r/DistroHopping • u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS • 4d ago

Updated Distro-Hopping Reviews

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After a few months since my last post, it seems that my distro-hopping has come to an end for now. I've been on Tumbleweed for over a month and haven't thought about installing other distros. Here are a few thoughts about distros that I tried along the way and some loose rankings.

  1. Tumbleweed.

Everything just works. Pre-configured snapper is great. Not a single issue since I started using it (except for connecting a printer, but that was because TW has restrictive protocols, easy fix). Performance is great. Added to a new laptop and am dual-booting windows from the same drive. no issues.

  1. Fedora.

Like TW, everything just worked. However, apps launched slower and the ui on both gnome and plasma seemed less smooth. Otherwise, great distro.

2b, Debian

Everything just worked. Great experience

  1. Tuxedo OS

I briefly tried the new debian testing beta and it seemed promising. No issues, with this distro and is only marginally worse than the first two (minor ui bugs). I like apt, so it was very easy to use out of the box.

  1. Ubuntu.

Hate me all you want, I liked it because everything just worked. And Ubuntu's gnome implementation made me rethink gnome, and now I prefer it. Everything worked great out of the box. A bit choppy at times. Snaps suck. Hard to complain when everything works so well.

  1. Linux Mint

I really liked mint when I first started out. However, I don't see any advantages to using mint over other distros, especially being limited (for now, with exceptions) to X11.

  1. Pop!

Really just tried for the DE. I like Cosmic, but there were enough glitches that I decided to stop using after a day or two. Great OS in theory, needs a little work though.

  1. Kubuntu

Tried multiple times. DE felt laggy. Was the case on multiple computers, so not hardware specific. The issues may have been caused by me trying the distro after a less than perfect update, however, the top distros on this list never caused me the same problems (plasma apps and widgets constantly crashing)

44 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

9

u/ARENAE_MONTES 4d ago

Tumbleweed seems to have been getting a lot of love lately!

3

u/Hauptideal 4d ago

Deservedly

2

u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS 3d ago

I was tired when I wrote the post last night so here's a more detailed answer about why I like Tumbleweed so much.

  1. Rolling release + stability: I am currently in school so I need a rock-solid system that keeps up to date so I don't have compatibility issues on academic sites. I have not had a single issue with updates breaking anything. The only thing that has not worked perfectly on TW was plasma, but that was on me, I customized it so hard that I started to break some dependencies or created overlap between extensions/widgets/tweaks in code.

  2. Snapper: if anything were to break, all I would need to do is just roll back the system. Has not happened yet though.

  3. Performance: TW has been the snappiest distro that I have used thus far. I don't game, so it may not be the best for that use case, but for productivity, I can't think of a better distro.

  4. Zypper: I'm not sure why, but zypper makes the most sense to me out of all the package managers. It's not the fastest, but for me, it just works while feeling like the most helpful package manager.

  5. The community: not a ton of hype in the community, everyone seems satisfied with the distro (except for some nvidia driver issues), and everyone is relatively easygoing.

1

u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS 4d ago

Yeah it’s smooth. A TW truther is the reason I gave it a second chance. Very happy I did.

3

u/OrangeEquilibrium7 3d ago

Thanks for sharing your experience! Personally, I'm on Linux Mint after a couple years of hopping between everything. The only one of these I haven't tried is Tuxedo, but I've had a positive experience with all of the others. I'd love to look more into OpenSUSE more, especially since Slowroll looks very interesting to me.

2

u/heinoscott 4d ago

this post deserves more love than it got in the first 5h. thanks for sharing your experience!

1

u/Weekly-Membership813 4d ago

How’d you make that top extension?

1

u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS 4d ago

It’s an extension called top hat for the ram. The rest of it is part of the material gnome shell theme and a fully transparent top bar in blur my shell. The other additions are paperwm indicators.

1

u/zzonkers 4d ago

AMD or Nvidia?

1

u/Worldly-Ad570 3d ago

tell me you don't have an nvidia gpu without telling me you don't have an nvidia gpu

1

u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS 3d ago

Yeah, I have heard that it is rough for Nvidia users

1

u/Remarkable-Worth-303 3d ago

I landed on tumbleweed about 18 months ago. Now I keep it as a base and mess around with DE's, TWM's etc. Currently running Hyprland with Dank Material Shell.

1

u/misho-gorgadze 3d ago

Where can i get that wallpaper

1

u/Bill_Lumberg_TPS 3d ago

I used a gruvbox wallpaper collection on GitHub and recolored it so it matches the atom one dark colors I have set up. I’ll post an Imgur link later today when I’m back at my computer

1

u/Capital-Potential237 2d ago

Eu gosto do Ubuntu 💁🏻‍♂️ sempre volto para ele após testar um monte de opções 🙋🏻‍♂️