(opinion) Why Distro Hopping Is Good · The Kernal
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Distro hopping is often seen as a sort of sickness. Something that you should strive to stop. But why is that? Many Linux experts have done it, and it doesn’t seem to have done any harm. In fact, I happen to believe that distro hopping is something that, while you shouldn’t probably continue to do forever, is deeply beneficial to anyone attempting to learn Linux. So, I will go through some reasons why you, yes you, should consider distro hopping.
  • federico3
    8·
    2 years ago

    For most people distro hopping is like changing car when a light breaks. You are denying yourself the opportunity to learn how to solve a problem. I’ll stick with Debian.

    Edit: if you want to learn about different package managers you can just use VMs for that. There’s no need to distro-hop.

    • CyclohexaneM
      41·
      2 years ago

      Hard disagree. I don’t change distros because something stopped working, especially if it’s something fixable. It is to experiment different distributions and their fundamental differences.

      • stopit
        11·
        2 years ago

        Same here! I use fedora at home (my first Linux distro) and arch on my smaller laptop. I am happy with both…but occasionally i like to test if the “grass is greener” elsewhere. I always come back to my original choices.

    • sproid
      11·
      2 years ago

      You are denying yourself the opportunity to learn how to solve a problem.

      I will argue most people distro hop because they got bored and wanted to explore something new or different. They already learned, that’s the trigger (or problem).

    • CyclohexaneM
      4·
      2 years ago

      just to get KDE/GNOME packaged in a certain way or one with a slightly more automated installer.

      I agree that type of distro hopping is useless. But experimenting Debian, Arch, Gentoo, NixOS, Slackware, Void, those are all very fundamentally different.

    • musicmatze
      3·
      2 years ago

      Maintaining a distro is a huge task

      As someone who packaged software for a living for almost three years, I cannot agree more. Even though it was just some packages for something like 10 different distros, not a full maintainership for a distro!

  • 10_0
    21·
    27 days ago

    deleted by creator

  • marmulak
    21·
    2 years ago

    Yeah I definitely did it as a learner, but years go by and eventually you get old and lazy. You find something that works perfectly, and then you think, “Should I just let this thing keep working perfectly, or should I stop everything in my life so I can break my OS and spend hours/days/weeks/months/years fixing it?”

    I haven’t changed distros in a long, long time. ^_^