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 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.
Who cares if it’s normal or not. You do you
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.
Not normal, you are a weirdo.
I use W11 bloat edition, BTW
Every Linux user has to go through a period of compulsive distro hopping. Don’t worry, eventually you’ll grow tired of it and just settle on one workhorse distro.
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’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.
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.
Gentoo also cured me of distro-hopping
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeh, totally normal. I switch distros roughly once a year and if I have more than one device on the go then I almost always have different distros on each of them. I think I was with Linux Mint the longest, but even then I switched DE at least 3 times.
I have 4 Linux devices on the go at the moment. My desktop is on OpenSuSE, my laptop I recently moved from windows to OpenSuSE, my HTPC is on Nobara and I have a Raspberry Pi on Raspbian.
I’ve also used Mint as my main before OpenSuSE and still use Mint in KVM on my desktop to run Virutal machines. My most used VM is for Servarr / torrent use - nice to run it in a contained sandbox with its own VPN.
Almost a year? I’ve been on the same one for about 15.
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.
In the current landscape of the distro wars, admitting you just jumped sides is grounds to call forth the raiders from your old distro, they know the distro specific vulnerabilities and will unleash a fury of which you have never seen. The first sign will be a blinking hard drive light…
It’s pretty normal as far as I am aware.
I have another friend who uses Linux and he also disro hops, same as me.
We’ll try out a distro and if it turns out we don’t like it, doesn’t suit our needs, doesn’t support something we want to do or it just breaks then we try another.
I started on Ubuntu many years ago and grew to dislike it. I stay away from Debian for the most part these days. Tried Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mint etc.
I tried Manjaro and hated it. It stopped working when my monitors went to sleep, could not bring them back. Also had some PC freezes. Tried another installation of it and same thing.
I tried Garuda, did not like.
I tried Pop!_OS but I don’t recall much about it.
I’ve now settled on Fedora based distros. Fedora is quite nice but my main one is Nobara. I’m currently playing around with Bazzite.
I’d like to see what Steam OS is about when they do some releases for their current version. I think I played around with a very old version years ago.
Never tried Arch, I might do it just because or so I can say I did.
I’ve probably forgotten a few others between.
Nah its normal, been hoping since 6 years. I keep an external hard drive with important info, so i can nuke my system without worry.
