Hi, I just want to share / get some opinion.
I started using Linux 2 years back. I was dual booting back then and after a year switched to Linux completely.
I started out using Ubuntu, hated it, installed Manjaro after a week and when pacmac broke the thing within 2 months, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, read the arch wiki and installed arch. Things were going great except for some Nvidia issues (I am using an Optimus laptop) but utt was running smoothly. Then decided that I want to build a game engine and the nvidia issues were significant. So I read somewhere that Fedora has great nvidia support and I installed it and everything worked. I installed Fedora 39, and it worked. When Fedora 40 came, I upgraded no issues, Fedora 41 came, no issues.
But just a few days back when I had vacation, I decided my system was getting bloated and I didn’t manually want to uninstall apps, I decided let’s format it. But I thought… Arch might take up less space on my disk(1 have a 512gb nvme, and t 2tb hdd, but I like to put things like games and projects I am working on, on the nvme). So I installed arch and loving the experience. I installed Nvidia-open drm drivers and it just works.
TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?
PS: I used archinstall because I didn’t want through the lengthy process again. And archinstall works great.
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.
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I hopped more for different desktop experiences than distro. now I’ve settled into arch for the last 12+ years
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
I started using Linux 2 years back.
Here’s the cause and it’s normal.
I remember going through a lot of hopping the first 3 or 4 years but have been settled on Arch since then.
Btw
Every distro hopper eventually settles on either Arch or Debian.
Or both! Debian on my server, arch on my desktop, btw
Bold of you to not run to assume I don’t run Arch on my server too (but with all the services inside containers (which are arch images))
I’ve settled on a minimal Debian installation with Flatpaks for all software.
A lot less config work than Arch, fewer bugs than Fedora Silverblue, and in my experience it just works.I’m so fucking over dealing with dependencies.
Who cares if it’s normal or not. You do you
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
Are you even a real Linux user when you don’t switch distros every day?
Personally I’m usually content for a long time. Although my ideal distro still doesn’t exist and probably never will with the way the meta is currently going.
But you do you. You know how hard/easy it is to reinstall so as long as you’re having fun just experiment away.
What would your ideal distro look like, and what’s missing currently?
At the moment I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but it’s a little too conservative in my opinion. I can manage it but I miss Debian automatically enabling and restarting services on install/update and management of user groups and other little helpers.
I’d love to have a Debian based rolling release distro with the same quality control as Tumbleweed. Not Sid, that’s too much tied to Debian Testing’s release cycle and doesn’t get security updates in a timely manner.
That used to be my holy grail, too. At some point I realized I do pretty much the same tasks on my PC now that I did 5 years ago.
So if 5 years of software upgrades don’t change the utility of my PC fundamentally, then I can live with Debian Stable.I like flapjack* for the occasional programs I want the newest version.
*Sure, autocorrect, let’s call it that now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?
I have used the same distribution (Debian) for over 20 years when I decided to change distributions and switch to NixOS. Debian was - and still is - a very fine distribution. I just needed something radically different.
So, to answer your question: yes, it is perfectly normal. Two years isn’t even long.
