What would make you change distro?

"We now added AI to the kernel"

Something going catastrophically wrong with my current installation in a way that I can't fix.

Well one day I heard about NixOS... And that's all it took

Sell it to me, please

Snap getting installed, ads when starting a shell. Basically the reasons I ditched Kubuntu.

I feel this so much, if you want that experience you may as well be using Windows! What did you switch to?
- Exactly! EndeavourOS, my first Arch distro. It's nice and easy to use, although Arch package updates are very different from say Debian. They don't differentiate between security fixes and typo fixes so you're either updating all the time like me or updating less frequently and being vulnerable. And then there's also the issue of rarely broken bleeding edge packages; I had to pin a bunch to prevent upgrading from KDE 5 to 6 for a while.

There was a power loss, my PC was on UPS for some time and UPS battery started running low. I initiated the shutdown and systemd stopped it because it could not find a network share on the already stopped server. It didn't gave up so I ended with fucked filesystem because the battery died. Switched to systemd free distro the day after.

Switched to systemd free distro the day after.
PCLinuxOS?
Tell me more about how lennart's cancer killed your machine too.
- It was Ubuntu. Switched to Artix...
  Systemd has its own OOM killer which was killing my VMs as soon as there is more than 50% of RAM in use.
That sucks!
I'm on Ubuntu, which I admit is not a popular option around here. But when my power goes out I use apcupsd and a network component to alert my attached or networked Ubuntu machines. When the power first goes out all of my non-essential machines automatically shut down gracefully. When the backup batteries get low enough (I have several separate APC units around the house) my essential machines also shut down automatically.
When the power comes back up one of my machines automatically powers up and runs a few checks before turning most of my other stuff back on.
I have very few power issues which last long enough for my batteries to run out, but when I do the only evidence is a few alerts and the fact that I have to log back into everything. All of my windows restore on my GUI machines, and no filesystem issues occur. It's more seamless than when I ran Windows, granted that was 25 years ago.
I'm similarly not a fan of systemd, but for backup battery and power management it seems to do the trick.
- For servers, yes. But I want full control on desktop.

the creation of a non-kodi htpc/media center alternative that works like a smart TV OS and works on a raspberry pi would get me to change my streaming device.

i stream jellyfin from a home server, and jellyfin on kodi is painful to use :(

an OS that can be controlled with tv-controller buttons and has an interface similar to any of the other players in this space would make me throw away my nvidia shield tv in a heartbeat

It is? What issues are you having?
I've used the Jellycon plugin for a while and it worked amazing.
- kodi is really good for local media, but none of my media is local. instead of using the smartTV-style jellyfin UI, jellyfin indexes the media from the server and throws up a text-only list of media in a folder structure. if i rip another movie, it needs to be indexed.
  though it is pulling the index and functioning as expected, it makes the experience feel like browsing in dolphin for spreadsheets instead of getting ready for movie night.
  the experience was bad enough where i just plugged the old streaming stick back in and hid my failur. i didnt tell the wife about my experience (she hates the streaming stick and wanted an OSS option). i said i would deliver one, so she thinks i just haven't done it yet. :(

Eh, probably if Guix becomes significantly better I'll switch to it (from NixOS). I really like how seriously they take user freedom, bootstrapping (only 357 bytes of binary to bootstrap everything else from source!) and consistent user interfaces (scheme everywhere). But unfortunately the package repo is just not big and mature enough yet, and declarative configuration options are not as good as they are with NixOS. My job is also Nix-related, and that's another major reason I'm staying for now.

Nix-related job - do tell!
- I'm doing Nix consulting-type jobs - it can mean anything from simply packaging some stuff for Nix and making a devShell to refactoring existing Nix-based infra (which can be hundreds of thousands of SLOC) to building entirely new developer UX, CI/CD and even production deployments on Nix/NixOS. I've also been paid to implement some cool features into Nix itself, fix bugs, etc. I'm really quite happy with the job, even though it could probably pay more :)

I used Fedora KDE from 2012 to 2023, then I moved to Fedora Kinoite because I like the idea of atomic distros. Don't know if that counts though since its mostly the same software, just delivered slightly differently (however you could argue that is the case for all distros)

What did that change for you ? more stable ? peace of mind ?
- I started fiddling with toolbox and distrobox and really liked being able to install random stuff and build dependencies in those containers and then purge them when I was done. It keeps the system clean. The ostree distros take that mentality to the whole system.
  I also then found I liked the appliance like nature and the ability to rebase. I will sometimes rebase to the rawhide branch to try new stuff out, and then rebase back to stable. I see some people feel the read only file system is going to be an issue, but I have not had to screw with it since the very early days. I truly believe this is where most distros should be headed.

I've been using openSuSe Tumbleweed on one device or another for quite a while now. Recently I switched my last device, so I'm officially 100% Tumbleweed. NGL, feels pretty good. I would, however, switch under a few circumstances:

openSuSe releases Tumbleweed clone with systemD alternative (like runit). I've tried Void repeatedly, but unfortunately never really fell in live with it.
openSuSe releases NixOS style immutable distro (not the current aeon or kalpa) based on Tumbleweed.

Honestly, Tumbleweed is nearly perfect for me. It's just that I've tasted what life without systemD can be like, and I goddamn miss it... I'm totally hooked on openSuSe products though.

Out of curiosity how is life without systemd better? What does it taste like?
- Boot times. I am the kind of person who shuts my computer (may it be a laptop or desktop) down, whenever I'm not using it. With systemD, boot times are generally kind of annoying; runit, however, completely changes this. It really feels amazing to turn a Void Linux system on, and have it boot in seconds, with just one screen of logs. On top of that, if you're doing a arch-style install (like the Void Linux minimal install), runit is just much nicer and more ergonomic. The main point is really boot time though, which I think is improved due to adhering to the Unix philosophy and having much less bloat. Using a runit system reminds you of how bloated and slow (and kinda convoluted) systemD is.
  I'm also the kinda guy who spends hours optimizing my neovim config (~80 plugins, including LSP) for 20 millisecond start-up times. In the end, I still use Tumbleweed though.

Not sure... I really like Arch, except for one thing that is also a problem on most other distros : packages creating files everywhere and leaving a mess behind when uninstalled. I'd rather have them isolated like NixOS does, and being able to switch easily between several versions of the same package is neat. Declarative configs are also very cool... but I really don't want to use a weird language for making packages, I'm just stating to learn how that work and I like that Arch packages are very straightforward and easy to understand.

I half the point of package managers was so you could easily uninstall them. Do package managers usually not fully uninstall?
- From what I understand the package managers remove files they themselves created but not files created by the application itself like config files and other stuff