Are you a distro hopper? I have been using Linux for over 25 years now and in the past have hopped with the best of them. Personally I stopped a long time ago although I still try and keep up with the latest and occasionally boot a new distro in Boxes just to take a look.
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I’ve only ever used two distributions (for desktop). My first was Ubuntu 8.10 when I got given a CD at my local college - used Ubuntu pretty much up until they started wanting to snap everything then I used to Fedora about 18-months ago.
That being said - I can be a bit of a desktop environment hopper.
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Mandrake Linux back in the late 1990’s, then over to AIX (so not really Linux at all!) for a long, long time, then Fedora in 2017 or so.
Does that count as hopping? 2 distros in about 27 years with a large stint in the middle on AIX.
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My journey began with Linux in 2013. I started using CentOS 6 for Minecraft multiplayer game hosting. I forget why I went with CentOS, but probably it was the most convenient option or what I could find the most docs for to accomplish hosting my Minecraft server.
Once I got my first laptop in high school, I started hopping around with different distros, before I eventually landed on Fedora because I figured using Fedora, as the RPM upstream of CentOS, would “make me better with CentOS.” I guess to some extent, that was true!
I might have originally hung onto Fedora for a somewhat silly reason, but over time, I found the release model, focus on cutting edge features without comprising stability (too much), and the community approach aligned with my personal preferences and beliefs in open source.
But what I have learned is that many Linux users have distro-hopping as the first phase. You have to play the field a bit to figure out what you like versus what you do not. But some people eventually find their thing and settle in for the long haul, while others continually do the distro-hopping throughout their tenure as a Linux user.
I think both are valuable for the overall ecosystem. We need people to commit as long-term users and provide useful feedback, knowledge, and experience of using the bits and bytes we make. At the same time, playing the field and knowing how different projects/communities do things also provides useful wisdom, as you can gain deeper insights to what works well and what does not across various contexts.
Good reply. I must have either installed on bare metal or in a vm over 50 distros in my time. I use BigLinux on my desktop since it’s a hp i5 cpu with only 8gb of ram. On my Dell laptop of course it’s Fedora kde all the way.
Been using GNU/Linux for 16 years and I still distro hop to this day, mostly when I am bored or want to try something new but in the end I always go back to Fedora because it’s quick, simple and easy to install and they have minimal modifications of the GNOME desktop. I tried most of the bigger ones, from easy to advanced. Last one I tried was Gentoo and it was a fun experience. My favourite distros so far would be Gentoo, Arch and Fedora. I put Fedora in 3rd because I like Gentoo and Arch a lot like what you can do with them but Fedora is simple, easy and installs in no time with minimal efforts and the low effort required is the main reason I use it as my main distro.
As for Arch, it’s Manjaro or BigLinux for me. I also liked Gentoo. No more bare metal installs for me, just in Boxes to take a look sometimes. I don’t do anything Gnome or Xfce, not my thing.
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I mostly do bare metal install I just back up all my stuff before and try something new. I did clean up my home directory a few times though because it accumulates a lot of junk at some point after moving through a lot of distros.
I first tried Red Hat Linux back in the early 2000’s. The technical challenge of getting it installed back then was considerable. I used BeOS until it was sold off. I tried Open Solaris and used it until Sun pulled the plug. In more recent times I tried Ubuntu but didn’t like snap. I used Clear Linux but it seemed like more of a proof of concept rather than a viable distro. Intel eventually pulled the plug anyway. I tried Nitrux but the DE was incomprehensible and useless to me. My first experience with Fedora was Silverblue, but now I’ve settled on COSMIC Atomic for the time being and I’m very happy with it.
I’ve distro hopped for at least 25 years here. I start with Linux in 1996 with slackware. Went to Redhat for a long time then to many different distros over the years. I like KDE DE so even though I used Mint for many years they no longer support KDE and I went to Debian for a long time. Now I’m coming back to Fedora. It’s simple and it’s KDE is upto date and work well for me. Learned a lot over the years and still try to help others as they navigate the Distro world.
I’ve hopped too many times to count but always come back to Fedora. I love the community, the fact that yum and rpm just make sense to my brain, and that I was here in the changeover from Redhat to Fedora.
Lately, the implementations of Gnome and KDE is what keeps drawing me back to Fedora. Both are very well done and show off the DM’s in the best light possible.
I was never one of those serial distro-hoppers who can’t stick around with one distro for long, but I do understand the urge to tinker that might motivate a lot of them. For me, there’s no longer any reason to distro hop as long as whatever distro I use as a base lets me install distrobox. I think at this point there are only a few possibilities that might convince me to switch away from Silverblue:
- If upstream decides to stop supporting the atomic paradigm
- If I were to come across a piece of hardware that I absolutely NEED to use for some reason, that simply will not work with Silverblue no matter what
- If some “better” tech were to appear that checks all the same boxes of “low-maintenance, low risk (because of the rollbacks), declarative config (right now I just have a CI pipeline that builds my Silverblue derivative automatically once a week)”
I can’t even count how many times I distro hopped Since 1998 when I played with redhat for the first time. At the beginning it was trying to find a distro that made it easy to use a win modem. Mandrake was my goto for a long time but I did alpha test PCLinux. Suse, Mepis..I think I have tyried them all. I do find that if I hop that it tends to be the same distros over and over again but I always come back to Fedora silverblue, Mostly I use a different laptop to try distros anymore so I can see how they are but not mess up my main rig.
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Hopped a few. Started out back in 1995 with three different operating systems on a 486. Windows 3.11, OS/2 Warp and Slackware Linux. I had to use a boot floppy to get into Slackware. It worked fine.
Lately we have been on a few. I think we did the Ubuntu thing before going to Linux Mint and then on to Fedora. I pretty much do whatever my son tells me to do. He said Fedora so here I am. No plan on hopping again. I did have some issues this last time when I updated to 43. But those are now fixed and all is well.
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Not a Distro hopper. As a Tech, I started with computers at DOS level. 1st Linux was SuSE (the early SuSE).way too technical at the time for the average User. Jumped to Mandrake and felt home then Mandriva and when it went under gave up on Linux for over a decade. Came back just recently, tried Ubuntu…nope, Kubuntu..better but still…nope. Fedora KDE Plasma…yep, that’s me. Linux Distros are still not there for the everyday User. I am already up to 30+ commands and switches in the Konsole. I don’t mind, but its still too much for the everyday Computer User.
I OS hop (last 2 days went from W10 21H2 → FreeBSD 16.0 → W10 1607 → W11 Server 2025 IP 29531 → back to W10 21H2 
)
I started on Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 (saw it advertised in a PC Gamer magazine), mained Fedora 20-40 Workstation and Server (occasionally used openSUSE TW), and tried a few other distros along the way (Debian, Solus, and Arch). I liked SELinux on Fedora 
What I learned from Linux carried back over to Windows, and helped me get into FreeBSD! I can switch my desktop and servers to 3 different environments on a whim