I feel like I'm missing out by not distro-hopping

mvirts, 1 year ago

Nothing, unless you’re not using nixos, then everything 😹

TeddE, 1 year ago (edited 8 months ago)

Let’s start simple: You should consider hoping from Linux Mint to LMDE if you haven’t already.

As a user, you have no obligation to participate in the politics between the Ubuntu and the Mint Development team, but if you’ve followed the controversy and agree that Ubuntu is being a bully, this would be a small yet material way to show support.

what am I missing?

Every Linux distribution has a purpose - a reason its author thought it was worth the effort of creating it. Some are grand, others are silly, etc. When you explore distros, you’re telling the community which ideas resonate with you. Popular ideas will replicate, unpopular ideas will be abandoned.

Also, switching distributions makes it harder for business to ‘capture’ the Linux demographic. The mere act of switching occasionally means that tools to import/export/manage your data stay relevant. This literally fights enshitification.

Finally, and this is a matter of personal taste, but I like trying different versions of Linux for the same reason I try different flavors of ice cream: It’s fun; and even if now and then I get a bad flavor, I feel enriched by the experience.

(Edit: it’s to its)

LunaCtld, 1 year ago

Own story (skip to the “—” if not interested):

Don’t worry yourself. If Mint works for you and you don’t have a good reason to switch. Just stay.

I started out with Mint as well. Switched from Cinnamon to Mate early on because I wanted to run a fancy compositor called Compiznand stay on that for like 2 years.

I still had a lot of free time, so I got “bored” by everything being so low maintenance compared to Windows 8. I checked out Arch and ran it for a bit with KDE 4 I think.

At some point I got a proper PC (was a crappy Laptop before) and wanted to Continue running KDE, so I chose KUbuntu because of that. I ran into some issues and a brick when upgrading that I couldn’t solve, so I went back to a rolling release distro to not need to worry about major updates again. I went with Manjaro as I thought it would be more stable than Arch (I didn’t have a problem with Arch, just craved max stability in general then).

In the meantime I since learned that Manjaro and Arch are about equally as stable from problems I needed solve and me sometimes running Arch on my old laptop when out.

I have been on Manjaro for about 7 years now (never re-installed), love it, KDE and don’t care about all the political stuff. I don’t care that people hate on Manjaro, never encountered a problem I couldn’t solve and will happily continue to use the distro until it breaks on me.

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You can use whatever you like. Distro hopping can be fun, but is also a burdon and might prevent you from making your PC your home.

I wouldn’t switch especially for political stuff. Just use what you like. If you don’t wanna miss out, just watch some YT Videos of people testing out Distros/DEs or run some in virtual machienes. If you have a secondary device, you can also do hopping on that.

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I hope this can help somewhat. Use whatever you like, don’t fret about political stuff. I used to kinda distro hop (not really) and now couldn’t care less about it.

You can easily check out other Distros using VMs, Docker Containers or even rented Servers for the most part.

If you have the time and are truely interested in Distro hopping (or just testing out a new DE) just go for it though. Just don’t let others dictate what you run.

cmlael67, 1 year ago

I try different distros just out of curiosity. I’ve used several that look promising, but there always seems to be some little thing I end up not liking. I usually end up going back to Zorin, which to me feels a lot like Mint. If Mint works well for you, use it. While many Linux users tend to distro-hop quite a bit, if you just want a computer that works for what you need it to do, stick with what does that for you.

TheFriendlyArtificer, 1 year ago (edited 8 months ago)

I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.

After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.

Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.

But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.

Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.

JustEnoughDucks, 1 year ago

If it aint broke, don’t fix it.

I have used arch on this same install since 2019, before that, 2016. (Just because I wanted to get my old system back ASAP and was comfortable with the process)

If I had to do it over, I would test out openSUSE tumbleweeb or endeavor, but if you have your system that works and you like it, there is absolutely nothing to gain by switching.

If you just want to explore or do it as a hobby, use an old SSD and test out different configs on a seperate drive (you can pick up a 128 or 240GB SSD for like $25) but the only differences are package managers and DE.