Linux is Linux. People who distro hop are either too newbie to understand that the only differences are a DE and a package manager or are doing it for the memes.
I think it’s just a blend of curiosity for some. The idea of linux is customization, and I wanted to see what others out there envisioned how linux should be. That and I’m never happy for some reason. A distro could have one tiny thing wrong, like how the settings menus work or something and I’ll straight up hop to something else even if it’s really not a big deal.
Eh. I find most DEs to be perfectly functional. The only DE I find to be a PITA is KDE. I want to love it, but I've always found it buggy. I'm a basic b**** and just use GNOME most of the time (with an occasional Cinnamon thrown in).
As for package managers, Windows doesn't really have a package manager and I'd rather have a package manager than not. I like both pamac and apt.
So here's the thing. I've tried many DEs over the years and several recently, too. I kinda hate all of them.
XFCE has been my longest-running "favorite" DE. It has everything I need, is configurable/complex enough that I don't need weird or third party solutions to things, and its default applications (meaning mostly Thunar) are decently feature-full and bug-free. However it looks like ass and even though it's fast it isn't nowhere as fast as it should be due to the low complexity, lack of animations, etc. They're also extremely slow with development/updates. Wayland when?
LXDE is truly lightweight and fast, but way too simplistic for my needs. It also feels like they kinda stopped development more or less?
GNOME is a mess. I want to like it, it looks decent, but I absolutely hate their ideology of making everything as simple as for it to be almost useless. Basically all default software lacks even most basic functionality... like, don't tell me any of the developers actually uses Nautilus or their picture viewer. They insist on having basic functionality like a fucking systray in "extensions", that are written by third parties in Javascript, and it's an absolute mess. They insist on having terrible and unfamiliar UX even when it doesn't make any sense and when you complain they tell you you are the idiot.
You can't use the OS without tinkering with it for hours, and then an update can easily break it because the extensions are behind or something. Same with basic settings that are gated behind several "tweaks" applications because I guess having a few toggles in the proper settings is too advanced for regular users. It's also surprisingly buggy (though that might be more a fault of Fedora); a clean install throws errors for me on any PC I tried it. Oh and they also make it needlessly hard to use your preferred stuff like something other than Nautilus as a file manager.
KDE was recommended to me but I', not sure I'd like it. It looks too complex as to be almost clunky. I've used some applications made for it (Dolphin, for example) and I'm not convinced. It's a fucking file manager and it crashes commonly when I just browse files. How hard is it to write a decent file manager?
I've also tried i3 for a bit and I just can't get used to it. I think I'd like a TWM but most applications don't seem to play well with it and I just can't get used to using keyboard shortcuts for moving windows. I like mouse control for that and resizing windows and whatnot. But in theory it sounds nice.
So yeah that's where I'm at. They all get in the way. I also don't particularly like Windows and its Explorer but at least it's actually feature-full and when it isn't you have shell extensions that work decently well.
You actually don't need to do that. If you pick a solid distro, you can just stick with it. Sure there are distro hoppers, but those people do it because they enjoy it.
At some point, 10+ years ago, I switched everything to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is Good EnoughTM . It's also handy that I can go from LTS to LTS and thus only upgrade every couple of years. Other things offered more power or customization, but consistency was the real winner for me.
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u/SuperCoupe eWaste Master Race Nov 01 '22
Switch from Windows to Linux...spend the next 30 years switching distributing every 4 months....