Linux

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.

No harm enjoying a distro and being stable.

I’m a fan of Arch and derivatives but I need better odds of shit just working. Been running Mankato on desktop for some time to get both stable ish packages and also AUR as/where needed.

For servers, it’s Debian all the way for me. Ubuntu does some things I don’t personally love - no offense to the distro, it’s well constructed - and the recent ish changes in the RPM world didn’t sit well with me - strictly personal opinion.

Anything in a container generally runs on whatever the image was built with. It’s only a minimal pain to port simple dockerfiles, but when you get into multiple linked containers, that risks edge case bugs down the road.

Honestly, between the lot of it, I use a pretty representative sample - I think alpine on desktop would be kind of pointless to say the least, doesn’t mean I’m going to forego any container built on it.

Use case is a huge factor here, as is ability to grok multiple distros concurrently. I find that easy, but plenty of people don’t. For them, maybe rebuilding that image makes more sense.

Linux is all about doing what works for you and your use case.

FWIW, pacman doesn’t resonate nearly as well as pamac does with me. Probably because I haven’t had to dive deep into it. All about what works for an individual. If that’s stability on an Ubuntu derivative, great - Linux is Linux, in that context.

Fire up a VM to scratch that itch or change up your desktop environment if you feel like it.

Unless you have a specific need that can't be met on your distro you're probably not missing much other than "ooh shiny" and some fun tinkering with something new.

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

If you're happy you're not missing anything. If you're using your computer and the computer itself isn't the hobby, you're also not missing anything. If you're an enthusiast, or super curious, you're missing out.

I've been doing this nearly three decades at this point and have at least tried most things, often for years at a time. I use Mint today because I have other things to do now than play computer (rather I'm paid to play computer for someone else). Before that was Fedora, but the release cycle is too short for me and there was a risk of messing up my system in a big upgrade every six months (rare as it is). I like Cinnamon because it has sane defaults, just enough customization without being ridiculous, and very little distracting swooshy effects that look janky on older computers, and Cinnamon runs best on Mint imo.

Trying new things has been very beneficial in that I'm familiar with most things and can use anything, but if I worked in marketing or something that wouldn't matter much.

Like some have mentioned, if you want to try different distros setup a VM (I would recommend KVM for better performance, but virtualbox is easier for beginners in VMing) with the iso of the distro you want to test out.

Like this you can keep a functional system without the hassle of having to setup on baremetal just for testing and having to go back again if doesn't pay-out.

Also would suggest messing around with more tech-savy setups like debian and fedora (specially minimal ones) if you want to delve deeper into the Linux nerdiness.

It sounds like you need distrobox and KVM.

I've only felt the need to change distros once, from Linux Mint to EndeavourOS, because I wanted Wayland support. I realize there were ways to get Wayland working on Mint in the past, but I've already made the switch and have already gotten used to my current setup. I personally don't feel like I'm missing out by sticking to one distro, tbh. If you're enjoying Mint, I'd suggest to stick with it, unless another distro fulfills a specific need you can't get on Mint.

I think you should try out other stuff, you'll always be wondering if you are getting the best Linux experience for you. It's relatively easy to try out other distros with a VM (as someone's already mentioned) or dual-boot. I also started on Mint (I think it was Mint, it was awhile ago now) but I definitely caught the distro-hopper bug and now I've settled down. I still try out new distros from time-to-time, Nobara was the most recent. Also, you'll learn more about Linux by going through the processes involved and learning how other distros work. It could be fun and most distros have lovely communities.

I switched from mint because I didn't like cinnamon and wanted to try kde without going through the process of replacing a de. It was worth it because it like using my computer a lot more when I can make the de pretty

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.

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.

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.

There's Debian and Red Hat Enterprise, everything else is pointless. Enjoy.

Distro hoppers - most likely - try different desktops (wm, compositor, tools). You may already know that you can easily switch you desktop within a few seconds. One tipp though: Don't use your main user logging in on a new desktop (to keep your /home clean)!

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.

I guess this is to figure out what is also possible on Linux, and getting to know that not all problems or missing features apply to other distros.

Sometimes you can lwarn amazing stuff, like a KDE distro can be customized to your liking while a Gnome desktop is a nearly forced workflow and design but can be slightly changed with buggy extensions.

Arch Linux, rolling Linux distribution, would give you the newest stable software, with probably new application features, but you can use distrobox, podman-toolbox, VirtualBox, KVM (QEMU) or a live Linux cd image to play with Arch Linux every now and then, without having to install it :)

What I tend to do that scratches the distro-hopping itch is I keep an external drive with a bunch of virtual machines on it that I can spin up and tinker around with as needed, like little specimen jars lol. I think I have about 5-6 on the go at the moment. So like my actual computer runs Arch (btw), but I have VMs for NixOS, OpenSUSE, Mint and so on, as well as another one that's as close to my main system as possible so if I want to try a weird experiment I can try it on there first to see what breaks. Just today I tried upgrading it to Plasma 6 to see what broke and the answer was everything lol.

I used to keep ones for Mac and Windows on the go too, but they tend to eat up a lot of drive space.

I've reinstalled Windows so many times over the years I could get everything I needed setup in under an hour max.

I'm still pretty new to Linux so starting again from scratch kinda scares me, Tho I'll probably move from Endeavour to vanilla Arch sometime soon since my install has gotten pretty messy lately.

There's other distros I've been curious about and messed around with in virtual machines but putting it on my main PC to daily drive is another thing.

Mint is basically Debian on easy mode so figure out if you're ready to change the difficulty