nanook

@jherazob That's great, my experience has not gone as smoothly, I've ended up with dependency loops that in spite of my best efforts, I could just not readily resolve. Things like there is a new version of python required by the new apt, but it installed the apt before the python, so now I'm stuck with a system that has a new version of apt but old version of python, thus apt won't work to install the new python manually. I've not encountered this with Ubuntu but more than once with Mint, like I said my success rate with Mint has been around 50/50.

@lancalot I run an ISP so quite a few servers thus though anacdotal, not a super tiny sample. And again I think it's an important point to consider but a lot has to do with how much effort you are going to put into customization. If your use is very generic, install and go, then no big deal, but if you spend a lot of time fine tuning and installing apps you have to get from third parties and compile yourself then a re-install is a big deal. I find myself often in the latter situation so it is important to me, to someone else perhaps not. For me windows is like the former situation, all I do with Windows is play games, and it takes me maybe 1/2 hour to install the games so do I care about a re-install of Windows? Not really.

@lancalot Only that I've run just about every debian derived distro there is and Ubuntu is the only one that has reliably upgraded in place.

The big thing to consider is how much are you going to customize it and how many external apps are you going to install, because with Mint when the next release you are more likely than not going to have to re-install, with Ubuntu you will be able to upgrade in place. Snap is trivially easy to get rid of, I'm typing this from a Ubuntu-Mate 24.04 system with NO snap.

@MonkeMischief @reallyzen NIS is seriously broken in Suse and I've had a bug report in four at least four years and they won't fix it. So no good in a network.

snap is easily excised, snap list, snap remove (everything in list0, apt remove snapd, only thing of importance is Ubuntu's introduction box and firefox, firefox can be installed directly from mozilla's repo. In my view the introductory box has zero value so no reason to install it.

What you are referring to as the system search isn't, it's only part of the default desktop. If you use anything but gnome you'll never see it.

@bbbhltz @Doodz The truth is you can make almost any distro work like any other. Main differences out of the box are desktops, but you can install virtually any desktop on virtually any distro, I have Mate on ALL of mine despite all the different distros, the other main difference is package managers. There are some outliers that are exceptions, gentoo for example, you compile the whole damn thing yourself, this has a learning curve but the advantage is 100% customization and you can optimize for your particular hardware and needs, arch and manjaro some packages provided as binaries but most things you can also recompile and customize. Then there is kali which is your friend if network penetration is your thing. There are a variety of immutable releases, more pain in the ass than they are worth in my view but that provides a layer of security, but those things are outliers. Probably 90% of distros are either offshoots of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Debian or of Ubuntu which is an offshoot of Debian. And the main difference between Debian and Redhat flavors are two things, package manager, dpkg/apt in the case of Debian and rpm/dnf in the case of Redhat, and of default security which is SeLinux and Debians which uses apparmor. Of the two selinux is probably more secure but is also more ubtrusive being a pain in the ass to change on the fly and requiring re-labeling which on systems with rotary drives is a slow and torturous process during which the machine is unavailable for anything else. The kernel security systems of the two, if you use secure boot, are also somewhat different, the Redhat version is able to use TPM, so of the two flavors I would say in theory Redhat is potentially more secure, but in practice ALL of the exploits I've seen on my servers have been on the Redhat flavor so perhaps practice and theory are somewhat incongruent in this case. At any rate, I agree with bbbhltz, take the time to get to know what you have well before distro hopping is that likely you can customize it to be what you want without changing. I personally find Ubuntu to be a good starting point, it's easy to learn initially and it is flexible enough to bend into what you want long term.

@troyunrau Ok did try, delete + center button mouse click does remove the file however since the only delete on my keyboard is right side and I'm right handed handed and and thus also use the mouse right hand, not terribly useful.

I have mint, ubuntu, debian, zorin, mxlinux, popos, fedora, alma, and rocky8 systems here, oh and one old centos6 system, and I use ubuntu for the majority of my infrastructure. Ubuntu always upgrades from one release to another in place successfully, the others do not. All the Redhat's are always a fresh install. Mint is about 50/50, and debian pretty much always requires a re-install. That and Ubuntu tends to be less problematic, especially after I excise snap.

@troyunrau In mate it's a drop down menu not a key.

On servers I primarily use a terminal, only for things like virt-manager do I ever fire up a desktop so on servers mostly moot.

Hard delete used to be in the drop-down along with move to Trash, since I rarely accidentally delete things and when I do I have backups, I much preferred that arrangement.