, out of patience for KDE (was using it when it went from 3 to 4: never ever again such shit; be very quiet about it if you're one responsible for that, as someone will one day beat your worthless piece of shit ass really bloody; or brag about it, as you're after all not even worth the bullet you still deserve in the back of your head) and out of genuine disgust for Gnome.

Also use CentOS on servers and router.

First things I tried were Redhat and Mandriva in the late 90's, but lack of at home Internet kept me away.

Then Ubuntu with Warty, as erryone was talking about it. Was cheap half assed shit then, and still was errytime I looked back at Ubuntu.

Then I rly learned with LFS, then Gentoo.

Then decided not to waste so much time and went with Debian.

Then got fed up with the niggering SJWry visibly consuming more of Debian resources than actually working on making a distro worthy of this name. Also got fed up of the stupidly short lifecycle for servers, while still stupidly long for desktops, with unbearably long testing and unstable freezes. May it horribly die in fire, together.

Then went with Fedora and CentOS. Am now happy and know peace, at last.

*together with anyone associated with that SJW crap

>fvwm
my nigger.
tried it out for the first time this weekend, stayed up all night playing with the config

>tfw ascended past autistic OS nitpicking

It's great.

Still get some entrenched habits from my fvwm days, like a rather thick dashboard on the left side of the screen, with big overview of all virtual desktops, and icons only taskbar.

Beware, though: that one rabbit hole is bottomless.

I'm at the last stage, with Fedora 25 KDE.

It simply works.

I'm on the eternal Antergos stage
I have transcended distro switching and moved to the infinitely higher plane of rolling filesystems - currently on btrfs

Started with Debian and then Ubuntu as a kid. Then Mint, then Arch/Debian, now Gentoo after realizing how silly it is to make everything difficult for myself by distro hopping since it's all the same shit anyway.

i'm at the last stage, happy on ubuntu mate.
i started on mint then went to arch and after using arch for a while i switched to manjaro and shortly after i found ubuntu mate and stuck with it.

Yup, he sure did.

The last one

Yeah I had slept the whole day before because sick or fatigue or idk and then had planned out this whole schedule planned out to stay up all night and catch up on all the work i had piled up but then i started reading the docs for FVWM around 12:30 or so and before I knew it it was 8am
i have an icons-only taskbar on fluxbox though

the one thing I didn't like about FVWM is that it didn't have the same kind of tiling that you can do with fluxbox, although I'm guess you can just write your own function to do more advanced tiling behavior? the extensibility in general blew my mind

last time I used it, there were tiling scripts, yes
though they were not that great at the time (last time I used it was maybe 8 years ago)

that actually is among those things I tell myself I'll use as an excuse to take another plunge in FVWM someday

anyhow, best windows manager memories I have are with FVWM
after FVWM, consequences can never be the same

Yup, I went through the entire cycle before even lurking Sup Forums. The Mint/Arch/Gentoo stages were a little more than a year total, then I spent 2 or 3 years on Ubuntu, then I got a Mac.

1996 reporting for duty.

GET THE FUCK OFF MY BOARD NSA! GET OUT! GET OUT! GET! THE! FUCK! OUT! YOU CAN'T FORCE ME TO USE WINDOWS YOU GODDAMN NIGGERS!

Nothing shows you have arrived more than the root lost+found of your main machine having been created 7 years ago.
Debian btw

>I went through the entire cycle before even lurking Sup Forums.
Are you me?
>Mint
You're not me.

On the sad side it's a shame that things that are really easy on Windows/OSX are really overly complicated on Linux. I remember when I switched from Arch or Ubuntu to Win7 and I was amazed of how easy things were.

On the plus side, all you learn with Linux can take it with you to a OSX (Cygwin is a nice try).

NSA! FUCK OFF!!

My best WM memories were using enlightenment.... 12 or 13 years ago? so much eye candy and textured decorations and the same kind of virtual desktop paradigm as fvwm. when i'm not too busy to spend several days straight on it, i'll finish building the latest sources for everything and get into it again, figure out which of the components work and which ones broke after 4 years of not being developed, make at least a simple style that doesn't look like shit, rewrite the build scripts, make packages, feel good about providing something for my distro

was using it at about the same time as you, just before my long FVWM era, actually
it looked great at the time, but was not too fond of usability and rough corners here and there

I use Debian because it just werks and literally nothing breaks. I see nothing wrong with Ubuntu, but I choose to use Debian because that's what I like.

>Debian
>literally nothing breaks
those pajeet standards

>Slackware
>RedHat
>Gentoo
>Slackware
>Debian Sid (4 years)
>MacOS
>OpenBSD (past 2 years)

they seem to have spent 10 years just rewriting the libraries for it and now the idea is to make something that could work consistently across anything with a display, from a wearable to some giant multi-screen setup. just curious to see if it is less buggy and has more features. they say it has a tiling mode (not like a command to arrange but like an actual tiling wm)
they added a lot of DE stuff to it but it looks like you can still turn most of it off and run it like just a WM.

the old version (i have e16) still looks great for shitposting in desktop threads but i haven't tried using it for anything else.

>pajeet standards
>installed Debian
>configured everything I needed
>torrent+mail+sshd+nginx+rsync
>updates via cron
>never touched the box again
>lost uptime because I stopped paying for the box
whatever you mean faggot

>Debian on servers
much too short lifecycle for that use
upgrade path rarely that great
been there, done that
and for a lot more than 200 days.

because it doesn't exist for any competent user

Went from 1st to 5th without doing all those steps. Every OS will do if I can do ssh on it. The worst OS among all of them is iOS, but that's because it's impossible to ctrl+c/crtl+x there.

>much too short lifecycle for that use
3 years seems fine to me>
>upgrade path rarely that great
What do you mean by this?
>for a lot more than 200 days
I wish I could too.

> upgrade path rarely that great
It almost never breaks unless you patch it with libs built from source.

Never used gentoo or arch. Ubuntu -> Fedora -> "Debian and make everything just like arch" (netinst), and that's it.

I started on ubuntu bc it was easy to install
moved to manjaro
tried arch didn't like the community
moved back to manjaro
moved to gentoo
moved to antergos
tried void didn't like it
moved back to antergos
just werkz

Started with Fedora, went to Arch, then Gentoo, and now I've been on Arch a while.

Man, I feel your pain when I'm working away with my MacOS. I wanted to installed Debian on it but fuck that, might as well use MacOS.