Nah its normal, been hoping since 6 years. I keep an external hard drive with important info, so i can nuke my system without worry.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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It's normal. As is to stick to one distro for ever. It's great to have options, no?
So I read somewhere that Fedora has great nvidia support and I installed it and everything worked
OK maybe I'll try Fedora or Arch, cuz Mint is being weird about my video card.
It's pretty normal as far as I am aware.
I have another friend who uses Linux and he also disro hops, same as me.
We'll try out a distro and if it turns out we don't like it, doesn't suit our needs, doesn't support something we want to do or it just breaks then we try another.
I started on Ubuntu many years ago and grew to dislike it. I stay away from Debian for the most part these days. Tried Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mint etc.
I tried Manjaro and hated it. It stopped working when my monitors went to sleep, could not bring them back. Also had some PC freezes. Tried another installation of it and same thing.
I tried Garuda, did not like.
I tried Pop!_OS but I don't recall much about it.
I've now settled on Fedora based distros. Fedora is quite nice but my main one is Nobara. I'm currently playing around with Bazzite.
I'd like to see what Steam OS is about when they do some releases for their current version. I think I played around with a very old version years ago.
Never tried Arch, I might do it just because or so I can say I did.
I've probably forgotten a few others between.
I had literally the same Linux distro-hopping track as you. I hated fedora though, and after one year installed openSUSE and Void Linux on my 2 of 3 systems respectively (3rd system ran Arch the whole way through). Now I'm happy, openSUSE is a great daily driver work laptop (I have it running on ancient shit, but it legit feels super smooth with swayWM), Void is my tinkering and personal programming laptop (broken right now, but I'll fix it soon), and arch is for heavy loads (cough, gaming, cough). Everything works and is efficient (Void has given me ACPI issues, but usually works). I think I'll probably stay like this for a while longer.
distro hopping to me is a feature even though I do not do it a lot. Im looking into appimage for my most important things to make it easier in future though. I move very slowly though.
I'd say it's normal, but also normal to not distoe hop - everyone has their own preferences and Linux gives people the freedom to do what they want.
I have wiped my distro before just because I felt I'd let it bloat. I like tinkering and installing all sorts of random packages a long the way but am not good at cleaning up. I stayed with the same Distro - OpenSuSE.
But before OpenSuSE I used to use Mint. I liked Mint but I managed to break the updates in a minor but annoying way with a customisation I did on one version prior to an a major system update. When I decided to fix the problem I decided to distro hop.
I also have a HTPC and I just reinstalled my distro this week - I did this to wipe Win11 off the device which had been pre installed and I kept when I installed Linux "just in case". I haven't used it once and it was taking up half the hard drive. So I figured I'd back up my home folder, wipe the computer and reinstall Nobara and then restore my home folder. Worked like a charm, and I was back up and running in about 30mins.
It also gave me a new appreciation for User level Flatpaks, much of my software was already there, installed and ready to use. I did even consider distro hopping again but Nobara has worked well in my HTPC.
So yes, Distro hopping is normal, reinstalling on a whim is normal, and staying with a distro and just letting it update for years is also normal.
I think it's pretty normal. I personally distrohopped every month until I finally settled on Void Linux. I know a lot of people have stopped distrohopping after using Void, but it may not be your cup of tea.
It's perfectly normal, especially if you found something you couldn't do or needed better support for.
In the current landscape of the distro wars, admitting you just jumped sides is grounds to call forth the raiders from your old distro, they know the distro specific vulnerabilities and will unleash a fury of which you have never seen. The first sign will be a blinking hard drive light...