I am a distro hopper and have been using Linux for around 22 years or so (16 of them windows free). I think I tried almost every distro available more than once. Way back in the early 2000’s two friends of mine who did not know each other met at a Microsoft convention in the Midwest. Somehow the topic of Linux came up and they started talking about this guy who installed different versions of Linux almost daily and couldn’t decide which one to use on a daily bases and they couldn’t understand it. That guy turned out to be me. I am not that bad now but every once in a while I want to try something different and I have learned to have spare hard drives sitting around to do just that. I do not use VM’s because I want to see how it works on bare metal. Earlier this year I decided I needed to pick a distro and use it exclusively on my main distro I tried Ubuntu proper and POP OS and decided that POP OS worked best for me. I was using it until I tried the beta of Fedora 33. I have never been a fan of Fedora, it never worked properly with my hardware or printer etc. I am not a programmer and just use my computer for everyday stuff. I know my way around the terminal because in the early days of Linux you had to fix a lot of things or change a lot of settings. Nowadays all you basically have to do is answer some questions and hit install. Fedora 33 is different than the previous versions. POP OS made me fall in love with Gnome but Fedora’s basic Gnome setup is perfect for me. I use very few extensions and just added the programs that I use and changed the background image. This brings me to loving the distro you use. It is rare for me to find one that I install and want to leave on and not worry about. In the past it was Mandrake, Suse, Mepis and Xandros. Even though I love POP OS, Fedora 33 just feels right. Everything is working properly and nothing has crashed. It’s been a while since I have felt this way. I have to give a shout out to the devs of Fedora for an outstanding job! You stopped a distro hopper in his tracks. I hope people reading this have also found their distro.
I guess i sort of did.
I recently discovered Kubuntu and now it’s running on a desktop and laptop.
My main workstation still has a Linux Mint on it, but that will change when the new hardware arrives.
I’m going to install Kubuntu on that one too.
It just “feels” right. As nuts as that may sound, it still feels somewhat, right…
Everybody should give some more love to the distros we actually use right now. It sounds and feels right. 
I have used and tried a ton of distros and still try new things but one distro that remains always with me is Debian, even with all its idiosyncrasies or maybe because of them. No distro is perfect but love is love. 
3 and 1/2 years ago I came back to running Linux. I started on Linux back in 2004, but since I was running it mainly as a hobby, real life got in the way and I shelved my Linux machines, and just ran Windows for about 7-8 years. When I came back I’ve always been limited by the “hand me down” hardware that I get to use for my computing hobby. The first set of hardware that I had at home and work to dedicate to Linux had 2GB of RAM, so I tried a few distros, and found that Bodhi Linux ran the best on my limited hardware. My next round of hardware had 4GB of RAM, this is when my love of Ubuntu Mate began. My current round of hardware has 16GB of RAM on the home machine, and 8GB on the work machine and I still have a few 4GB systems kicking around.
I have settled on Fedora 33 at home since Fedora 30. I enjoyed Fedora in the past, and have enjoyed all of the versions that I have used on my home workstation. Last July, I switched to MX Linux on the spare machine at work and a spare laptop that I use at home. MX really won my heart when they came out with their Fluxbox edition. Fluxbox has always been a favorite WM for me, and MX Fluxbox makes me smile every time I’m in it. For me a positive community is just as important as a polished distro. Fedora and MX Linux have amazing communities, and I’m so thankful to both of those communities and the users that have helped me solve my little bumps along the way. I’ve been giving both of these distros more and more of my computer time.
I’ve used Manjaro for a year or so, but things have broken a bit, so I went to Pop OS 20.10. It works, when I get a kernel update the dkms stuff continues to work so I’m good. Only thing I’m missing is the i2c-nct6775 kernel patch from the gitlab OpenRGB project.
(Which they added via my request, thanks devs!)
I hop a little. My base stuff is LMDE 4, MX19,Sparky 6 rolling w Qt and openbox Noir (default),then I have my never ending Sid partition w/Lxde.
