My take on distro hopping
2022-12-03
The most common distros people install when they first get into Linux are Ubuntu , one of its derivatives like the excellent Linux Mint and more recently Fedora . However, many of them quickly start searching for more advanced alternatives and get into a habit that is called "distro hopping". In this article I am going to present my take on it.
To be brutally honest with you, one of the primary thoughts I had after fully switching to Linux for a few weeks (besides noticing how much nicer than Windows it is) also was that the distribution I installed probably was not the right one for me and that I should install something else. So that was excatly what I did...
I tried all kinds of distros ranging from Fedora to different kinds of Arch Linux, but I mostly stayed in the Debian world, because I depend on some obscure packages that are only available in the .deb format. However, that did not stop me from trying countless derivatives over the course of a few more weeks, only to come back to where I started (Linux Mint), since most of them did not do things better at all or were even worse in some regards like default configurations.
Looking back at it now, I think that it definitely was an amazing decision for learning more about how Linux works and which different approaches to things like package management or desktop environments exist. Nevertheless, I also believe that installing them on my production systems was a bad idea, as it required me to install and configure the programs I need on a daily basis over and over again wasting precious free time.
Instead, I should have tried them in a VM with enough resources to not limit their capabilities while also keeping the software I depend on working. This is what I do nowadays and I can definitely recommend it to beginners as well. Simply stick to what already works for your productions systems and try out other possibilites in virtual machines until you find them to be so good that they are worth installing on real hardware.
This is not hard to do thanks to amazing software such as Gnome Boxes and will save you from a lot a repetitive and unnecessary work. You can thank me later...