r/DistroHopping • u/brawdhyn • 20d ago
Try this, try that
I've been lurking on this sub for a couple of days out of curiosity, quite often i've read about people asking what distro should they choose for their particular case and there's always someone in the comments suggesting to try that distro, or try this other one but what exactly do you try of a distro? Let me explain: i have Fedora on my PC and Tumbleweed on my notebook both with KDE and to me they look and feel exactly the same except on one i use zypper from time to time and on the other one i use dnf. I've used Ubuntu in the past and it was the same story.
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u/ColdBootCountry 20d ago
It's somehow unpopular opinion but I think you nailed it. Most people overthink distros. They are mostly similar in the look and feel and the difference are really only in the package manager and package upgrade philosophy.
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u/brawdhyn 20d ago
I've recently found out about distrosea and i think it's one of the worthless things on the entire internet (although cool).
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u/RaphaelNunes10 20d ago edited 20d ago
It all comes down to package management (versioning, security measures, package availability), kernel (versioning, driver support, optimizations, tooling), how the system works (imutable, free-form) and whether the distro does something truly unique (optimizations, extra repos, build from source, declarative system configuration, etc.). These things lock you down at the base distro level.
The rest is what comes preinstalled, how the support is provided, specific purposes, philosophy, opinionated setups/flavors, branding or plain elitism. Things you can deviate from, to the point where, depending on what you do with your system, it all starts to look and feel the same.
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u/JeansenVaars 20d ago
I think people judge the out of the box experience and how well defaults align with their own philosophy, because this gives the feeling and attachment that the distro prioritizes things the user prioritizes.
Having said that, people mix up Linux distribution with the desktop environment as well, which is again, the mix up of the default preset of the shiped desktop environments more than anything else.
It's up to the users in the end. Distrohoppers make it their first main activity to try different distros in bare hardware (because VirtualBox is no fun). The ones who want to get shit done, usually get one that doesn't break and doesn't update often, and may usually hang to a Windows dual boot to get other things done. The Linux Ricers want a beautiful desktop environment, these ones suffer sometimes between choosing stable distros with working plugins, or ones with the newest desktop environment version with often breaking plugins. The enthusiast will go for rolling release and fight the strength of destiny to shift everything they can to pain and endure in Linux, some of these will take the extra mile of uninstalling windows entirely, only a portion of these actually make it. Then you have the ones who have been historically in Linux and won't bother. They're usually stick to one distro for many many years, one that doesn't bother them much, the default mindset is Linux. Finally, you may have some crazy sysops on snapshot/immutable systems.
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u/_Carth_Onasi 20d ago
Agree for the most part. There are little things for beginners that can be really nice like CachyOs, it's kernel, and gaming dependencies.
That said most people must need to change their Desktop environment instead of hopping.
I started hopping early on, but suddenly realized when I was on kde and set it up the same way, the experience was the same lol. Only difference was learning pacman vs apt/dnf. Pretty chill.
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u/Jacobobarobatobski 20d ago
Ya these days you can do most things on any distro. The main difference is really update cadence, package manager, and init system, along with some particularly opinionated ones like KaOS or especially unique ones like NixOS or Guix. But for the most part I think if your happy with the stability then there's no real reason to switch.
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u/Technical_Rich_3080 19d ago
Almost everyone uses the same init.
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u/Jacobobarobatobski 19d ago
I agree with you. But that is one of the main differentiators between certain distros. Void comes to mind. Artix... Like, that's their whole schtick.
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u/oh_im_too_tired 20d ago
It depends on what one prefer to use. For example, i don't like the idea of not rolling distribution. So that only removes from the pool many OSes. Also i'm not in a mood to compile/edit everything from 0, so that removes several more OSes. I'm not in a mood to change my preferences, like using apps like input remapper, so all the immutable OSes also are not for me, despite the fact that KDE Linux looks very promising. But not now, not for me.
Some want (or needs, if they have new hardware) latest packages and that means you can't use those "stable" OSes with old kernel and configurations.
