So, many folks distro-hop for years before finding the distribution that they like the most.
I know, I did it for a bit more than 20 years !
To give you a bit of context, I started my linux journey in 2000, while I was at school. We were learning to code, and it was around 2 hours of lectures per week for around 8 hours of practice. Those eight hours were split in half :
The "linux half" teacher was a bearded man (obviously, clichés die hard).
The GUI was very basic for my eyes used to Windows, cause it was TWM (or probably some variants of it). We were connecting to our /home folder via telnet and using gcc+emacs (yes, emacs, for students who never used linux).
And it interested me. A lot. I mean, I knew there were other operating systems, Jurassic Park showed me there was Unix (the filemanager in that movie has a "modern" version named FSV3, look it up on github), and I've heard about Linux before.
So, eventually I asked that teacher if I could use that system at home, to familiarize myself with it. He told me Red Hat wasn't free, but he pointed me to Mandrake (another distro using RPM as the package manager).
I grabbed a blank CD or two, he helped me get the ISO images burned on them, and I decided to try it on the family computer.
Of course, you can guess how that went.
After I broke the windows install on the PC everyone at home used, I still managed to get Mandrake going, and with an internet connection !
I was amazed, frankly. Something totally different, it was exciting !
I quickly realized, though, that I'll have to make a dual boot. Which, by then, with my meager knowledge at the time... wouldn't be a thing.
Windows Me (yes) was reinstalled, and I was forbidden to ever do something like that again. Which was deserved, frankly :p
2 years passed.
In that time, we did way more C with gcc and emacs, but we also started learning C++ and Java on Windows. In my free time I was starting to learn PHP (3 at the time) and used a tool that installed apache/php/mysql on windows (I think it was EasyPHP ? Maybe ?)
Then, when I finally graduated, I figured that before entering the next stage of my school journey (getting one extra year for one extra degree), I would need my own computer.
So, I got my very first one, a second hand machine. It had a Duron 800MHz CPU, a S3 pro savage 4 GPU, and I think 128MB of ram ?
We were in 2002, it was time to get a dual boot going. After MANY tries, eventually I gave up the dual boot idea, as I couldn't get it to work. So I used Mandrake for a while during the summer, to try out that linux thing.
Eventually though, the summer ended and I had to get windows back on there, cause I knew how to set up what I needed on that OS better.
Skipping one more year ahead, summer 2003. Got the second degree. Time to search for work. And that, mostly, needed a browser and a notepad. The fancy resume I could do on the family computer that was still on winME if needed.
Time to give linux a go again !
This time, I did some research, and I heard about debian. So, I grabbed the ISO (it was debian 3.0 or 3.1 iirc), I burned it on a CD and installed it. I'm not remembering precisely how the install went, but I remember thinking that Debian had more packages than Mandrake, and seemed more polished. That might have been teen me being confused, though :D
Anyhow, I ended up really liking Debian, mainly because of the bigger community. There was a bigger community than Mandrake's, and I actually could find help online.
I used debian for a bit more than a year, yet by the end of 2024, another distribution would arrive and grab my attention.
Indeed, I heard about a new distro, based on debian, aimed at newcomers, called Ubuntu. As soon as their first released version, Ubuntu 4.10 "Warty Warthog", arrived, I downloaded it (which took days, back then :p)
The install process felt like a breeze compared to anything I tried before, and it felt, despite the bugs, super polished. Not sure how/why, but it really blew me away at the time.
I spent most of the end of that year participating in the french Ubuntu communities, that were shaping up at that time. I ended up becoming an #ubuntu-fr moderator (that was the french IRC channel on freenode).
That's the period where I started to really daily drive linux.
I got my first job, finally, in April 2006. That was almost 2 years of job searching, if you wanted to keep track of that.
Still living with my parents, my first couple of wages allowed me to help them financially, and still have enough to change from my second hand PC to a brand new one, with two hard drives.
I was using Mac (which I was discovering) and Linux at work (server was on debian), but I was also starting to get into gaming.
Thus, I wanted to really, finally, have a dual boot with windows for the games, and linux for the rest.
And with two drives, and renewed motivation, I got a dualboot working ! If I remember correctly, at first, to boot windows I had to load the boot menu and manually boot on the correct drive... but I eventually got Grub sorted out.
That's the period I stayed with Ubuntu (as it was working just fine). I also learned to configure apache/php/mysql myself, on linux.
From there, Windows was really used for the things that weren't working on linux. To avoid rebooting all the time though, on days where I knew I would game later, I still booted Windows.
Between 2006 and 2016, Windows versions released, new distros regularly appeared, but mostly I stayed on Ubuntu.
After all, it was doing everything I needed, flawlessly, reliably. But... I had heard of all those other distributions. Their communities were growing too.
