What distros have you been testing recently?

[crosscourt]

For the first time in a long time I not only havent tested any distros but havent distrohopped at all. You get to a point where youre happy where your at and dont want to change.

[CaptNoize]

I know the feeling... If its not broke, why try fixing it...?

[crosscourt]

There really hasnt been anything that catches my attention and no new releases that offer anything significant.

[crosscourt]

Setting up my Dell Latitude E6440 on my Edock and will probably run MX Linux but looking forward to the release of Debian 12 at some point.

[wove]

Fedora 38 is a go for release on Tueday April 18, 2023. Over the last few years, it has been rare to see Fedora even be a go on their planned release day and I do not recall them every hitting their "hoped for early release date." But Fedora 38 is making that happen. WOW.

The first couple release updates for Fedora Silverblue ended up working out ok, but it was a tad messy and took a few bug fix updates before it settled down with everything working flawless. I am looking forward to this update, just to see if it will be a seamless update on the first try. In my experience a seamless version update is the last hurdle Silverblue needs to cross. A good long term distro needs to seamless update from version to version.

[crosscourt]

Seamless update from version to version is an issue for a lot of distros. Zorin still cant do it and neither can MX Linux to name a few. Even with those that can do it, sometimes they change their OS enough that one version group cant be updated to a new version, Linux Lite being the best example.
Fedora at least in my case has been very hit an miss with various versions but I havent tried Silverblue,

[wove]

Fedora and Ubuntu both at this time appear to have very top notch teams working on the releases for their distros. Early reviews of both distros have been very positive. Ubuntu has a solid history of updating easily from one release to the next, with the biggest complaint being that some releases are not worth the effort. Updating Fedora from one release to the next has never been as easy as Ubuntu, and on more than one occasion updating has been a big disaster. With this release Ubuntu is using their new in house developed installer. All of the Ubuntu family members are going to go snap package only with this release, which appears to be the big downside, that people are complaining about.

My Silverblue install, will just update as it does. And then I will most likely take a look at the new Ubuntu using Gnome Boxes.

[crosscourt]

I like flexibility and thus distros like Mint and Zorin allow me out of the box to go a number of ways and dont try to limit my choices. Ubuntu increasingly is becoming their own island and many distors have prepared for the possibility of dropping Ubuntu as their base. Mint recently has been talking a lot about this and not sure what Zorin would do.

[crosscourt]

Ended up using Zorin with my Dell E6440 that I began using again for testing.

[crosscourt]

Tried Fedora SilverBlue and loved it. Im up to 4 installs and will be using it on my Dell E6440s, Dell 7010 USFFs and probably one of my Dell E5470s.