I'm not Stable

[Guest]

Hi guys i kind off have this sort of trouble the thing is that i constantly jump from one distro to another sometimes even i changed my os every 2 days has that ever happened to one of you is there any tips to stop myself i know that some of you may find it stupid but i truly think that too much of freedom is downside to linux

[dibl]

Well, if you're having a good time installing a new OS every two days, why stop now?

OTOH, if you ever get to a point where you need to use the computer to do serious work over a period of days, weeks, months, or years, you might find configuring your system and your tools to support your work is too much time and energy on non-productive activities, and then you might select an OS to stay with indefinitely. I went to the extreme other side -- I don't even want to risk a distro upgrade every six months or a year, so I went with a rolling release that never becomes obsolete. I'm typing this on a system that I installed in mid-2011, in firefox (iceweasel) ver. 32.0.3, running a 3.17 kernel. It's all a matter of taste, and your needs for a production platform.

[jpenguin]

only every 2 days?

(Most of my installs are in vmware, but I'm try quite a few distro's)

[GreyGeek]

Allow me to recommend that you stay with Kubuntu 14.04 as your primary OS, install VirtualBox on it, and then play with all the other distros as a guest OS inside of VirtualBox.

[Qqmike]

I think, at first, a lot of people install distros frequently, like this, mainly because they can, and it's free, and possibly fun.

OTOH, sounds like it could be a hobby, so why not make it such, officially.

Partition your disk so you have one main OS--a root, home, and swap partition (say 25 GB, 100 GB, 5 GB, respectively--or whatever). Leave room for partition(s) for other OSs. Use your main partition for serious work; use the others for your experiments. And enjoy it without further analysis or ado.

Get and keep this on hand:

Boot-Repair
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Example of partitioning:
Use GParted Live CD/USB to do this, on one disk, say.
sad1 root / 25 GB -- for your main OS
sda2 /home 100 GB -- for your main OS
sda3 swap
sda4 Extended (I'm assuming a MBR partition structure)
Then Logical partitions within the Extended--for your test OSs

sda5 another OS root
sda6 another OS home (if necessary)
etc. (for other test OSs, you may not want or need a separate /home partition ... and so on)
...
...

[whatthefunk]

I never really understood distro jumping. You cant really get to know a distro until youve used it for a while. Ive been on Kubuntu for nearly three years now and Im still finding stuff that I didnt know about before.

[Snowhog]

I've stayed with Kubuntu because it just works for me, and it has been incredibly stable. Sometimes; rarely; I might have an issue with an application. But I don't expect a 100% error-free perfect system. It's written by humans after all. Kubuntu has been an absolute pleasure to use. I have no inclination to switch.

[eggbert]

I never really understood distro jumping. You cant really get to know a distro until youve used it for a while. Ive been on Kubuntu for nearly three years now and Im still finding stuff that I didnt know about before.

Same here, I don't understand the appeal of it. Reinstalling an OS is about as fun for me as watching grass grow. I generally ignore the C-list distros as they tend to sprout up and then die off. There also isn't much community/support for the smaller distros. So I do not want to invest time/energy into something that might not be a viable OS in a few years. If I ever do any distro hopping it's going to be one of the big 4: Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, or Suse.

I guess it could be interesting to check out the differences of other distros, but would be wiser to do that with virtualbox I would think.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I never really understood distro jumping. You cant really get to know a distro until youve used it for a while. Ive been on Kubuntu for nearly three years now and Im still finding stuff that I didnt know about before.

I've used Kubuntu since its first release, and it's the distro I like the most, and long ago settled on as "my" distro. Sometimes--and this is usually only limited to times when I have a new computer, with a big empty hard drive just waiting for an OS--I'll try a few other distros. It's nice to see how they stack up to my gold standard of Kubuntu. Some I've liked more than others, and could certainly see myself using them permanently, but I like the consistency of having Kubuntu on all my computers.

With all that said, however, if someone derives pleasure out of distro-hopping, more power to them!

