I’m on Linux for a couple of years and I love it. Distrohoping never interested me though, I’m content with my flavour. But I need to reinstall my OS soon and it gives me headaches. So many settings I changed, applications I installed, configured and forgot about.
Now I read about all you guys constantly distrohopping for fun, how do you even do this? Do you start from scratch, explore everything and leave after months of putting in all the work of making an OS your own!? Or do you just casually check it out a couple of days? What do you do with all your music, pictures, addons, portable software?
I prefer to do it clean and manually transfer files, because I usually don’t want a copy paste of my previous setup. For files that are just, for lack of a better way of putting it, personal storage (ie the files that are not dotfiles in my home directory, eg pictures and documents etc), they are on a Nextcloud.
When I was doing it I started from scratch, you can generally keep your home directory intact between distros though, settings and data stay
Get ventoy on a USB Stick, throw some iso on it and boot and try and boot and try and boot and try…
You can backup you home-directory and add it back into the newly installed OS. Some of the more dedicated distro-hoppers will even have the home-directory on a separate partition, which they don’t overwrite during installation and rather just mount into the new OS.
The home-directory contains all your music, pictures, add-ons and portable software. It also contains your configurations under
~/.config/and local files of applications under~/.local/.
After you’ve reinstalled, you won’t have all the same applications installed, but once you reinstall them, they should pick up the configuration from those folders and work as you expect. Sometimes, your new distribution/installation might use different versions of that particular software, so it’s not guaranteed that everything works perfectly, but it does work pretty well.I’d go 1 step further and insist on putting
homeon a separate partition anyway - helps with issues like running out of diskspace.To answer the original question, boot the distro’s ISO from a USB stick and try that (/those) before you actually install anything. You might find some hardware’s not supported (ie wifi) until you do a full install, but at least you can eliminate the distros you don’t like, quickly.
Or 1 step even further and use a btrfs partition with subvolumes for root, home, etc. Then you’re not even stuck with a specific amount of disk space for each. (But you may be limited depending on the specific distro installer support for btrfs. In theory you can always just mount the subvols yourself and point the installer at them, but YMMV).
I recommend keeping a separate boot partition though.
helps with issues like running out of diskspace
Or causes that problem if you don’t manage to predict your usage patterns correctly. I have seen many people run out of space on one or the other but have plenty overall and would not have had a problem with a single partition.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong… many a time I’ve had to boot gparted and resize partitions, but, the system isn’t affected if you download too much and / or you don’t lose data if the system’s full.
Huh? You seem to be arguing both ways? If the system drive is full you have problems well before you risk losing data and if the home drive is full you have problems saving data? Both of these things can happen in a split partition or single partition setup. The split partition just means you have to get the space correct or end up with long resizing options for juggling the size around. And with a single partition it gives you more places to free up space when you do run out.
Need to save a file but the disk is full? Clean out the package manager cache. You cannot do that if the partitions are separate. An update does not have enough space? Delete a steam game or clear out your downloads folder.
Ext also has a reserved space option which when there is less free space than that option it refuses writes to anything but the root user - which is meant to solve the issue of a user trying to use up to much space, there is always a reserved bit that the system can do what it needs to. Though I have never seen this configured correctly for a running system and root can blast past the default 5% on smaller drives with a simple update. Or some other process is running as root is already consuming that space.
Other partition types like btrfs have proper quotas that can be set per directory or user to prevent this type of issue as well and gives you a lot more control over the allocated space without needing to reboot into a live USB to resize the partitions.
People seem to think a split partition helps but I have generally found it just causes more problems then it solves and there are now better tools that actually solve these problems in more elegant ways.
Sorry for the confusion there, trying to be too concise in a short reply.
I get the points you’re making; I’ve been there, done the root space recovery thing (the default can be a massive amount of space with modern drives, so I’ve changed it on several systems). I’ve setup lvm across drives, used btrfs (& sunvolumes), etc, so I know where you’re coming from. Never seen quotas actually used out in the wild of (generally) single user domestic settings.
But, moving
/hometo a separate partition, drive(s), etc. provides flexibility - in this case, the OP’s point of distrohopping.
Not sure but it seems to me most major distributions offer you to do a separate /home partition by default? I may be wrong but this happens with the likes of Fedora and Ubuntu? Or at least they do recommend to make it that way
It might have to do with my being an old fart, but having at least home on a separate disk or partition seems like basic stuff. I’ve always done it that way.
Of course back in the day, everything had its own partition.