In another drive I have Neon and Deepin at the moment.Going to burn Feren today and play with that a bit.
I’ve been distro-hopping since switching to Linux several months ago. It is almost a sickness I believe. I’ve been pinging back and forth with Ubuntu/Debian-based distros and eventually (thought) I settled on Gnome as a DE and Pop!_OS. It worked great for my hardware, but I kept having this need to find something “better” but I was not sure what I was looking for an often said to myself that I am wasting time doing this, nothing is going to stick better, just stay with Gnome and Pop!_OS. Every week I would wipe the computer and install another, set up, work the week and then wipe again.
At this point, I am a pro at installing and setting up LOL. Then I went to Ubuntu again and I even once again tried Linux Mint and Cinnamon which I really don’t like. I eventually tried Fedora which was a long dream of mine for some reason and yet that wasn’t good enough either. Yep, definitely a sickness.
Even tried FerenOS. Well, now I am on Manjaro w/ KDE and I am in love! I think I found what I was looking for finally. Which is good, because I was growing tired of the hopping. The attention to detail the Manjaro team took with KDE has been impressive. I have 2 issues that are minor and this is the first distro that this happened in.
- Printer doesn’t work. Can’t figure out how to get it to.
- CD/DVD (external) works and then it doesn’t. Seems like I have to reboot each change of a CD. I am ripping all of my owned CDs to .ogg
- Ethernet doesn’t recover when we lose internet. I have to reboot or run a command. I have since made a bash script that lives on my desktop I run and it fixes it.
I know this is Arch-based but I would have thought these things would work as expected like on Ubuntu.
Any way, LOVING MANJARO KDE! Having choices, is what starts the hopping. With Windows or MacOS you just use what is available… their OS. In Linux it is wide-open and what makes you hop!
Manjaro KDE is nice and I love it, I actually used it for 2 years straight on this laptop and that was before plasma. I hated plasma when it first came out. For years KDE was my go to DE. Haven’t had any issues with it like you have. Manjaro Gnome wouldn’t recognize my printer but the other DE’s did. What printer do you have? Their is a Manjaro telegram group that is pretty active if you need help.I have slowed my distro hopping way down to almost a crawl and have a laptop just for that purpose. I have noticed most of my hopping was just going back and forth between the same distros over and over again and such a waste of time.
HP OfficeJet Pro 8720 which is on the network. If I go to settings > printers it tells me “print service is unavailable, bad file descriptor”. If I run the HP Device Manager which I believe was installed with the OS(?) it finds the printer through the network just fine and knows what it is. Yet, the PPD file is not found, even if I point it to the one for this model, it never applies. I’ll have to install Telegram I guess, thank you for the reply.
Ubuntu Studio for me. I had been a windose user since 3.1 and tried various other OSs – OS2 (back in my IBM days), Slackware, HPUX, AIX, (mini comp days) etc… I never stuck with Linux for long as I didn’t have the time to wrap my head around building a kernel. I kept looking at linux from time to time down through the years. I came back to linux for a daily driver with Ubuntu 16.04. Then found Ubuntu Studio in 18.04 and am currently using Ubuntu Studio 20.04. This is a production machine that needs to churn out mission critical work daily. For me Ubuntu Studio is rock solid and with XFCE it is fleet.
I have put it on about a half dozen old laptops and given them to family. My daughter, to whom I had given an old laptop with an SSD and Ubuntu Studio, told me she could not function without a Windows laptop. I visited her recently and she tells me that the linux laptop is what she uses nearly 100% of the time. She says, “It’s soooo fast and opens any document or file format I put on it.” It’s an 8 year old laptop and out performs her new laptop which runs Windose 10. (sorry, I just realized I’m preaching to the choir.)