[SteveRiley]

Hi guys i kind off have this sort of trouble the thing is that i constantly jump from one distro to another sometimes even i changed my os every 2 days has that ever happened to one of you is there any tips to stop myself i know that some of you may find it stupid but i truly think that too much of freedom is downside to linux

May I suggest some punctuation? A period here, a comma there, perhaps even a semi-colon. They're excellent for helping one pause, contemplate, evaluate; they improve understanding.

[Teunis]

For a moment I thought you meant your Kubuntu install was not stable.
Be re-reading your text I see it is an observation of yourself as a computer user

I also like to try out things but always keep a stable install available for the normal daily work and fun, at the moment it is Kubuntu 14.04 that I use most.
But the previous one was 13.10 and at boot it's still available on separate partitions for th time an experiment goes wrong and I seriously damage 14.04.

13.10 will soon be replaced by 14.10 and next March or April there's a good chance 14.04 will be replaced by 15.04, all depending on the stability of 14.10.

I rarely deviate from Kubuntu but do have a Netrunner install on an external disk and an older HP desktop with the Gentoo based Sabayon, again I use a KDE desktop.
For me it boils down to wanting, no expecting, the reconfigurability KDE offers, any other DE will soon bore me.

In other words, I reinstall twice a year, the rest is temporary and on their own partitions or even disks.
A VM is a good option, I only use it to keep a version of XP.

[millusions]

im also unstable. love trying new distros. finding out how things were dealt with differently, sometimes better sometimes worse.

while doing so Kubuntu was my first wow (after POS Mint), i really didnt like Kde before Kubuntu but out of curiosity i gave it a go as i found Unity a pointless mess of clicking about..

anyway, i was put off Kubuntu/Ubuntu with the frequent updates and new kernel every few days, frequently updates would break things. It comes down to user skill i guess and i should have turned that off.
But curiosity got the better of me and i kept searching for a rock solid KDE distro.
so Suse was next, it's been around 10 years since i hada suse server at home, i think it was Suse 9 or 10.
Anyhow, Suse feels rock solid and there's a definate fine polished feel to it. it's very nice!

one curious thing about Suse; i posted a fairly simple question on Suse forums, and the quality of response by one of the admins was pretty crap.
I realised how good the kubuntu forums are!!!!

anyway, later on i was working with a fairly low specced machine and Suse was definately not a candidate , so i tried Debian with kde.
talk about rock solid distro! love it! with xfce or kde it is very awsome! have not used this distro for many years and it is still THE ROCK. (debian sucks for usb or removable disk installs because it lacks drivers/firmware for nework itnerfaces)
a
this weekend i bought a Macbook Air 13 inch planning to install, sorry to say, Debian on it. being a total ignoramus of Mac OS i started reading about it, and its base on BSD not linux, but the interface is familiar to Linux way of handling things, has a terminal with some linux commands, not many, but has ssh and telnet which is a real bonus! it boots perfectly off a kubuntu on USB and Debian on a removable SSD.

so there's Kubuntu on my server, Suse on my desktop, debian on a Dell laptop and Mac OS on Macbook. it's interesting how all those things are different yet have so many similarities..

[MoonRise]

What is stability anyway!?? Isn't that a view point held by many who themselves may be unstable in the first place?

[millusions]

Mac OS is the greatest hippy con in the world...

i know its not linux, but bear with me for a second,

think of it like this,

build a distro based on, ahh, whatever u like.

tune it to only one PC build.

and sell that PC..over and over again

its brilliant if u ask me

[GreyGeek]

... Suse feels rock solid and there's a definate fine polished feel to it. it's very nice!..

That it is. RPM was the package management system on my first Linux, RH5.0, and several other, including SuSE, which I used for five straight years before Novell bought it. When I switched to a Debian based system ("LibraNet", IIRC) I realized how much better the deb packaging system is. I've been with Kubuntu for almost six years, and while I used to frequently try other distros, as guest OS's in VirtualBox, none has matched Kubuntu, IMO.

As far as forums go, I too, find this forum to be the best I've ever used in sixteen years of using Linux.