Linux

Arch. Or, rather EndeavourOS. I've lived with several distros (daily driver desktops, laptops, servers) for years: debian, Ubuntu, Gobo, gentoo, Redhat, CentOS, Arch, Artix, and EndeavourOS. Redhat was my least favorite, and EndeavourOS probably my most.

I'm currently running Endeavour on my desktop, Artix on my laptop, and vanilla Arch on several servers and ancillary devices. All of the Arches are basically the same day-to-day, except Artix; Artix is the lightest, but also the most work, and I probably wouldn't choose it again.

I like Arch because - for me - it's been stable and pain-free from dependency-hell, of which Redhat distros were the worst. I will not go back to any point release distro - rolling release has been so much better for me. The Arch wiki is the best source of Linux information on the internet, and the AUR has almost everything in it, and is easy to contribute to. PKGBUILDs are easy to write; it's hardly any more work to put one together to install something and have it managed by the package manager, than to not.

I'm interested in playing more with some of the source-based distros like void, alpine, tinycore, venom, and kiss; my experience with gentoo leads me to believe I won't be happy with any as daily drivers.

However, I'm very interested in Chimera.

I'm probably going to stick with Arch, or maybe EndeavourOS.

I've hopped from distro to distro but I always keep coming back to Arch. The reason I use Arch is that it's my weird sweet spot of "DIY" and "it just works". It gives me a blank slate at first, but it lets me paint the canvas with whatever I want, however I want. It allows for some weird setups (like VFIO, for instance) and the wiki really helps with that. I don't really use the AUR nowadays unless it's for a package only available there, so I can't say anything about that. I use Flatpak nowadays. Some people might prefer the AUR, that's good for them! Right now it's just not for me.

If I do distro-hop again, I'll probably go for EndeavourOS just to have an Arch install that leans heavier on the "just works" side of things.

Might be OT since I never was much of a distro hopper.

Got introduced to Linux with SLS, used RedHat until it became too commercial for my taste. At that time, found gentoo and stuck with it hard. It allows me to have completely custom packages fully integrated with the system package manager, that's the top killer feature for me.

Mandrake > Debian > Ubuntu > Mint & Arco Linux & MX Linux.

These three distros are the chosen ones in my case. I've been using them in my main computers for a couple of years now. It's the right mixture.

@tet my first computer was a ubantu mini PC I have used almost every major distro and now I use fadora because I like gnome on my laptop

I was never distro-hopping much. Switched from Debian only when I got a job with Red Hat, and then switched to openSUSE when I switched to SUSE. I have actually switched recently to my own semi-distro https://sr.ht/~mcepl/moldavite/ (basically MicroOS with sway).

• Ubuntu
• Opensuse
• Linux Mint
• Fedora
• Manjaro
• Endeavour OS

Windows 11 because I now have hardware that's completely incompatible with Linux

I've been hopping between Arch and NixOS for about a year, and I've been on Arch For a few months before that (wirh the exception of a few short-term hops to Ubuntu, Fedora, Starting off with Mint and ArcoLinux, And I almost stayed on Tumbleweed about a week ago but I couldn't figure out dnf5 (a few days later I was told that installing dnf was installing dnf5 so I just had to configure it properly). So right now I'm on NixOS, where SDDM broke last night and I had to switch to GDM, and with my recent switch to Emacs, NixOS keeps on throwing issues at me (and here I was, thinking NixOS could be my forever distro). Tumbleweed is missing a lot of packages I use, I'm tired of Arch, and I feel like NixOS is giving me problems every time I try it, so at this point, I'm at a loss.

Like, I'm seriously considering abandoning Wayland and everything, and just switching all the way back to AwesomeWM (my first window manager) with Jonaburg's fork of Picom (to give me Hyprland-like animations, rounded corners and floating bars) on Debian and sticking with it until we get Hyprland on Debian and then sticking to that. Alternatively, Fedora (even though I felt dirty using it after the whole redhat debacle, and hyprland and waybar weren't working the way they were supposed to). I don't know. I'm tired, I want all my stuff on a distro that I can just not update for weeks, because I'm often too busy or just forget, and where things just work (tm). So... yeah. That's the crap I'm dealing with.

TLDR: The only distros that have all the packages I need (I really, REALLY, don't want to compile anything if I can avoid it) are either, broken and problematic (NixOS for some reason), have slow package management and are missing packages (Tumbleweed) or do not have a stable branch (Arch AND Tumbleweed), meaning that when they aren't updated for weeks (as it often happens with my system), they can break (Arch).

So I distrohop cuz NO distro out there meets my criteria and works well for me. I just want Debian's stability with Arch's repos and AUR, so I can get Hyprland and all my (often not very popular) software I use, from the regular ol repos so I don't have to compile.