2w ago

I just distro hopped after using a distro almost a year. Is it normal?

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.

59 comments

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.
  
  Well, I settled on a Ubuntu derivative so I guess it's in the family. It could just as easily have been Fedora though.
  
  Or both! Debian on my server, arch on my desktop, btw

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.
- 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.

Distrohopping is just a symptom of FOMO (Fear of missing OpenSUSE)
- 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.

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

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.

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.

Not normal, you are a weirdo.
I use W11 bloat edition, BTW
- I recommend distrohopping to check out Vista and iOS. It's easier to get started with if you dual boot them on your W11 netbook.

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.

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.

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

back when i started with Linux, i would distro hop in the beginning since i was trying out different ones, making mistakes, but taking that knowledge with me onto the next one. Then i discovered Manjaro, then EndeavourOS and have been on it for years now
Have thought about reinstalling EOS once i rebuild my computer, but see how that goes -

Yes, normal. It is good for you and it is good for Linux.
Distros try different things, and it is good to be exposed to many of those. It helps to discover the most functional ideas and cross pollinate.
Wait until you try non-linux FOSS OSes...
Easier to distro hope if your data is safe elsewhere.
- I had a three year bender with OpenBSD back in 2001-2003 or so. I even started building my own kernels and doing a tiny bit of hacking on the code. There's all kinds of interesting tools and systems out there if you start exploring.
  
  Nice!
  I am currently setting up a FreeBSD ZFS file server. Software installs are so fast I thought they failed. (OS installer needs quality of life improvemens.)

I distro-hopped so many times I got so sick of change that I've stuck with Debian for 4 years, the longest ever. It's a peaceful life.

I think this is part of tge beauty of linux, you hop till you're happy 😀

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.

Yeah, it's normal. There are so many flavours of Linux out there, why wouldn't you want to try some of them?

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.

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.

Almost a year? I've been on the same one for about 15.

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 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.

NB: setup a NAS with either nfs or smb/cifs or fish/sshfs for your home folder.
That way wherever or whatever distro you boot on your home network you can mount your home folder and relogin with all your data and configs in place. Replicate if you want local copies with rsync to avoid duplication and drift.

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...

So I read somewhere that Fedora has great nvidia support and I installed it and everything worked
OK maybe I'll try Fedora or Arch, cuz Mint is being weird about my video card.

It's normal. As is to stick to one distro for ever. It's great to have options, no?

I'd say it's normal, but also normal to not distoe hop - everyone has their own preferences and Linux gives people the freedom to do what they want.
I have wiped my distro before just because I felt I'd let it bloat. I like tinkering and installing all sorts of random packages a long the way but am not good at cleaning up. I stayed with the same Distro - OpenSuSE.
But before OpenSuSE I used to use Mint. I liked Mint but I managed to break the updates in a minor but annoying way with a customisation I did on one version prior to an a major system update. When I decided to fix the problem I decided to distro hop.
I also have a HTPC and I just reinstalled my distro this week - I did this to wipe Win11 off the device which had been pre installed and I kept when I installed Linux "just in case". I haven't used it once and it was taking up half the hard drive. So I figured I'd back up my home folder, wipe the computer and reinstall Nobara and then restore my home folder. Worked like a charm, and I was back up and running in about 30mins.
It also gave me a new appreciation for User level Flatpaks, much of my software was already there, installed and ready to use. I did even consider distro hopping again but Nobara has worked well in my HTPC.
So yes, Distro hopping is normal, reinstalling on a whim is normal, and staying with a distro and just letting it update for years is also normal.

I had literally the same Linux distro-hopping track as you. I hated fedora though, and after one year installed openSUSE and Void Linux on my 2 of 3 systems respectively (3rd system ran Arch the whole way through). Now I'm happy, openSUSE is a great daily driver work laptop (I have it running on ancient shit, but it legit feels super smooth with swayWM), Void is my tinkering and personal programming laptop (broken right now, but I'll fix it soon), and arch is for heavy loads (cough, gaming, cough). Everything works and is efficient (Void has given me ACPI issues, but usually works). I think I'll probably stay like this for a while longer.

I distro hopped last year. Proud user of Debian for 15+ years, switched for Void.
Amazing little distro, simple just how I like it.

distro hopping to me is a feature even though I do not do it a lot. Im looking into appimage for my most important things to make it easier in future though. I move very slowly though.

I think it's pretty normal. I personally distrohopped every month until I finally settled on Void Linux. I know a lot of people have stopped distrohopping after using Void, but it may not be your cup of tea.
It's perfectly normal, especially if you found something you couldn't do or needed better support for.

i switched to nixos after using arch for like 12 years.

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.

59 comments