How often do you hop distros?

I've never really understood distro-hopping. Unless you have a reason to switch, why to do it? Or, why to bother?

If you want to check it out, read/watch a review, or test it on a virtual machine. You don't really – IMO – have a reason to have it on bare metal.

I don't. I just use Debian, because it's the oldest, most popular, most (API) stable distro out there. I have zero needs to switch. I'm sick of OS' (i.e. Windows) that keep moving/switching/changing things around in massive ways, just for the sake of change. I know they do it to stay fresh in the market, but that's simply not it for me anymore.

Somewhere along the lines of 10-15 years?

Never... isn't that normal?

I run a variety of VMs, and the VMs can run any distro, I'm pretty agnostic about it.

As far as my user interface goes once I've got it tweaked and set up I don't want to ever change it. But I'm one of those crazy people who runs macOS as UI, and a fleet of VMs below it.

And at various companies I work for, I run Windows, with a fleet of VMs below that.

On my secure console I run Qubes with a fleet of VMs below that.

I did about once a year until 2018 when I settled on Arch.

But now I've got a server on NixOS and loving it, so I might be switching my laptop soon.

Whenever my sound card randomly stops working and I can't fix it. I switch to a different distro in hope that someone has this mess figured out by now.

I don't, I've been on arch since 2012 when I left xubuntu. This install has been in many different machines and started life on a HDD and is now on an nvme.

I'm settled on Manjaro GNOME for now but before that it was maybe 1-2 months of swapping until i found one i liked

I started with Backtrack on a laptop, and I currently have Kali on a preserved USB; with endeavor as a daily driver.

That being said, my current "real" daily drivers in Win10, mostly for gaming - Not because proton doesn't do a hell of a job, it certainly does, but it makes modding single player games more complicated. I will say that is absolutely my fault, I haven't spent enough time to figure it out. But after work, and the wife, and the animals, and the alcoholic BIL who shares the house... I just want to use Vortex to add some simple QOL mods to single player games and play it.

I troubleshoot IT issues all day at work, at the end of the day, I just need it to work. I've hardened and removed as much telemetry type bullshit as I could, but I'm sure some slips out. For my threat model, on this machine, I'm fine with it.

On the aforementioned labtop I boot into Kali for... well, that has a different threat model.

Its all self hosted vulnerable VMs for the specific reason of education, but some activities may fall into a grey area, so better safe than sorry.

I started using Linux about 6 years ago. First 3 years were a hopping-hell. The other 3 have been with Arch, Manjaro then made the jump to endeavourOS almost 1.5 years ago and haven't gone anywhere else, and not planning on it at all. Just realized that hopping was just useless. Now I can finally set it up and enjoy my system.

I test distros at work that I wouldn't test at home 😅 And every time I have to reinstall it because of some error, most notabe one was some BTRFS error. Sooo, every 2-3 years or so?

This is the first time in 25 years of using Linux that I've changed distributions.

I think it's healthy to give every distro a try to see how it feels, because your favorite distro might be something you haven't used yet. Personally I've already used all the distros a decent amount and I don't switch without a good reason.

I have hopped rather rarely. I think my journey started with Debian -> (all kinds of flavors of) Ubuntu -> Arch -> NixOS.

Maybe I missed a few (started with linux at probably ~2005). I've stayed on each of these for a few years, I think I switched between Ubuntu flavors a little bit more frequently. Stayed on Arch the longest for ~7 years. And I think I have basically settled now since 3 1/2 years on NixOS without plan to hop any further distros (unless there comes a distro comparable to NixOS that has less quirks and is generally nicer to use (e.g. tooling, strong, strict static typing etc.)).

NixOS is quite different than other distros (which IMO are all very similar) but does package-management+system-configuration basically how it should be done (in hindsight). It's a rather steep learning curve in the beginning, but it only gets better over time, since your system continuously improves, compared to different distros that accumulate dirty state over time and in one way or the other break after some time. This was often the reason why I hopped on a different distro, since I wanted a clean fresh install, which I get with something like Impermanence+tmpfs on root after each reboot.

I switched from NixOS mainly cause there is no saint way to use my dotfiles except to adapt homemanager or the like.

For now I use my own OS based on Fedora Silverblue

https://github.com/SimonWoodtli/cloud-os

Started with Debian Woody and stuck with Sid up until systemd, them hopped to Gentoo and Slackware (and occasionally Devuan).

Only when there is a real need . Debian runs on everything and it is a no nonsense distro so I've been happy with that for years... Started on Debian 6 and continued until now on laptops servers and SBCs. Before that it was Ubuntu and crunchbang for a few years and before that was fedora core that came on like 6 cds with KDE3.

At this point the only interesting thing for me are security changes. Games are largely sorted due to wine , proton and vulkan and all of the great work going on there.

I keep and eye on quebesOS , NixOS, silverblue ,subgraphOS and openBSD and alpine.

The dream OS would be hardened by default. Hardened Kernel with ACLs for everything defined by default. Like each app should be required to list all of the files it accessed and the type of access in a manifest, list permissions it needs and of URLs it accesses. Obviously there is a need for some wildcard stuff but it could be limited in scope. More of the kernel in rust would be nice with legacy systems removed to reduce the technical debt.

I know we have apparmor and selinux and pax/grsec (if you pay) but I think they dont scale well and require a massive investment in time to understand and debug.

I'm a non hopper guy. In 2008 wiped out Windows XP to switch fulltime to Ubuntu. Never hopped to any other distro until 13 years later in 2021 to Manjaro (based on Arch, but with changes and updates come in waves). Used it 1.5 years and was not happy and switched to EndeavourOS (closely based on Arch) and still use it, even after a new installation on a new machine. I thought about switching the distro, but it works so good and well and has what I need. NixOS was on my radar, but ultimately it would be too much of an experiment, change and needed time to learn. The uncertainty what to expect made me stay with what I know, as there was no reason for a change in my case.

The reason why I don't change too often the system is probably because I inform myself and know what to expect. Therefore the thing I chose is probably exactly what I want.

Hi, I don't because I use Windows