this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7066703

Like I hear a lot of people trying a lot of different distros till they find the one they stick with.

Is there a point in Distro hopping ? Like assuming im mostly content with my Mint. Have been using it for about 10 days now.

Ofc Im curious about Desktop enviroments for example. Cinnamon is nice if a bit basic. But beyond that am I missing out on some cool stuff :3

Sorry if this a babys first Linux question.

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[–] Strayce 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I mean if you're curious, spin up a VM and have a poke around. Why not? It can be useful to see how other distros do things. Power users might distro hop a bit trying to find one they "vibe" with in terms of update cycle, atomic and/or immutable, pre-packaged software and drivers, package manager, init scheme, glibc vs. musl, or any one of a bazillion other nerdy things. Some distros follow particular design philosophies, for example being intentionally packaged to be more barebones to run on lower-end hardware.

The differences in day-to-day usage now are a lot less than they used to be, and a lot of it is functionally irrelevant for a desktop user. Things like flatpak and appimage mean more or less anything that runs on Linux can run on any distro. If you start moving outside of that and your distro's repos you might find some of the above stuff becomes relevant. Regarding desktop environments, some distros may only focus on making sure everything works cleanly and looks good in one or two, so installing a different one, though technically available, might not look and/or work the best. Available themes and colour schemes might be different (although you should be able to install those with varying degrees of ease), along with any distro-specific management software (OpenSUSE's YaST, for example, if that's still a thing).

If you're happy where you're at, stick with it. Especially if you're new to Linux. By the time you run up against any potential limitations you'll have a much better idea of what you want out of a distro and you'll be in a better position to judge. Personally I've been thru Slackware, OpenSuSE, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, Arch (btw), Alpine, Ubuntu and a couple of the BSDs (not in that order). I've settled on Bazzite now because it does everything I realistically need to do on a daily basis with near-zero fuss. For weird shit there's always VMs or distrobox.