I love autumn.

For so many reasons. The temperature drops just enough to justify wearing a blazer (which I feel naked without) and we, as a people, have a renewed focus on holidays where you do nothing but eat copious quantities of food. Without a doubt, the best time of the year.

Perhaps the most important reason of all to love this glorious season: we call an end to the dry spell of no new major Linux distribution releases – the dark, boring time that most people refer to as "Summer."

The end of October through the beginning of November is sort of a sacred, holy period for Linux nerds across the globe.

Kicking things off, on Thursday, October 22nd, Ubuntu 15.10 was released. You better believe I upgraded my Ubuntu 15.04 partition to 15.10 the moment it was available.

Unfortunately, upgrading from 15.04 (vanilla and mostly untouched other than some benchmark testing, but using GNOME as the desktop environment because Unity makes me sad on the inside) rendered the whole installation unusable. It wouldn’t boot into a graphical environment at all after that.

What was the problem? Not really sure. Seems like it might have been an issue with using GDM instead of LightGDM when the upgrade occurred. I didn’t feel particularly invested in fixing it, as that partition really didn’t have anything I needed on it. So I blew it away and installed Ubuntu 15.10 fresh. At which point it ran fantastically well with no issues whatsoever. After a quick switch over to GNOME 3.16, I was a happy guy.

But then, just five days later, on Tuesday, October 27th, Fedora 23 will be released.

Five days! We have just five tiny little days to fully feast upon Ubuntu 15.10 before we need to make room in our lives to take Fedora 23 for a full spin. Which, based on my testing of an earlier beta build, tells me that this is going to be a release worth paying some attention to.

But those five days seem like an eternity compared to the mere THREE DAYS between the release of Fedora 23 and the Gold Master version of openSUSE Leap 42.1 on October 30th. Another gigantic release that is worthy of our attention.

I went ahead and installed the Release Candidate of openSUSE Leap 42.1 a few days ahead of time to spread things out a bit and give me an extra day or two to spend on Fedora 23 before I need to jump back over to the openSUSE side of things.

For those following along at home, that’s three of the biggest, most legendary Linux distributions all being released within an eight-day period. I can think of at least a dozen actual holidays that are less fun than this. This should, absolutely, be an official holiday.

The downside to this joyous time is, of course, that we will all be assaulted with a never-ending stream of reviews of all three of these distributions – and their derivatives. Which I, just like every other tech journalist who writes about Free Software, will write. But, to be nice to all of you, I will just write one review – comparing all three. In as much detail as I can muster before my head explodes.

In the meantime, I want to wish you all a Happy Distrovus. Yep. I’m declaring it. That’s what this holiday is called.

May your /home be backed up and your thumb drives be of sufficient size.