Why would you switch from Ubuntu to another distribution?

Question

I've used (K)ubuntu/Mint on my home and work computers for over a year now. I started because it was supposedly good for beginners to Linux, but recently I've been wondering what it's like working with other distributions yet I haven't found a compelling reason to switch away.

If it helps, I work mostly as a programmer and systems administrator. I also prefer to do most tasks via command line vs. GUI given the chance. I've used both apt and yum (Ubuntu, CentOS) and don't have a preference for package management.

If you've made a switch from Ubuntu, why did you switch? Or if you've always used another flavor of Linux/Unix-like, why are you happy with what you are using now?

Answer 1

I've moved back and forth over the last couple of decade or so between Macs, Windows, Slackware, the BSD's, and more recently Ubuntu. I chose it basically because:

• I'd heard good things
• I had some CD's handy and no decent internet connection available at the time
• I needed a Linux to support some annoying hardware.

It served me well for a couple of years.

My eventual reason for switching was due to my personal preferences, and it's gradual shift further away from them:

• I'm prone to minimalism, and I found that Ubuntu was always doing things automagically that I didn't want behind my back that took an inordinate amount of work to get rid of - sometimes with multiple, conflicting packages modifying each others behaviour. Particularly around upgrade time, it was just a PITA to figure out what needed changing all over again to set things back to how I liked them.

• A lot of their work goes into features that I really just have no use for - PulseAudio was unpleasant, and offered me no benefits over ALSA. HAL and DBUS were both irrelevant AND annoying to the way I like to use my computer. I don't use GNOME, or KDE, so improvements in those areas just weren't interesting to me.

The final straw was an update that meant compiz just wouldn't run anymore on my hardware - which, coming after several days of customizing it, and it being a laptop with no chance of upgrading, was a Big Deal to me.

So I've been running arch for nearly a year now, and am fairly happy with it. In all honesty, I'd probably prefer to go back to FreeBSD, but with no pressing need, I find these days that I'm not really willing to invest the time to change - it's not broken, and I'd rather spend my time doing other things.

I've tweaked Arch into a state that I'm fairly happy with, and their design decisions generally mesh well with my way of doing things.

Fundamentally, for me, it was matter of personal taste - and my taste isn't really Ubuntu. It was definitely worth running such a variety - I now have a fairly good idea of how they differ, and more importantly to me, of what I want out of a system.

Answer 2

Actually, I would not want to shift from Ubuntu.
However, its a complicated world and there are many reasons to need another distro.

1. PuppyLinux is a lean and fast distro that works quite well on older hardware platforms.
   • it works off the memory making it blazing fast to browse
2. As a special case, I had to use RH9 (huh, you say what is that?)
   • this was because a ton of other software was already setup on it and
     no one wanted to bother changing (to say Ubuntu)

You should peek at the DistroWatch site to get a hang on what others can do.

Answer 3

I switched from Ubuntu to Debian on a crusty old home server machine recently. The main push for switching was the need to get away from Ubuntu 7.04, which is out of life and no longer supported by the repositories.

I chose Debian partially because I wanted to see what was different (I've used RedHat in the past, then Ubuntu, never straight-up Debian), and partially to get a bit more control over the system than Ubuntu offered. I think a lot of the setup would've been easier if I'd gone with a server version of Ubuntu 9.4, but I certainly wouldn't have learned as much.

Answer 4

Learning.

Using other (more complicated) distributions may elp you udnerstand how other things work. For example, the isntallation process for Arch Linux is a bit more ocmplicated and requires a bit more of manual work, but it would help you understand fstab, daemons and some other concepts.

Gentoo could help you understand for example, how kernel compilation works.

Answer 5

As others have mentioned, the main reason would be to learn. Once you have mastered Ubuntu, all you have done is master Ubuntu. You have not mastered Linux. For that, you will need to take away all the magic of Ubuntu and get down to the guts. The up-side is that once you master Linux, you would be able to get down to work with almost any distribution and adjusting to other *nix flavours would be easier too.

Answer 6

I'd switch to a distribution that takes a stronger stance against non-free software like gNewSense.