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Looks like I made a good call in the end, haha! I've come across others telling about how they've done plenty of distro-hopping to find the right choice for them (mostly on Reddit to be honest, but I feel I can never really trust anyone on there for a few reasons)... other than Slackware at least, what were some of the other distros that you tried out in that time? And would you say the reasons they didn't feel any better than Debian for you were more because of your specific tastes, or more general issues that would make you less open to recommending them?

And yeah, some of the more DIY distros do seem to be quite fun projects (with an added dose of banging your head against the wall), perhaps when I'm a tad more knowledgeable on how things work I may try out one or two myself for the hell of it... but it'll take a while, so I'll get there when I get there.

by December Winterwolf; 1 month ago (edited); Report 👍

this is something I could talk about all day, really ☺️ I hear what you're saying abut reddit, getting answers there is kind of a last resort..lol.

the very first one I tried was in 2007, when support and security fixes ended for windows 2000. win2k was lightweight and very snappy, and would do anything xp could with less ram and cpu but needed more attention to get everything working. I'd been thinking about getting away from it, anyway so I downloaded and ran "Mandriva" which was more or less an earlier fork of Fedora. it used the kde 3 desktop environment, which I am still using! when KDE went to v.4, the project was picked up and renamed "trinity desktop environment". the install was graphical and effortless, wine came pre loaded and I didn't have to leave any little windows apps behind that I couldn't replace via the native apps. it was really exciting to have it working! it wasn't a very popular distro and support for it didn't last long, i ran it for maybe a week and couldn't wait to try more distro flavors. 

I asked online friends and did searches on what i should try next, and set up my "distro froggy" pc. ubuntu was mentioned the most, effortless install like mandriva.. when I read that it was a mod of debian, I needed to get debian and after a day of testing it, on to my main pc it went. first version was "Etch". I had downloaded slackware but was clueless as what to do with it. I came across 'Vector linux" which packaged slackware up like ubuntu did with debian, had it working in minutes and really liked it! they made a slapt-get command and it worked just like apt-get, it used all the same prompts so a debian user could do anything on it instantly. I don't think it's still around. so when I had a lot of time I threw myself at slackware again and after about 2 days, I had it going as good as vector. I just typed whatever didn't work into google and there the answer was, and even fixed a few things guessing. FreeBSD was on that same difficulty level. PC-BSD was like vector in that sense, any dummy could get it up and running, and still use the freebsd ports system that is more or less their version of apt. didn't think it was as snappy as the linux kernel, and not as widely supported but very robust and I could easily survive on it if i chose to.

I messed with fedora & redhat, centOS, suse, knoppix, and several knockoffs thereof..mint was new around that time. solaris was really odd! it was neither linux nor bsd, it's very own thing. very hard to configure, didn't mess with it for long. Gentoo was super intriguing, how it built itself entirely from source and customized itself to the hardware. many swore that worked better than downloaded binaries and I'm sure it did! but like slackware, it was literally a 2 day process getting everything working. Sabayon linux was another similar to ubuntu and mandriva, it made all it's binaries from gentoo and had a good package manager..super easy to get running in no time. if you had a lot of time or cared enough to, there's ways to build debian entirely from source same as gentoo, but I haven't tried it yet. 

the debian project is one of the oldest , widely used, trusted and considered the most reliable, popular stuff like mint and ubuntu are just customizations of it, i always preferred to strip my systems down to get the most from my hardware, and it's just the best all-around barebones system out there.

I have a little laptop I'm going to take on trips that I'm going to try and get NetBSD running on, it's like a really stripped down older version of freebsd that got maintained differently over time. 

by rillo; 1 month ago (edited); Report 👍