Yeah, I like
/varto be in it’s own partition so I can keep my system(s) under close control, and a separate/bootseems to be necessary these *EFI days
You don’t actually require a separate partition - you just need to not reformat the current one when reinstalling. Most distros I have seen will delete system folders if you don’t format but will always leave the home folder intact. Manually deleting the system folders is also an option if the installer does not.
TBH I am not sure a separate partition actually buys you anything but false confidence (which we do sometimes need ;) ). During the partitioning phase you can easily delete or format the wrong one (hell, if you only have one then it is less error prone to skip it all together). And after that step the drives are mounted and there is nothing protecting your files from the installer deleting them. It is just installers don’t touch the home folder or anything other then the system ones if it is on one partition or 50 different ones - it just sees the files in the directory it wants to install to. The only way a separate partition would add protection is if it were mounted after the install - which I do not know of any installer that actually does that.
As with anything. ALWAYS backup the data you care about before installing a new OS. The separate partition does NOT protect your data from deletion in any way. Leaving your home folder is simply a convenience option so you don’t need to restore all your files after the installation - not a replacement for a backup.
Or debian with distrobox and you have all the benefits of all the distros at the same time lol
With distrobox I would maybe recommend fedora Kinoite (the immutable fedora with KDE)
Yeah that works too i have just run debian sid for over 20 years at this point
As someone who distrohoped quite a bit, let me give you some advice:
- Try the new distro in a VM first.
- Configure your distro as you want and put all the commands you used in a script to use when you make the switch.
- Ask your self, what do i get from distrohoping? Is it really worth it?
- Create a dotfilles git repo with all of your configs. Create a script to install your dotfiles easily. (Either by copying them to .config or creating symlinks)
Remember that, at the end, linux is linux, remember that you can customize you distro to look exactly like the fancy one you saw.
I don’t. I switched to Bazzite after using EndeavourOS for a while, and those are the only two I’ve used. I see no reason to ever go back from Bazzite though.
With immutable distros you can “rebase” very easily to a different immutable distro with literally one command. I haven’t really messed with it yet, but it seems pretty straightforward.
That’s me and Bluefin now.
I don’t distrohop much these days because I’m happy with where I am. But I actually enjoy having a clean start once in a while; going back and experiencing the defaults for a time helps clarify which customisations are actually really useful and which ones I’m just stuck in a rut with which happens a lot more than I usually expect. Of course I back up all my data/media and move that across, but configurations I like to approach with a clean slate. It’s quite freeing to know that I can just wipe and reinstall my system at any time without much difficulty.
By far the most important thing I’ve done is created a list of all the package names. With just one command, I can reinstall all my apps.
The second most important thing I’ve done is created a long list of gsettings/dconf commands that configure Gnome to my liking.
I’ve also moved most of my user data off my OS drive to removable drives. But I don’t have my home on a separate drive since I don’t want to share that across different distros since they configure things differently. It’s also just a lot easier to not have a separate home.
Apart from that, the script I have also copies over some config files, sets my hostname, sets flatpak overrides.
I don’t really distrohop alot but this is what makes me distro hop and this is what i look in a disto.
- What packages does the official repo have.
- How frequently the distro breaks (Low to no breakage prefered)
- How old the packages are.
If your package manager is apt, you can get a list of all the packages you have installed with
apt list --installed
There’s also a command to automatically reinstall all your apps from the list, I don’t remember offhand, but I usually just do them manually from Synaptic.
As other commenters have said, some people keep their /home on a different partition so you can reinstall or install a different distro without losing all your configurations (always back it up first anyway of course). But another thing I’ve done a lot is just have a different disk or partition with all my data files on it (called ‘data’ of course :p ), and I put a link to it in my home directory. So when I reinstall the OS I do have to backup my home dir and then copy it over to the new install home dir, but it’s small and just has my dotfiles and things.
Also on the data partition I have a backup subfolder where I keep a copy of any system config files that I’ve edited (usually found in /etc/), such as my pulseaudio config, so I can restore those.
And you can always try out different distros in a virtual machine or with a live USB before making the commitment of installing one on your hardware.
Honestly, why switch distros? I switch DEs from time to time
Get a spare computer. Then you will feel more inclined to mess with it. And your main computer is always ready to look up issues and set up boot USB sticks. You will definitely try out lots more distros without hesitation.
And there are some cool mini PCs to buy quite cheap.
A way to distrohop could be a virtual machine. That way you aren’t “sacrificing” your current install.
If you choose to reinstall, try to document all the changes you are doing and why. See if you can automate the changes. That way you can always get back to a desired state with minimal input on your end.
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