What did yall end up settling on?
EndeavourOS is home. 💜
OpenSuse Tumbleweed for my gaming PC. Fedora KDE for everything else (laptops, mom’s desktop).
I’ve only ever used Debian my entire life
seventy tooth
The seventy-tooth
I can’t tell whether this is hilarious or I’m exhausted, because I’m crying from laughter
Am I the only one here that uses their computer instead of fucking with it?
Most kids these days use em to fuck, I hear
Don’t call me kid, mister.
When I was a kid I just fucked with it and had a great time, now I’m too old for that
I mean… uh… no comment.
Found ninajirachi’s alt account
Ubuntu -> Mint.
Mint works for me. So, I use Mint.
I suppose it’s partly because I’m old and have built something like nine PCs for myself over the years, and the novelty of all that wore off long ago. I just want something that works.
I’m a big fan of boring, tbh. It works. What more could I need.
Yes
I like to do both.
I used to distros hop a bunch, not so much anymore.
Not really much point for me these days, arch based distros are so well documented that I can change basically anything I want without reinstalling the os, and Debian is similar for my homelab servers.
Yes
I started on pop!_os and now 6 years later im on… pop!_os
Yeah, I didn’t really do any distro hopping :p. Though I’ve tried a bunch of distros in VMs
Same with endeavour lol. VM test drives before “buying” ol’ reliable is the way to go ;)
Although I do use SteamOS on my deck, if that counts as a hop.
A side hop if anything :3 I wouldn’t count secondary devices as distro hopping, especially something like the steamdeck, but I suppose someone might
Speaking of steamdecks tho, I’ve thought about picking one up. I just wish I travelled more to actually be able to justify the price lol. It’s a cool piece of kit
Half my time on my deck is at home tbf. I use it for gaming from the couch/bed mostly and streaming my heavier games from my desktop. Quite nice that way imo!

Ubuntu -> Debian -> Linux Mint -> Fedora -> Arch -> Manjaro -> EndeavourOS -> SuSE Linux -> NixOS
I’m pretty happy on NixOS now…
I’m close to you, skipped a few intermediate steps though. Ubuntu -> Mint -> Manjaro -> CachyOS
Debian for the 72fth time.
Ubuntu 7.04 -> 7.10 -> 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04 -> 9.10 -> 10.04 -> 12.04 -> 14.04 -> 16.04 -> 18.04 -> 20.04 -> 22.04 -> 24.04 -> Fedora J/K Ubuntu 26.04
I like how sh.itjust.works
Haha, I feel that switch to LTS only releases. I was upgrading to every release in the beginning as well but it started to get old real fast. I run Mint nowdays. In the early days I loved testing new distros and tweaking around with my system, but after over a decade working in tech the last thing I want to do in my free time is have to fix my own computer.
Hell yeah! I was using Ubuntu 10-14 in college and now back on the train with 24, 25 and 26. Everything just works every time and all the professional apps I need are first class citizens and well supported.
Ubuntu Server, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are my server distros of choice as well. FreeBSD for a NAS. Gotta pick the right tools for the job!
I started with like, nothing, linux 0.99 on 8 floppies and X11 on like 12 floppies… then some kind of LFS, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then MX with Xfce (since almost 10 years)
Can’t tell if joking or old or both…?
Old coot here
I started using un*x on mainframe (aix, irix, hpux, etc). On a regular PC you could have SVR4, BSD, Minix, things like this, then linux came, in the 90s we had no CD, we downloaded the floppies images from ftp on the university server, then rushed to home to install linux on a 486, we did a lot of compile ourselves, no choice back in time. I used some distro after, like Mandrake (I’m French) but always liked the DIY thing, but it was more and more complicated and long… this is why I started using Debian in the days…
I’d forgotten about LFS. Not sure if it should even count, for me at least, it’s not like I actually used it to daily drive. But I did use the knowledge from it to make a mini bootable “rescue” distro that I would put on backup disks so they’d be self-sufficient.
