i switched to nixos after using arch for like 12 years.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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I like having my stable daily driver (currently PopOS) and a separate drive or partition for a rotating distro that may pose more of a learning curve (NixOS right now). So it doesn't really feel like hopping, more like a stable and a sandbox.
I've also hopped distros on a scale of several years at a time. Loved Arch before I was living on an awful internet connection; did Ubuntu until they messed with snaps; loved Tumbleweed for a few years, but the volume of updates was getting a bit much; nearly learnt Nix but a trial run of Home Manager went up in flames, then I realised multiple layered package versions wasn't worth the 'stability'; now Mint's been doing the job nicely, but I'm tempted to try KDE's new distro someday.
Variety is the spice of life. I've used Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, Nix, been on Debian the last few years. Been looking at setting up my own UBlue image. I really like the immutable thing. Do whatever makes you happy..
I'm interested, What exactly is UBlue? Can you clarify on the immutable thing?
UBlue is a tool the fedora team created to build immutable distros in a container. This is a list of official distros created by it. If you've seen Bazzite it was also created with UBlue.
Immutable distro just means the root filesystem is mounted read-only. So when you do updates, they create another image of your filesystem with the updates applied. Then you have to boot into the new filesystem. This is called an atomic upgrade. So if something is broken, you reload your last image and everything is fine.
Thanks for the explanation. That sounds quite promising. I updated Ubuntu one time and it basically broke a python project environment to where I had to reinstall the previous os again. Then of course reinstall everything else too.
I hopped more for different desktop experiences than distro. now I've settled into arch for the last 12+ years
I distro hopped last year. Proud user of Debian for 15+ years, switched for Void.
Amazing little distro, simple just how I like it.
distro hopping to me is a feature even though I do not do it a lot. Im looking into appimage for my most important things to make it easier in future though. I move very slowly though.
Distro hopping is fairly normal if you're still relatively new to Linux, I guess you do it less as time goes on, because you'll have a better idea of whether or not a specific distro is appealing to you or not. To be able to even judge that you have to try out some distros for yourself, of course, so you need to do some distro hopping in order to tell what "direction" of distro is best for you. Sure you can read about it or watch videos but it's never the same as actually running it for yourself.
I think it's pretty normal. I personally distrohopped every month until I finally settled on Void Linux. I know a lot of people have stopped distrohopping after using Void, but it may not be your cup of tea.
It's perfectly normal, especially if you found something you couldn't do or needed better support for.
Distrohopping is just a symptom of FOMO (Fear of missing OpenSUSE)
I had tried opensuse tumbleweed and absolutely loved the way it did things, my perfect balance between fedora and arch, but there were Teo problems that I couldn't get over.
- Zypper is slow.
- I couldn't get it to do parallel downloads packages.
But it's a great distro nonetheless.
Also it has a similar problem with fedora that arch doesn't. VIDEO CODECS. I don't understand how the USA messes with my ability to play a video and I am seriously annoyed by it.
I mean I love OpenSUSE TW. Been using it for well over 2 years. One of the best distros I used. But I am slowly looking to try something new. Its all fun and games 😄
The distro that cured my distro-hopping was Slackware.
It taught me that you can do anything Linux can do in any distro, no matter how obscure, ancient or simplistic.
It also taught me that there is no reward waiting for you on the other side for making your own life difficult.
Went back to Debian knowing I could do it all myself manually, but I don't have to.
For me it is just trying different flavors. They are all unique in their own right. I have not used Slackware yet. Might give it a go though.
no see a doctor
If distro hopping happens more than once a week, please stop hopping immediately and dial 911 as this is the sign of a very rare and serious symptom
plays more upbeat music
NB: setup a NAS with either nfs or smb/cifs or fish/sshfs for your home folder.
That way wherever or whatever distro you boot on your home network you can mount your home folder and relogin with all your data and configs in place. Replicate if you want local copies with rsync to avoid duplication and drift.
Almost a year? I've been on the same one for about 15.
Pretty normal if you've never used debian.
Debian is the cure to distro hopping
This is so true started on Original SUSE 6 switched to Debian been on debian for 25 years
I think this is part of tge beauty of linux, you hop till you're happy 😀
It’s normal if you feel like it, don’t care about others opinions too much ;)
My opinion : far too many distros are « pet distros », a few are actually usable for servers, for desktop as a daily driver and do actual stuff instead of figuring out how to make things work/look pretty.
My opinion : far too many distros are « pet distros »
I think those are actually great. Personally wouldn't use them for a prolonged time or anything critical. But I love the spirit, even if the distribution is of no use to me.
The one thing I wish I would have learned in the beginning is that distro = opinionated changes to the base offering. Some are sensible, while some maintainers might add fluff that they like themselves.