So, while I can't say the exact dates/period and for how long I tried each one (still alongside windows), here's a non-exhaustive list :
I know I did try niche ones based on debian/redhat, but I don't really remember the names. I don't think any of those are still alive today.
Many folks online were mentioning it, very proud of using it. That year, I... didn't manually installed Arch for the first time.
Nope. I heard Manjaro was easier, so I tried it. And it worked for a while... until it didn't, an update broke the system, I had no idea why, but now in hindsight... I had many AUR packages installed, and let's say that Manjaro and AUR... if you know, you know.
Still, I reinstalled it and went on until like 2020. Until you-know-what happened.
During the lockdown due to the covid pandemic, I had my work machine setup on one screen, my personal rig on the other. Somehow, I really like the setup I had, because I could do work while listening to music and it was awesome.
I tried Garuda, liked it, except the default "gamer neon" themes.
While I had used linux distros for years now, and had more than just the basics on many things under the hood, it always felt daunting for me to look at the arch wiki (which was already good back then) and install arch itself manually.
And yet, in 2021, I tried to manually install Arch.
And... it took time, but I actually managed first try to get a gnome desktop going ! The tough part was enabling the network on the chrooted system before rebooting to avoid issues. And maybe not forgetting the bootloader, too.
And while I liked that I did it, it didn't have the automated snapshots on updates and a few other things Garuda did by default.
So, I went back to an arch-based distro, this time it was EndeavourOS. I also tried Archcraft at some point during that time.
Surprisingly, very recently. End of 2023, I heard about archinstall, decided to give that a go. And it made the arch install process way way way easier and faster. To the point that even without the automated snapshots magically available at boot in grub, I stayed on that for a bit.
By that time, Microsoft announced they were stopping windows 10 support in October 2025... and win11 started to annoy me more and more. At the same time, the steam deck (I got one) proved that Proton had reached a point where most recent games would just work fine on linux.
I was participating in a community project around doom mapmaking in June 2024... which was when I decided that as soon as that was done, I would be switching to 100% linux, yeet windows, and try to setup Arch manually, exactly how I wanted it. My plan was to configure everything I wanted to have, no matter how long it would take me to get it right.
So, early July, manual install it was. I planned it : btrfs and subvolumes on a brand new Nvme SSD (1TB), migrating some data there to erase completely the drive with windows on it. I also decided on a window manager, I would be using Sway (but I still would have gnome as a regular desktop if needed, as a backup).
As it wasn't my first time, it went way smoother. I figured out Timeshift and use grub-btrfsd + timeshift-autosnap too. That way I had snapshots taken daily, or just before I would do updates. I could also boot into those snapshots to restore them.
I took the time to tinker on that sway config (I based it initially, to not start blank, on what the Garuda-Sway variant includes by default).
So, since July 2024, I've been not only using Arch as my primary OS, it is the only OS I have installed, be it on my desktop or my laptop.
I kept tinkering on my sway config since, removing the things Garuda-Sway included that I wasn't using, replacing what I felt like replacing, and nowadays, my config is mine, to the point people not using a tiling window manager would probably see my unlocked machine and have no idea how to do anything.
It's been more than 7 months and... and I'm good.
Discord finally fixed streaming on linux with wayland (but I'll still keep vesktop cause it's all themed how I like). Most games just work. I know how to fix my system if an update breaks it (booting into a snapshot and restoring it, which hasn't been needed once).
No ads, the system has exactly (and only) what I want it to have. It's fast. I have Virt-Manager all setup (I did have a "work" ubuntu install, I recreated it as a virtual machine).
In short : I feel no need to distro-hop, I feel at home.
It's not that arch is the best. It's that it's the one that works best for me.
The best distro for you ? The one you like the most. The one you're most comfy with.
You don't want to tinker config files or the system, you prefer easier distros where most things are already set up ? Perfectly fine, please do enjoy those distros too.
Elitism and gatekeeping won't help the linux community to grow. You know what will, though ?
I mentioned earlier I had virt-manager set up.
Beside hosting the ubuntu distro I use to work (cause it is the same set up I have at work itself), it's main use is for me to install distributions into VMs to help friends on different distros than me.
Cause that's how I'm trying to repay the community and help it grow : helping people no matter the distribution they use.
Remember me mentioning doom mapmaking ? Well, during that month of June 2024, one doom mapmaker migrated from Windows to Linux Mint. He wanted to try it, and see if he could keep making doom maps on it.
He was struggling to compile Ultimate Doom Builder (UDB for short, a big mapmaking tool made with .NET) on his mint. So what did I do ? I created a VM, installed Mint on it, and noted what I did to get UDB compiled and working. The result is that page.
Another mapmaker was considering using UDB on her debian, she was able to adapt that "guide" to debian and it worked !
That is my goal now : I feel a responsibility to provide folks with the help and advice I wish I had gotten years ago. So that's what I'll do.