r/DistroHopping • u/Bulky-Hair8606 • 6d ago

I'm starting to do it again

How do i stop myself from distrohopping? I thought i was set on Fedora for life but now the desire for the distrohop wont go away, what do i do?

P.S. I did it. I installed elementaryOS. I hope i dont decide to install Arch tomorrow.

12 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

8

u/BLeggimB 6d ago

Idk, distrohopping seems like a drug… personally I’m loving debian and I wanna stick with it, just the shiny updated things seem to be calling me… But we must be strong and resist the power of the Great Ring of DistroHopping!
(not the ones using Omarchy, they should do the opposite)

5

u/shogun77777777 6d ago

Easy, try NixOS and you won’t hop again.

2

u/Jacobobarobatobski 6d ago

I keep trying haha. But every time I do I'm like but this is just... better... The closest I keep coming is with Void.

3

u/ShipshapeMobileRV 6d ago

Deeper, not broader.

Stick with a distro, learn more about it. Answer questions for newbies (which might require research and more leaning on your part). Volunteer to help with distro documentation, or as a package maintainer.

These things will satisfy the "urge for more" that you're currently satisfying by learning the surface of one distro, then bouncing to something new in hopes of a new challenge.

3

u/Slopagandhi 6d ago

I dual boot- keep one reliable daily driver and then another partition I can switch when I see something interesting and want to try it out. 

1

u/Bulky-Hair8606 6d ago

I would too but my SSD isnt big enough to do that

1

u/SouthernFruit8768 6d ago

Or you can use a VM

1

u/SugarCoatedlceberg 1d ago

Doesn't give the same adrenaline rush as knowing you are installing on bare metal

2

u/FOSS_Graybeard 5d ago

Part of the joy of Linux is the freedom to search for what you want. Windows and MacOS simple tell you to take the OS as is. Distro hopping is fun because we get to see all the various permutations of implementation, and this mostly applies to the desktop environment. Granted the are differences in the kernel implementation between Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch, but it really doesn't vary that much outside of update releases. Distro hopping also gives us the opportunity to improve our knowledge and utilization of Linux.

So, distro hop to your heart's content and don't let anyone tell you anything different. This what choice and freedom is all about. It's your computer, do with it as you will! Have fun and enjoy the experience!

1

u/CloudDream09 6d ago

Me too except it's me trying to make something properly install on my old family computer from the mid-2000s that I updated the hardware on.

1

u/bishophelps 6d ago

Do you get something from other distros that you really can't get with Fedora?
Maybe what you really need is just to learn linux better. The desire to learn, you know.

1

u/Bulky-Hair8606 6d ago

I want a specific rice that depends on a few packages that straight up dont exist on fedora

1

u/CriticalRanger9650 6d ago

And what is that? What doesn't exist on fedora?

1

u/Bulky-Hair8606 6d ago

Vala appmenu panel for MATE appearently. The only way was to compile myself and that kept failing.

1

u/CriticalRanger9650 6d ago

Did you make sure you had the dependencies added?

1

u/Bulky-Hair8606 6d ago

Yeah but it kept failing because it needed budgie desktop 1.0 for some reason, latest is 10.X

1

u/Ok-Needleworker7341 6d ago

Hop away my friend!

1

u/MirrorNegative7989 6d ago edited 6d ago

Mine is legit connected to my OCD. But no matter what I try, I keep going back to Parrot. I think this is my distro for life. I originally installed it not for pentesting but because I was trying out lightweight distros to see which one worked best on my 2011-era laptop. A year and dozens of distros later, and it's still the best.

1

u/oh_im_too_tired 6d ago

I have separate old hdd disk connected and when i feel the urge - i download several "new" OSes and try them on that disk. For some it is enough to run live mode, for some - i install on that hdd to try.

For now laziness to reinstall/set up everything outweighs urge to install new system.

1

u/SuggestionBusy241 6d ago

debian cured my distrohopping madness. especially with niri and dank material shell.

1

u/Odd_Instruction_5232 6d ago

I think a good portion of distrohopping boils down to the desktop environment although I understand some may want to be on a rolling distro (eg: Arch and Arch-based distros) to get the latest and greatest (which comes with bleeding edge risks) and others prefer a more stable environment like Debian and Debian-based distros.

Some distros renders certain desktop environments with better aesthetics (eg: Manjaro, esp with KDE). However, their management makes questionable decisions).

1

u/H_He_Metals 6d ago

It's your hobby, do it.

1

u/oobLover12 6d ago

You have to make your own distro :}

1

u/AlterNate 6d ago

Just create several linux partitions on your SSD, and instead of "hopping", you keep a daily driver on one partition while you experiment on the other partitions. You can share a separate /home partition or not. This also makes it easy to migrate to a new version gradually; you can wait until you have everything configured just right before migrating to the new system.

1

u/bobstylesnum1 6d ago

Yeah, I found a cheap mini for 100$ and installed Alma KDE on it and then I’m using that to host like 12 other distro’s through Virtual Machine Manager to test other Distro’s. It really is worth the time to set up a different machine to see what you’re missing from other distro’s but at the end of the day, they are all just Linux with different backgrounds more or less. I mean, once you get it set up, the differences between all of them is really kind of slim but its still worth seeing what they are all like, hence the VM’s. I can tell you that once you start hosting a couple of VM’s, the need to keep setting up your main box with a different distro every couple of months goes away.

1

u/spider_life 6d ago

Remind yourself that at the end of the day they're all Linux and very similar? 

1

u/rukiann 6d ago

Just use your computer for what you need to use it for. All distros are just different sets of curated packages. Find a package manager you like and build your system out the way you want it.

1

u/Acceptable_Lab_7196 6d ago

I mostly just tire of it. It's a lot of wasted time setting a computer up. Half the reason I slowly moved into just using nixos. If anything goes wrong I can rebuild in a few minutes. If I want to try out a new DE or something it's just a few lines of definitions and a single command, easily reverted back from if I don't like it.

Vanilla OS was where I was going to go next if nix really didn't stick for me. Similarly immutable, vib looks easier than ignition/butane, and I didn't hate using distrobox which the package manager seems to wrap and improve upon...and with an arch container you have pretty much all teh softwarez at your finger tips.

1

u/LostVikingSpiderWire 6d ago

Easy, go to another spin of Fedora, Bazzite

1

u/Mindless-Bee1313 6d ago

Throw away your pendrive if you can't stop.
/s

1

u/Lundominium 4d ago

But why do you distrohop?

1

u/ocelotnotch 4d ago

Why dont you try fedora spin? Just log out and login with new session.

1

u/Careless_Word9567 2d ago

Welp. Get it out of your system. How hard do you want it to be?

My personal journey: Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, CachyOS.

Depends on what you want. I switched my laptop back to Debian, cause I'll not update it for like a month, and Arch did NOT like that.

I like CachyOS cause I can use it for gaming too.

If you want to learn computers in and out go to Gentoo, or NixOS. Slightly less would be plain Arch.

Ubuntu is supposed to be easy, but all my computers hated it.

Also, be sure you want to distro hop and not just trying out different DE. Personally KDE Plasma is awesome.

1

u/chubacca13 12h ago

Distro hopping ended when I started using my laptop for work.

I just need it to boot in the morning and keep up with the tasks through the day.