I did something very similar, spent about a year on fedora … 33? then discovered “my preferred distro” and never looked back.

Thing is that everyone finds their place with a distro and settles for as long as it suits their needs. Then, you might move on, you might not. Its just an OS, a means to an end. Use what you need, then use something else, no need to go to the doctor for hopping headaches :)

It’s normal. As is to stick to one distro for ever. It’s great to have options, no?

I’d say it’s normal, but also normal to not distoe hop - everyone has their own preferences and Linux gives people the freedom to do what they want.

I have wiped my distro before just because I felt I’d let it bloat. I like tinkering and installing all sorts of random packages a long the way but am not good at cleaning up. I stayed with the same Distro - OpenSuSE.

But before OpenSuSE I used to use Mint. I liked Mint but I managed to break the updates in a minor but annoying way with a customisation I did on one version prior to an a major system update. When I decided to fix the problem I decided to distro hop.

I also have a HTPC and I just reinstalled my distro this week - I did this to wipe Win11 off the device which had been pre installed and I kept when I installed Linux “just in case”. I haven’t used it once and it was taking up half the hard drive. So I figured I’d back up my home folder, wipe the computer and reinstall Nobara and then restore my home folder. Worked like a charm, and I was back up and running in about 30mins.

It also gave me a new appreciation for User level Flatpaks, much of my software was already there, installed and ready to use. I did even consider distro hopping again but Nobara has worked well in my HTPC.

So yes, Distro hopping is normal, reinstalling on a whim is normal, and staying with a distro and just letting it update for years is also normal.

Who cares if it’s normal or not. You do you

I started using Linux 2 years back.

Here’s the cause and it’s normal.

I remember going through a lot of hopping the first 3 or 4 years but have been settled on Arch since then.

It’s pretty normal as far as I am aware.

I have another friend who uses Linux and he also disro hops, same as me.

We’ll try out a distro and if it turns out we don’t like it, doesn’t suit our needs, doesn’t support something we want to do or it just breaks then we try another.

I started on Ubuntu many years ago and grew to dislike it. I stay away from Debian for the most part these days. Tried Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mint etc.

I tried Manjaro and hated it. It stopped working when my monitors went to sleep, could not bring them back. Also had some PC freezes. Tried another installation of it and same thing.

I tried Garuda, did not like.

I tried Pop!_OS but I don’t recall much about it.

I’ve now settled on Fedora based distros. Fedora is quite nice but my main one is Nobara. I’m currently playing around with Bazzite.

I’d like to see what Steam OS is about when they do some releases for their current version. I think I played around with a very old version years ago.

Never tried Arch, I might do it just because or so I can say I did.

I’ve probably forgotten a few others between.

Yeah, it’s normal. There are so many flavours of Linux out there, why wouldn’t you want to try some of them?

Not normal, you are a weirdo.

I use W11 bloat edition, BTW

It’s perfectly normal, especially when you’re still so green. I’ve distro hopped lots for my first 4 years, started with Ubuntu, and tried a bunch of stuff until settling for Arch back in 2008. Since then I’ve tried one or another distro for some amount of time or specific purpose, e.g. servers running Debian, work machines running Ubuntu, and there was a 2 year gap where I used Gentoo as my main system (but despite things that I loved there, I just didn’t had the patience). Just the other day I was talking about Bazzite with someone here on Lemmy, and they made such a good defense for it that I might install it on a VM for testing, I’ve also been wanting to give NixOS a serious try any day. All of which is to say, yes man, trying different stuff is normal, even if you’re perfectly happy with what you have you won’t know if there’s anything better for you unless you try it, I used to think I was happy on Windows.

back when i started with Linux, i would distro hop in the beginning since i was trying out different ones, making mistakes, but taking that knowledge with me onto the next one. Then i discovered Manjaro, then EndeavourOS and have been on it for years now

Have thought about reinstalling EOS once i rebuild my computer, but see how that goes -

I had literally the same Linux distro-hopping track as you. I hated fedora though, and after one year installed openSUSE and Void Linux on my 2 of 3 systems respectively (3rd system ran Arch the whole way through). Now I’m happy, openSUSE is a great daily driver work laptop (I have it running on ancient shit, but it legit feels super smooth with swayWM), Void is my tinkering and personal programming laptop (broken right now, but I’ll fix it soon), and arch is for heavy loads (cough, gaming, cough). Everything works and is efficient (Void has given me ACPI issues, but usually works). I think I’ll probably stay like this for a while longer.

Almost a year? I’ve been on the same one for about 15.

I think this is part of tge beauty of linux, you hop till you’re happy 😀

Pretty normal if you’ve never used debian.

Debian is the cure to distro hopping

I’ve been using Linux for 25 years. I started with SuSe, switched to RedHat after a couple months, and after a few more months switched to Gentoo… for 10 years, then did Arch for the remainder.

Frankly, I think that distro hopping is a bad idea because it means you don’t get enough time really understanding how to fix things. As a long time Arch user, it would never occur to me to throw out 10+years of tooling and scripts, muscle memory and shorthand to fix a driver issue. I would read the wiki top to bottom and then go spelunking through other sources until I find the solution (then update the wiki) before I’d switch to something foreign with its own set of problems and unknowns.

My advice is to find a distro that makes sense to you, and that has a deployment pattern you like and commit to it for a few years. Don’t switch unless you find something that fulfills those two requirements even better, and even then do so cautiously. Your experience and understanding is hard-won.