Hi, I just want to share / get some opinion.
I started using Linux 2 years back. I was dual booting back then and after a year switched to Linux completely.
I started out using Ubuntu, hated it, installed Manjaro after a week and when pacmac broke the thing within 2 months, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, read the arch wiki and installed arch. Things were going great except for some Nvidia issues (I am using an Optimus laptop) but utt was running smoothly. Then decided that I want to build a game engine and the nvidia issues were significant. So I read somewhere that Fedora has great nvidia support and I installed it and everything worked. I installed Fedora 39, and it worked. When Fedora 40 came, I upgraded no issues, Fedora 41 came, no issues.
But just a few days back when I had vacation, I decided my system was getting bloated and I didn’t manually want to uninstall apps, I decided let’s format it. But I thought… Arch might take up less space on my disk(1 have a 512gb nvme, and t 2tb hdd, but I like to put things like games and projects I am working on, on the nvme). So I installed arch and loving the experience. I installed Nvidia-open drm drivers and it just works.
TLDR: Is it normal to distro hop after being using a distro perfectly for so long?
PS: I used archinstall because I didn’t want through the lengthy process again. And archinstall works great.
Variety is the spice of life. I’ve used Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, Fedora, Nix, been on Debian the last few years. Been looking at setting up my own UBlue image. I really like the immutable thing. Do whatever makes you happy…
I’m interested, What exactly is UBlue? Can you clarify on the immutable thing?
UBlue is a tool the fedora team created to build immutable distros in a container. This is a list of official distros created by it. If you’ve seen Bazzite it was also created with UBlue.
Immutable distro just means the root filesystem is mounted read-only. So when you do updates, they create another image of your filesystem with the updates applied. Then you have to boot into the new filesystem. This is called an atomic upgrade. So if something is broken, you reload your last image and everything is fine.
Thanks for the explanation. That sounds quite promising. I updated Ubuntu one time and it basically broke a python project environment to where I had to reinstall the previous os again. Then of course reinstall everything else too.