Seems like the ones that do minimal changes but still offer something novel are the ones that tend to last, though there's obviously exceptions.
I had literally the same Linux distro-hopping track as you. I hated fedora though, and after one year installed openSUSE and Void Linux on my 2 of 3 systems respectively (3rd system ran Arch the whole way through). Now I'm happy, openSUSE is a great daily driver work laptop (I have it running on ancient shit, but it legit feels super smooth with swayWM), Void is my tinkering and personal programming laptop (broken right now, but I'll fix it soon), and arch is for heavy loads (cough, gaming, cough). Everything works and is efficient (Void has given me ACPI issues, but usually works). I think I'll probably stay like this for a while longer.
Yes, normal. It is good for you and it is good for Linux.
Distros try different things, and it is good to be exposed to many of those. It helps to discover the most functional ideas and cross pollinate.
Wait until you try non-linux FOSS OSes...
Easier to distro hope if your data is safe elsewhere.
I had a three year bender with OpenBSD back in 2001-2003 or so. I even started building my own kernels and doing a tiny bit of hacking on the code. There's all kinds of interesting tools and systems out there if you start exploring.
Nice!
I am currently setting up a FreeBSD ZFS file server. Software installs are so fast I thought they failed. (OS installer needs quality of life improvemens.)
We had a similar issue back in 2004 or so. Downloading a browser (Mozilla) was a bout 40MB. Normally it took about 30 seconds to pull it down on our University Internet. Then one day we were setting up systems and every time we clicked the download button nothing seemed to happen.
Further inspection showed that it had many successful download in under 1 second each. Our IT network team got us linked up to Internet2. It was able to download so fast that the bottleneck was the IDE bus of about 40MB/s. The file was coming from Intel over I2 so we couldn't even see it download before it was done.
I distro-hopped so many times I got so sick of change that I've stuck with Debian for 4 years, the longest ever. It's a peaceful life.
I've been using Linux for 25 years. I started with SuSe, switched to RedHat after a couple months, and after a few more months switched to Gentoo... for 10 years, then did Arch for the remainder.
Frankly, I think that distro hopping is a bad idea because it means you don't get enough time really understanding how to fix things. As a long time Arch user, it would never occur to me to throw out 10+years of tooling and scripts, muscle memory and shorthand to fix a driver issue. I would read the wiki top to bottom and then go spelunking through other sources until I find the solution (then update the wiki) before I'd switch to something foreign with its own set of problems and unknowns.
My advice is to find a distro that makes sense to you, and that has a deployment pattern you like and commit to it for a few years. Don't switch unless you find something that fulfills those two requirements even better, and even then do so cautiously. Your experience and understanding is hard-won.
I was on EndeavourOS for a couple of years and now I'm just on vanilla Arch with KDE and I also couldn't imagine just dumping all of my knowledge and problem solving workflow by jumping to a different distro or architecture. I certainly can't see myself ever using Windows again. It's very weird to imagine that if I ever wanted a flagship computer I would probably buy an Apple.
Gentoo also cured me of distro-hopping
My advice is to find a distro that makes sense to you, and that has a deployment pattern you like and commit to it for a few years.
Excellent advice. I'd also include maintenance structure, if that's something you can determine. Do they have a history of addressing important bugs? How active are they? Is it maintained by a single dev? Does the team seem overwhelmed or are they stretched thin?
I've avoided distros that have a single maintainer (like Archcraft), because while voluntary distro hoping can be fun, forced distro hoping due to the lone maintainer getting burned out and abandoning the project, leaving their custom repos dead, is no fun for anyone.
It's perfectly normal, especially when you're still so green. I've distro hopped lots for my first 4 years, started with Ubuntu, and tried a bunch of stuff until settling for Arch back in 2008. Since then I've tried one or another distro for some amount of time or specific purpose, e.g. servers running Debian, work machines running Ubuntu, and there was a 2 year gap where I used Gentoo as my main system (but despite things that I loved there, I just didn't had the patience). Just the other day I was talking about Bazzite with someone here on Lemmy, and they made such a good defense for it that I might install it on a VM for testing, I've also been wanting to give NixOS a serious try any day. All of which is to say, yes man, trying different stuff is normal, even if you're perfectly happy with what you have you won't know if there's anything better for you unless you try it, I used to think I was happy on Windows.
back when i started with Linux, i would distro hop in the beginning since i was trying out different ones, making mistakes, but taking that knowledge with me onto the next one. Then i discovered Manjaro, then EndeavourOS and have been on it for years now
Have thought about reinstalling EOS once i rebuild my computer, but see how that goes -
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