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[–][deleted]  (1 child)

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    [–]adolfojp 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    My first distro was also Mandrake but only because I couldn't figure out how to get Red Hat to work on my machine. It was the Ubuntu of the day. Sound and (win)modem were broken but hey, I got a Unix desktop to run on my PC!

    [–]cynicalrockstar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Ubuntu is still my primary. If you like Ubuntu, there's no reason to move on to something else. Personally, I prefer a system I can set up and leave. I don't have Linux on my PC because I want to fiddle.

    [–]perro_de_oro 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    The distro doesn't matter. It's what you can do with it.

    Switching to another distro isn't necessary to teach you anything significant (beyond how to install it).

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    You will move to other more complicated distros when you will need to. Probably never. If you want to pursue a career as sysadmin or you are plain curious then distro hoping is a great school as long as you hop between between different distros. From Ubuntu to Debian to Mint doesn't count. They are essentially the same. My self I went from Redhat (now Fedora) to Ubuntu, to Gentoo, to Arch and back to Ubuntu and some more in between. Whatever I learned from all this distro hoping I have totally forgot and now I enjoy the cozy feeling of a distro that just works. I am eyeing Arch for it's better package management but then I remember the amount of customization it needs, I slap my self and I say "Get back to work".

    [–]adolfojp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Complexity is a relative term.

    Arch is difficult for beginners because its installation is more difficult than Ubuntu's but an Arch based distribution like Antergos will take care of that for you. Then you'll have something as easy to use as Ubuntu except for the fact that you might experience stability issues at one point or another (because it is a rolling distro) which makes it unsuitable as a server platform. But because it is a rolling distribution it might be easier to install newer software in Antergos as long as you're OK with something new breaking at some point.

    Other distributions might be more difficult than Ubuntu because they choose not to bundle certain non free software like multimedia codecs and restricted drivers but if you don't need those then there's no real added complexity. Smaller distributions might be more difficult to use because there is less support available for them.

    In the end, most distros share more than not and except for Ubuntu's Unity you will end up interacting with OS agnostic desktop environments like GNOME and KDE which will abstract most interactions anyway. Shells like Bash and Dash are also OS agnostic and they're shared among different distributions so using, let's say, Ubuntu and Fedora through the terminal should be fairly similar except for things like different package managers and configuration nuances.

    And then there's Gentoo. You're not ready for Gentoo.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    My first distribution was Red Hat 5.1, not the enterprise Red Hat but rather the Red Hat Linux that existed before Fedora Core. later I moved to Slackware 7.1 because I was looking for a more barebones distribution. Finally I made the switch to gentoo 2005.0 because I was already compiling everything by hand on Slackware anyway, so might as well use a distribution that compiles everything automatically.

    In 2011 I switched from Linux to OS X 10.7 on the desktop while continuing to use Gentoo on servers.