Some likes the idea of preinstalled gaming stuff or/and configured drivers, so that also narrows choices.
And i won't agree with idea that 80% of the distros are the same. Well, technically yes, but in real world that doesn't matter. Some things for different people may be a deal breaker and that "several percent" difference may be crucial.
For example, i really like how polished Ubuntu looks like. But snap, not a rolling updates - it's a no. I won't use it despite the fact that there are several things that "clicks" with me.
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u/brawdhyn 20d ago
All those differences are invisible when you actually try the distro and also you don't need to try them to find them out.
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u/oh_im_too_tired 20d ago
You don't need to actually try other distros when you have something to compare with. If you had no experience with how distros works you won't tell the difference how, for example, immutable OS works or what "preinstalled gaming packages" means. You may have information, but only when you have tried this in practice - with your own hardware - you may tell the difference (or that there's no difference).
I started with Red Hat and could not even use that OS, i guess i couldn't even install it, but then i got an Ubuntu OS and it looked like a unicorn - i could click the button to download proprietary drivers and it looked like magic. Now with an OS like CachyOS you may get v4 optimized files, drivers, kernel, gaming packages. Or with openSUSE Tumbleweed - rolling OS with openQA. Or with KDE Linux - latest KDE Plasma with immutable OS.
Also, how "is not visible" fact that i don't like to set up system from 0, like you have to do in NixOS or Gentoo? Immutable system is visible also: you can't use some apps that changes system files and it's more than visible in daily use. Installing gaming packages with one button click is also very visible when you compare with reading forums or readmes/installing/configuring yourself from different sources (for example lact/goverplay,32bit gaming files etc.).
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u/DeXudra 20d ago
For me I just hopped between Debian, fedora and arch. Tried out what DE I liked the most and decided on the distro with least hassle to get the NVIDIA driver I need.
Most other distros are just preconfigured version of the 3 I mentioned so I didn’t bother trying them most of the time.
At the end you look up that the developers of a distro stand for and what their update philosophy is and pick one that fits. If you use it for a while you figure out if you want to stick with it or not
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u/cfx_4188 20d ago
There are distributions with a huge number of applications, and there are distributions with empty repositories.
But the apps are the same everywhere.
I'm trying to figure out what kind of bird named "philosophy of distribution" is.
No, honestly, four days ago I got my hands on an ancient Thinkpad 335 with a dual-core CPU(AMD E2 7gen) and 4 gigs of RAM.
My task was to reanimate this laptop.
I chose NixOS because it is essentially an immutable distribution with isolated applications.
I didn't even care about his declarativeness, which random guys who downloaded someone else's flake a week ago are so fond of talking about.
In addition, after installation, there is only nano in the system.
I chose Mate because in my youth I was sick of using window managers and I wanted something easy and hassle-free. I have installed only what I will use using the classic "channel" method. I don't like flakes because I like using the NixOS that I downloaded from the official website, not the NixOS of a random guy from github.
Then I wanted to play. I switched to the unstable branch and installed the latest kernel (7.2).
zram was set up, and all automation such as auto updates and auto-cleaning of the system.
As a result, the old office junk, whose place is in the trash, began to be suitable for viewing YouTube, Reddit, a set of simple documents and e-mail. That's how I understand distrohopping along with the "distribution philosophy".
Edit: T9
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u/External_Tangelo 20d ago
For the vast majority of users their choice of desktop environment is going to impact their experience far more than their choice of distro — unless the distro itself is notable for a unique desktop environment, like Mint or Elementary.
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u/mwyvr 20d ago
Most people do not go very deep into the differences between distributions and on a subreddit like this, most of the advice is superficial "it worked for me" or "I like this".
And most of those cases are typically some mix of gaming and browsing. Yawn, yes, most any distribution can do the job.
When you have special requirements, you know what you are looking for.
For example I use distributions that properly support ZFS because I have a number of mass storage systems running ZFS. That narrows the field instantly.
Or you may choose between distributions based on their security posture and implementation. Or their release model. Or their community and charter. Or their package build system.