Last week I made the decision to switch Linux distributions for my primary and secondary notebooks.
My primary notebook had been running Devuan since October 2023, and my secondary notebook had been running Debian stable since July 2024.
What prompted my decision was something I’d read the week before that Debian had decided to cease posting on X because X doesn’t reflect Debian’s ‘shared values’.
Pardon me, but I would think that a community or project (as they describe themselves) responsible for developing, maintaining and promoting an operating system would want to promulgate their ideas and communiqués on as broad a range of platforms as possible and to garner input from an equally broad base of developers and users.
I most recently wrote about my Linux distro of choice and window managers a little over a year ago.
At that time I was running the i3 window manager on an Arch distro. That is still my setup of choice, but in the interim I did use both dwm and Qtile for quite a while (probably 9 months in dwm and two months using Qtile). dwm did take some fiddling with patches to install a systray, but it eventually came together.
For some reason every six or twelve months I tend to switch Linux distros. Some of that history can be read here, here, here, here, here and here.
My mid-2021 switch has been from Fedora 32 running Gnome 3 to Arch running i3. What precipitated this flip? A couple of things: a new release of the Gnome Desktop Environment had been released and Fedora seemed a little slow (to me) in making it available in their stable branch. Whilst I can appreciate the stability and certainty that brings many users, in this case I wanted to try out Gnome 40 a little sooner. I realise I could have moved to the development branch (called Rawhide), but I instead opted for a clean install of something else. Interestingly (to me, anyway), that decision to move to Gnome 40 is what also moved me on from Gnome to re-look at some tiling window managers. But more on that shortly.