A few years ago I finally made the jump from Windows to Linux permanently. At first it was because I got stung by a comment I read online, and it applied to me, that said something like "Everyone says they use Linux, but no one actually uses Linux". Yes, I used it for work, and I used to tinker with it in my spare time. Sometimes I even set up dual boot to switch between Windows and Linux, pretending I was gonna live more on the Linux side, but then I'd just stay on Windows anyway.
Then a friend of mine suggested I try Pop!_OS, and I loved it. In case you haven't heard about it, it's based on Ubuntu and made by System76, a computer company, and they do a great job with it. I played games on it and everything. It was my main driver for, I'd need to check, but I think about four years.
Lately, the issue I started having with it wasn't really an issue. It worked fine, mostly. But I felt like the Ubuntu base was a little too old, and they were taking a while to release their new version, which is very understandable. They were developing their COSMIC desktop environment from scratch, and everyone seems to be excited about COSMIC. I've tried it a little bit, and yes, it's very nice. However, it's still new, and it's still missing many things I like. It works, and it's pretty too, I guess. It just doesn't have as many features as I want just yet. Not that I want a lot of features, but it felt a little too basic, at least in these earlier versions.
So I went back to the usual Ubuntu, because Ubuntu has been there forever. I don't care a lot about the controversy with the snap packages. I mean, it's not like I like them a lot, but even though I'm a little bit of a tech nerd, I don't care about many other things as long as something works.
So I was happy-ish with my Ubuntu until it started crashing. Really bad. My computer would just power off, just like that. I spent lots of time troubleshooting. It felt like too much of a coincidence that it had started after an update, but the symptom was way too extreme for software. It was like a power supply issue. I used Claude to investigate and roll back updates and everything, and it just wouldn't work. I even replaced the power supply just in case, and it still did the same thing.
So I got frustrated, reinstalled my OS, and installed Fedora instead. I was happy for a little bit, until another update for my NVIDIA GPU left me with a black screen on boot. I fixed it, but I got annoyed. This is just not stable enough. I want something that works. I'm not crazy enough to use Arch and build my kernel from scratch or whatever. I just need something that works, and that is Linux, because I like Linux right now.
Still, I gave CachyOS a shot, because it seemed to be very popular at the time, and I loved how it looked. However, it's based on Arch. There was something I needed to install, and I can't even remember what it was, that was available for Ubuntu and even Fedora, but not for Arch, at least not out of the box. I know Arch is supposed to be for people who want to tinker and do things under the hood, but again, I just need something for productivity. I don't have the time to deal with that. Maybe ten years ago I would have, but not right now. So that tiny annoyance of not having that specific thing readily available to install was a dealbreaker for me. But I liked how it looked, and it was a KDE environment.
So next I went with Linux Mint, because it's supposed to be stable and nice. And yes, it was stable, and it worked just great. But I wanted my Linux to look a little bit prettier by default, out of the box, without tweaking it a lot myself. I know there are lots of Linux setups where people tweak their desktop environments in so many different ways that they don't even resemble Windows or Mac or anything. I just wanted something prettier that still looks familiar. COSMIC kind of did that for me, at least in the previous version, before they did everything from scratch. Mint with its Cinnamon desktop was not as flashy as I'd like.
So I started looking for something stable and up to date, not as old as the Pop!_OS version I initially had, something that would look nice and wouldn't break. I didn't want to be surprised after an update by rebooting into a black screen or something.
And I think I found the perfect candidate: Aurora Linux. It's based on Fedora, but on Fedora Kinoite. So it's an atomic kind of Linux. It's not quite a rolling release, but it's fresh enough for my purposes. It seems to be stable enough, and easier to roll back if something goes wrong. So far nothing has gone wrong, after probably a month. It looks nice because it's KDE, and it's Fedora, so it has pretty much everything I need available. It's not as rare as Arch, I would say.
So I'm happy. I've been playing there, doing my development work, and I installed my Hermes agent there. I'm a happy camper. So far so good. Maybe I found my new favorite for years to come. Time will tell.