Memoir of a Distrohopper

Introduction

I just want to warn readers that this blog post has no real narrative. It’s essentially just my experience of using various Linux distributions on my old laptop. This blog post serves as decent context for my article on my new laptop. It’ll probably also give you a taste of how insane Linux distro hopping can get. For the uninitiated, distro hopping mean to change which distribution of Linux one is using.

Distro Hopping Insanity!

I ran Linux on my old laptop (a xiaomi mi air 13) since the day I got it, originally Ubuntu 16.04 which wasn’t a great experience as I didn’t seem to have any palm rejection. I upgraded to 20.04 when it released however I still had no palm rejection. After a while I heard about Manjaro and how you could get more up to date packages which sounded appealing to me. I liked it at first as the KDE environment was very customisable however I quickly fell out of love with it as things just seemed to break. Everything just felt glitchy, pamac (the graphical interface for pacman, arch linux’s package manager) often didn’t seem to work well, my heavily customised desktop environment would glitch in weird ways. I didn’t like it.

I think I tried Pop!_OS for half a day or so but that felt too slow. Next was Arco linux which a youtuber recommended. That kinda reminded me of Manjaro in the sense that it was loaded with a bunch of software I didn’t want or like. I tried living with it for a while but it just felt bloated, although I did get my first taste of a tiling window manager which I really liked.

Next was pure Arch, which I enjoyed however I was not confident or competent enough to maintain it. I learned a lot though. I settled into DWM which I really miss and hope to go back to an experience like that one day (preferably on wayland). I can’t quite remember the details but I think it’s likely that I nuked my system one or two times before I decided to give Fedora a try.

Fedora was cool, it had GNOME 40 so that was a fresh experience. I found it to be much more stable than KDE and I actually quite like the fairly minimalist/dumbed down interface of GNOME/GTK. But something deep inside of me was pulling me back towards Arch, I thought “I could make it work this time”. So I ditched fedora and jumped back on the Arch DWM bandwagon and didn’t look back.

I took my system to uni where I was very happy with the experience however after a month or two I nuked my system again. It wouldn’t boot past a cryptic screen. I think to this day if I had an internet connection and some more time I could have fixed it but getting a wired connection was not really possible for me. I think it’s my fault I broke it but I can’t be sure, I think I did something bad when trying to connect my phone to my laptop. The trouble is that I didn’t reboot my machine for like a week after that event so it could have been something else.

Regardless of why I nuked my system, I had nuked my system. So I had to choose which distro to put on my laptop. And I had to choose fast! One of the requirements was that it had to be something reliable. I was torn between giving Pop another try and installing Ubuntu. I opted for Ubuntu. I liked the relative stability of it but I didn’t like how out of date many packages were. But I stuck with it up until my new Framework arrived. Interestingly the palm rejection worked this time round.