Man. I have tried SO MANY. I started dabbling back in 2000 or so with different Linux. Slackware 2.something was the first I used but it was in a school lab so wasn’t mine. Red Hat 5.0 I think was one of the first I used (it had a GUI!). I may still have that old one laying around. I used one called Linspire once that eventually became freespire. I do not even remember what they were built on. Debian? Maybe? Anyway after trying a bunch of weird ones like BLAG I think was one.Anyway, I dug into the multiple different branches in my younger days playing in Linux. Still have some of the old Cd-R with them burned on it actually. I eventually settled on Ubuntu. Started back with 7.04 I think. I do like PopOS! a lot too. Earlier this year I tried going all in with it but eventually ran into an issue with it and settled back into Ubuntu 20.04. I also like Linux Mint for a lot of devices. Debian has always been fairly high on my list as well.
Now that I have rambled I will TL;DR this with Ubuntu 20.04 is my current daily using Kernel 5.08 though I will jump to 5.10 probably before Canonical adds it to their repos.
I tried slackware in the early 2000’s never really liked it. I still have the Red Hat disk and manual somewhere and the original CD of the first Ubuntu. The last CEO of Linspire, Kevin Carmony., tried very hard to get me to stop using Xandros in favor of Linspire giving me free access to the click N run software store. Linspire was based on Debian but at one point was ubuntu based. It was sold to Xandros in 2008. I can see the appeal of Ubuntu 20.04. Linux mint is the distro I tell new users to try first. I too have it installed on a laptop or two
The correct Mint is Ubuntu free.Ubuntu reeks of Giraffe PooPoo.SNAP. LMDE 4
You have a right to your opinion, but I would not use mint LMDE. I like my software to be newer. and up to date. If Mint was to stop using ubuntu I would stop using it and stop recommending it.
For me it was Xubuntu for a few years. It was accidental at first, I happened to have the CD of it when my Windows laptop’s hard disk died. I used it out of necessity for a few days to recover most of my hard disk then I realized that Linux desktops had improved a lot since I had last taken a look (this was still over 10 years ago, hence the CD not USB stick).
I did play with other distros, but nothing ever made me want to switch, other than I found a few minor graphical glitches in xfce, but they were so minor that it was never enough to switch.
Going back to the last year or two, when Debian 10 came out - I saw lots of reviews and a suggestion that it was worth a try if you have been using a Debian based distro. I was curious and because you could choose a few desktop environments from the installer and try them all out, it was quite a good exercise.
I now use Debian with Cinnamon which was a surprise in a way, but it did remove the glitches I had with xfce and it works really well. I have installed Debian on 3 PCs in my house - interesting to see all family members using it without even mentioning that Windows had disappeared - they were all struggling with Windows 10 after Windows 7, so I guess the Cinnamon desktop is actually more familiar to them.
I’d just like to give a big thank you to Linux Mint and the crew. Thank you and keep up the good work!
It has everything i need for this setup.
A long time ago I started with Ubuntu 10.04, which was one of the last versions with GNOME 2, I switched to Linux. First by accident (woops, installed to the entire disk 
) but thereafter by choice.
I’ve had a phase of distro-hopping, starting with Lubuntu when Ubuntu started with Unity. Long-time Ubuntu and GTK fan (GNOME Shell, LXDE, Budgie(originally on Solos)), but very recently I’ve switched to loving Qt. Now I’ve returned to my original love Lubuntu, which made the switch to LXQt!
I’ve already started contributing by giving advice to other beginners in the support channel and I’m preparing a script that should enable autorotation in a distribution agnostic matter (and therefore in Qt based environments).
I remember gnome 2 fondly.
Auto-rotation? As in, with one of those all-in-ones that convert from laptop to tablet? Do tell!
Yes, I never reported it here but I’ve finished it up. At least with using Bash scripts, I might rewrite it some time in the future into a single cohesive app. But at least I’ve got a working solution; Autorotate S.A.M.
BTW, I’ve recently found a new interest in NixOS, a declarative Linux distribution 