Mint > Ubuntu > Lubuntu > Arch (desktop) / Debian (server)
I switched away from Canonical the first time I saw an ad when running
apt update & apt upgrade, fuck them forever.I’m sticking to Arch because its easier to install something myself than to rip apart something prepackaged.
I’m curious about trying Void.
You might find Void too barebones but it’s nice like that. When you finish void-installer for the first time, you get a system with 144 packages only.
That’s exactly what I ended up with, Arch on my gaming laptop, Debian on the server.
It is weird not having a desktop computer, but the laptop plays all the games and the server does all the rest.I used Void for a bit. I wouldn’t recommend using on your main system unless you really hate systemd for some reason. Try adding the CachyOS kernel and repos on your Arch system. It will be like having a newer better Arch. No reinstall required.
Since when has apt had ads? That’s horrendous. How have I never heard of this?!
Since at least 3 years and 9 months ago.
The message I recall was different though, it was advertising Ubuntu Pro for better security updates. All it did was make me feel like I’m using an insecure system.
ubuntu > fedora > manjaro > endeavor > arch > fedora > arch > nixos.
started in 2015 with ubuntu, started distrohopping in 2019 when i upgraded from laptop to desktop, but ended with nixos 3 years ago
What are the advantages of nixOS? I have a Ubuntu Server but plan to run Fedora KDE on my desktop when I build it.
Not the same dude, but I assume the Nix reproducible declarative build and deployment system. It’s what interested me the most as a former Arch user, though the poor documentation threw me off at the time. Don’t know if it improved or not.
as t4v0 said, the reprdoucable build system
i have a desktop, a trash laptop for work (construction) and a not as trash one for personal use. also a server
but all managed with one config, where with just one command i can get a program on all my devices, and i know i get a working system out of it, bcs it just refuses to build if just one component fails. then i tweak it until it builds properly, and never have a broken OS.
also, while still heavily underused, the nature of flakes and the ability to pull from non-github repos makes it in theory very decentralized. in theory. in praxis, microsoft is our package vendor :P
Do people actually do this serial distro hopping? When such a meme is posted even now most people say they switched only a few times at most
every now and again, I feel the urge to try another distro. I can’t help it, it’s in my DNA
Exactly! Whyvis everyone on hannah montana linux now? I must know
Probably going to get hate for this and reveal my age a bit, but i’ve been on Ubuntu since 2006 back when they’d actually mail you CDs for free. My desktop’s hardware has been a ship of theseus since then, and no dist-upgrade really ever broke things, and I think the last time I did a full OS reinstall was in like ~2011 when I got an SSD that was a smaller side than my old HDD, so I couldn’t just clone the drive with
dd. Everything works well for what I need it for, and don’t need the bleeding edge.I just really like exploring. I do also enjoy the feel of a fresh clean install. Getting to set things up again without all the cruft of gradual config tweaks.
It’s rly only for ppl who REALLY care about the install process or just have the ‘grass is always greener’
Or both
For reasons unknown even to myself, I hoard my old hardware and run it till it won’t run anymore. All of my servers are my own old machines, corporate castoffs, and a few that were literally pulled out of a dumpster, so I have a lot of test subjects. I like to experiment with distros and will probably never stop. I like seeing all the cool stuff people make. And driver support has gotten good enough that it’s not that painful to switch nowadays. I run through the installer and boot up, and everything more or less works. It’s a good time to be a distrohopper.
For my main rig and “important” servers I generally stick with debian; if I need to fix something I don’t want to be learning the guts of a new OS while I’m trying to figure out something else. Everything else is frolics.
Ubuntu -> Mint -> Arch -> NixOS
Ubuntu really drove me away for some time. Only when I got to Mint, I felt that Linux could be a daily driver. Arch made me strangely reinstall it every few days. Not by not working but by having the feeling of dirtying the machine on use.
NixOS is really what I want to use the rest of my life. Very complicated on first use but definitly worth it (for me).
Yeah, I bounced off NixOS for a couple months before it stuck. I would switch again but it would have to be like Nix but better















