Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

A few aspects here

First? If you linux “correctly”, distro hopping is almost a non issue. The key is that you want as little as possible installed on your OS drive/partition. Because you have a package manager with any distro (that you should consider for a desktop) so installing software is really easy.

Aside from that: There are a lot of youtubes out there that mostly boil down to evaluating popular distros. But… the reality is that mostly you are looking at desktop environments with those. Sure you sometimes have different ideologies in what can be in a package manager (such as closed source nvidia drivers), but there are almost always workarounds for any consumer oriented desktop distro. I recommend just watching one and then realizing that KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong) and then picking a distro from there.

Personally? I mostly like (K)Ubuntu for my desktop. Most of the servers I work on for my day job are either rhel or debian so apt install is built into my brain at this point. And while I don’t like the ever increasing focus on snaps and flatpaks, I know enough to work around them when I need to and adding a new ppa is pretty trivial. And I have absolutely zero qualms about using the functional nvidia drivers so having that trivially built in is nice.

Although, funny enough: I am currently looking at other distros to maybe switch away from ubuntu. Mostly because I need to better understand exactly what the esm-apps are because right now it feels like Canonical is actively holding back package updates because they want people to pay for Pro and… fuck that noise.

Which, getting back to making distro hopping easy: My documents are already backed up to my NAS. Steam wise, I just need to copy the install library in my /data/nvme00 directory to a different drive (or redownload/reinstall). And then everything else on my OS drive is trivially replaceable and I just need to write a usb stick. … Or I use this as an excuse to buy an even bigger nvme drive and then use a usb adapter to transfer shit.

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What I will say is this: if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them. We all get VERY tribal and one of my best friends only slightly ironically encourages people to use gentoo. I am pretty sure even gentoo’s maintainers discourage people from using gentoo :)