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Comment by case0x | Hacker News Reader

I think the article encapsulates the problem perfectly.

When I started to switch from Windows to Linux, I've constantly changed distros picking whatever I saw "cool" people in my online circle use. I switched between Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and it's 100% FLOSS siblings all the time, sometimes using a distro just for one or two days.

It is a stupid Endeavour as you have no time getting used to your environment and so you lack the skills required to solve any problems that occur.

What fixed my habit was actually having to use my laptop for university, where I ran Ubuntu, and later at work, where we used Fedora. It helped me get used to it and tailor it to my needs.

Recently, I've switched at home and work to MacOS ( couldn’t resist the new M1 chips). It fulfills my requirements and works like a charm.

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I went with Ubuntu when I switched from Windows some time around "Dapper". Stuck with it until "Karmic" or something like that. I only switched to Arch because I was getting tired of the big upgrades, and not having the latest versions of things I needed for work.

This decision makes sense for me and for the laptop that I use daily as a developer. It doesn't make a lot of sense for a regular user, and even less for a server environment.

Is it really so complicated? If you have very specific needs, you'll know what to look for. If you're not that special - why not just go with something common until you see what limitations you can live with and which ones are deal-breakers?

I think a lot of "distro hopping" is also just being interested in the OS itself. I don't see the problem.

It is a stupid Endeavour

Installing and switching between a half dozen distros (plus a couple of BDSs and Open Solaris) when first learning to use *nix really taught me a lot about all kinds of different aspects and philosophies of the *nix world and getting all those distros to actually install and run gave me lots problem solving skills.

Now I've settled on Ubuntu, been using it basically exclusively for the past 10+ years (minus a short affair with Arch a few years ago) and have no plans on switching. But having that initial experience with lots of different OSs was very educational.

Quite interesting to see how our experiences differentiate as I never got the chance to really understand what I was doing or what is going on but maybe that depends on our different approaches when switching distros

I think it also depends on which distros you choose. Installing 6 different Debian/Ubuntu flavours, might not teach you much. Installing Debian, Gentoo and OpenBSD will at least open you up to several different ways of solving the same problem.

I also think it really depends on what your end goal for doing it is. Do you just want to get to the point where you have a working dev environment as quickly as possible or do you want to learn about Operating Systems and hardware for its own sake. For me, at the time, getting NetBSD working on a 'no name' PowerPC dev board I bought off of eBay was a fun goal in it self.

It really is a matter of perspective. I ended up doing the same thing as the parent comment, switching to Linux after being fed up with Windows and MacOS. It took me a few tries to find a package manager that worked for me (and I certainly borked my fair share of systems in the first few months), but Linux just worked in ways that MacOS and Windows never really did for me. Software installed quickly and flawlessly. Dev tools like git, docker and make were no longer second-class experiences. My coreutils were up-to-date, out-of-the-box. I could test and compile stuff on my own system and reliably deploy it to the cloud without needing to account for different architectures, kernel breakage or ABI incongruity. Virtual machines and containers executed faster than any other system I had tried. Microsoft Edge wasn't begging me to leave it as default. I didn't get notifications about The New Safari.

It ultimately comes down to workload, I suppose. If you're a creative professional or build iPhone apps for a living, I doubt you'll enjoy your time on Linux very much. As someone who does neither of those things very often, Linux feels like home to me.

As a long-time user of Ubuntu (and derivative distros) who has always wanted to checkout Arch, what made you get back to Ubuntu from your fling with Arch?

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