Hi, I just want to share / get some opinion.
I started using Linux 2 years back. I was dual booting back then and after a year switched to Linux completely.
I started out using Ubuntu, hated it, installed Manjaro after a week and when pacmac broke the thing within 2 months, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, read the arch wiki and installed arch. Things were going great except for some Nvidia issues (I am using an Optimus laptop) but utt was running smoothly. Then decided that I want to build a game engine and the nvidia issues were significant. So I read somewhere that Fedora has great nvidia support and I installed it and everything worked. I installed Fedora 39, and it worked. When Fedora 40 came, I upgraded no issues, Fedora 41 came, no issues.
But just a few days back when I had vacation, I decided my system was getting bloated and I didn’t manually want to uninstall apps, I decided let’s format it. But I thought… Arch might take up less space on my disk(1 have a 512gb nvme, and t 2tb hdd, but I like to put things like games and projects I am working on, on the nvme). So I installed arch and loving the experience. I installed Nvidia-open drm drivers and it just works.
TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?
PS: I used archinstall because I didn’t want through the lengthy process again. And archinstall works great.
Are you even a real Linux user when you don’t switch distros every day?
Personally I’m usually content for a long time. Although my ideal distro still doesn’t exist and probably never will with the way the meta is currently going.
But you do you. You know how hard/easy it is to reinstall so as long as you’re having fun just experiment away.
What would your ideal distro look like, and what’s missing currently?
At the moment I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed but it’s a little too conservative in my opinion. I can manage it but I miss Debian automatically enabling and restarting services on install/update and management of user groups and other little helpers.
I’d love to have a Debian based rolling release distro with the same quality control as Tumbleweed. Not Sid, that’s too much tied to Debian Testing’s release cycle and doesn’t get security updates in a timely manner.
That used to be my holy grail, too. At some point I realized I do pretty much the same tasks on my PC now that I did 5 years ago.
So if 5 years of software upgrades don’t change the utility of my PC fundamentally, then I can live with Debian Stable.
I like flapjack* for the occasional programs I want the newest version.
*Sure, autocorrect, let’s call it that now.