Distro hoppers favorites

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Hello fellow hoppers! What are your favorite distros, and why?

My top 3 are:
Arch for the AUR.
OpenMandriva for stability, and no politics.
Tumbleweed for YAST, the OBS with OPI, and arguably the greatest linux logo.

What are you hopping around on?

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I agree with Arch for the AUR. There is just tons of software available on there.

I used Fedora Rawhide for a little while. I enjoyed it but it started to become unstable.

Then I discovered Tumbleweed, and it feels like a nice little ground. Stable rolling release tied in with a nice GUI for configuration and the Open Build System! And yes, the gecko is one of the best Linux mascots!

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I’ve hopped distros multiple times, but have only really stuck to a few. My first distro was Mint, back in 2019. Up until last year, Mint was all I used as it was all I knew I would need. I kept my main computer on Mint and used a second laptop to try out all kinds of stuff. Low-risk tinkering environment plus Ventoy equals lots of distros.

I stuck to Arch on that second laptop for a few months. Great distro, but I personally got tired of the things I had to set up myself. I then found out Tumbleweed is also rolling-release, and has both user-friendly pre-installation and expert options, if desired.

Now, openSUSE is what I use by default, with Debian on a little server.

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Sheesh - I’m gonna have to dig into my soggy memory banks, but I’ll give it a try. (sidenote: I was using Unix type OSes since the early 80s, before Linux distros, so been hopping for many years, maybe when some in here were in diapers :slight_smile: )

Before Linux.

  • FreeBSD, MINIX, SCO, OS/2 (then Warp), AIX.

Linux distros.

  • TAMU, Slackware (a favorite), Yggdrasil, Caldera, Red Hat, Mandrake, Xandros, Knoppix, TurboLinux
  • S.u.S.E. Linux (yes, way back in the beginning, when they branched from Slackware)
  • SuSE Linux version 6.x
  • At some point, I was thinking hardcore and used Gentoo for a while.
  • Eventually, arrived back with openSUSE 10.x, 11, 12 (skipped 13 because it’s a bad luck number) … then on to Leap, TW, and now back on Leap.

There … 40+ years of hopping :+1:

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I still have a folder containing every iso I have downloaded and tried out. Multiple ubuntu flavors, multiple fedora spins, mint/lmde, debian, pop, kali, tails, arch, garuda, endeavour, manjaro, cachy, tumbleweed, openmandriva, mageia, rhino, slackware, nixos, zorin, vanilla, freebsd, ghostbsd, regata, gecko, and probably some others.

I still use an old HP workstation for trying out different distros on actual hardware. I run Arch on my gaming pc, tumbleweed on my home server, and openmandriva on my laptop.