Distrohopping is often a very maligned subject amongst users of GNU+Linux users and is usually associated with curious newbies, and is more often than not influenced by YouTube influencers and reddit communities dedicated to desktop ricing such as r/unixporn. Of course, they are not the only stated reasons. A lot of users switch distros because they have been disillusioned by certain approaches that the promoters of a certain distro have been taking.
I can shamelessly admit that I have distrohopped myself and here is how I have gone so far:
Pure OS --> Pop OS --> Artix Linux with Linux-Hardened kernel.
Note that this does not include my first distro Fedora 14 and my second and the third one: Whonix and Tails respectively because I was using them entirely for research purposes and they were by no means my daily drivers. I only stated to daily drive Linux distributions during the pandemic, as for most time I did not have the resources to invest on a personal laptop after my last one went bust years ago.
So, why have I distrohopped thus far? #
One of the major reasons for distrohopping on my part were the packages. With Pure OS, which is literally just a Debian reskin without the propreitary blobs - packages were a problem and they did not seem to care much of security updates, often rolling it out days after Debian rolled out theirs. Debian isn't known for speed security updates, mind you - but you always get a stable disto. I would advise anyone contemplating Pure OS to just use Debian instead, makes much more sense.
I had a pretty decent experience with Pop OS. I still regard it as a very reliable distro which is a Ubuntu fork, a proper fork and not merely a reskin. I decided to stay away from Ubuntu because of Canonical's past reputation, particularly with a past data-sharing agreement with Amazon and the Snaps debacle. While Pop OS does not preload snaps, it does come with flatpaks enabled by default, but Pop Os does not force it on its users and flatpak also has an free software backend, unlike Snaps. Certain packages such as Libre Office are available as apt as well as flatpaks, but the flatpaks are almost always up-to-date, with apt packages lagging somewhat. I would have intended to keep using Pop Os, if not for the fact that my SSD broke down. Thankfully, some of the data was backed up elsewhere and I did not much critical data on it anyway. I decided not to install Pop OS on the warranty replacement as I wasn't learning much with it and it wasn't contributing much towards my productivity. I also bought another SSD on which I installed Qubes OS, which I only use very sparingly and exclusively for research purposes and is by no means my daily driver.
I then had Artix installed on my replaced SSD as I wanted a lightweight terminal workflow for just about everything. I decided not to go for any of the popular DEs, although XFCE is still rather good as a DE. Installing Artix was a pain and once it was installed, something always broke. Audio was a mess and setting up pipewire was exhausting. Starting out with i3wm, I tried out Sway, an excellent Wayland replacement for i3, but I had problems with audio every once in a while. Then I finally switched to Luke Smith's build of dwm because it set up a lot of things by default and it permanently fixed by audio output for good, although audio input is still problematic and I haven't really fixed audio input, where the source seems to add a lot of noise to the sound it captures, but it isn't a dealbreaker for me and my computer is now relatively silent, unless I am compiling something while installing packages using AUR or streaming. Artix has effectively solved the issue I had with packages while I have mostly switched to a terminal workflow, particularly for emails, IRC and RSS feeds and to some extent for web browsing. I also chose openrc as my init system as I wanted to have a certain bridge with the BSD style inits which is being used in Gentoo and Alpine, as opposed to SystemD(a bloated, not just an init system).
Satisfaction with my current setup #
I have had my share of annoyances so far. Personally, I think I had a decent learning experience with terminals and I could say I now know a lot more than I would have learnt if I still had Pop OS or Pure OS installed on my computer. I understand everyone starts off with an easier to use distro and then switch to other distributions and in some cases, even FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, all of which are independent operating systems that I keep constantly hearing as superior than a majority of Linux distributions out there. I even dabbled with FreeBSD in a VM, and I am not close to master it.
With Artix, despite the initial teething problems, it has been moving quite smoothly, except with occasional breaking of packages, in which case I just revert to older versions, until this has been fixed. I don't think I will ever with switching to other OSes, except for may be Alpine/FreeBSD/OpenBSD, but even then it would be unlikely. Even then, I will probably start using them more extensively in Qubes more than anything else
Is distrohopping helpful at all? #
This is something I cannot answer with certainty. Distrohopping can divide opinions and are often conflicting, see ZDNET and Unix Sheikh, where Unix Sheikh makes a more compelling argument against it.If a user has to distro hop, I'd rather have it because they have nailed down the use case, rather than because they had just seen a riced desktop out there somewhere.
What Enables Distohopping? #
The sheer number of available choices and alternatives and the human tendency towards curiosity seem like the primary drivers towards distrohopping. Add to the fact that most Linux distributions(with a few exceptions) and other Free operating systems such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD do not intend to lock users down(unlike Microsoft Windows, Apple Macs/iOS and Google Android) to a single operating system mean that all users have enormous number of choices to explore, for better or worse.