I wouldn’t really call myself a distro hopper, but in the last few months I’ve had to do some fresh installs on a couple of machines and VMs for work
If these aren’t included by default, I’ll make sure to get em:
GUI:
- Firefox & Chromium
- Gimp & Krita
- VSCode/VSCodium
- Okular
- Libre office
CLI*:
- git
- wget&curl
- neovim
- zsh/ohmyzsh + plugins
- glow
- neofetch
- figlet/toilet
- zellij
- python
- nodejs/npm/nvm + nodemon globally
- ranger/rifle
Also, how do you go about migrating your old config and rc files? Start fresh or just copy em over and make adjustments where necessary?
Step 1: install Debian 12 today, Step 2: upgrade to Debian 13 when available, then Debian 14, Debian 15 and so on… that’s the only hopping one should.
I always need
- LibreWolf (privacy-focused Firefox fork)
- Some nice terminal emulator like Alacritty or Kitty
- A torrent client
- Emacs
- Strawberry (the music player)
CLI:
- fish shell
- bat
- neovim
- fd
- fzf
- zoxide
- Some other Rust alternatives for GNU coreutils
- GPG
- fun stuff like neofetch, lolcat, asciiquarium, cmatrix, etc.
Another fish and modern Unix user 🫶
PS. Try out lsd if you haven’t already - a nice ls/eza/exa replacement.
I absolutely forgot about lsd, I used to use exa but recently I switched to lsd, it’s fantastic.
- fish
- tmux
- sshfs
- htop
- nmap
- distrobox (haven’t tried this yet but looks amazing)
- zfs (and any utilities that go with that)
- sanoid
- syncoid
- tailscale
- snapper (if using btrfs)
As far as config files go, I haven’t gotten around to automating those so I usually search my nas for old ones and copy/paste what I need
Use Ansible for package installations and configuration, and a git repository & GNU stow for dotfiles.
Usually I install:
- Steam
- flatpak
- discord
- gimp
- vlc
- lutris
- protonupQ
- protontricks
The rest I install once I need it. Plasma delivers also many of my programs.
ProtonUpQ hell yeah
Strawberry, qBittorrent, neovim
Recently, I’ve been changing distros about once a year. These are the things I install every time:
- hdparm - I use this to disable APM on my HDD which makes annoying sounds when it’s enabled. (Yes, my computer is old and still uses an HDD as the system drive.)
- KeePassXC - My preferred password manager.
- VeraCrypt - My external drives are encrypted with this.
- Joplin - I store my setup notes in here.
- Lutris/Steam/Wine - I’m a gamer.
As for the config files, I always start fresh.
Man, do yourself a favor and get an SSD. You can get a 512 GB for as cheap as $30 and a 1 TB for as cheap as $60 on Amazon. The speed difference is night and day. That’s probably the single best upgrade you can do to an old machine.
- Firefox (often preinstalled)
- Thunderbird
- Code
- FreeTube & Stremio
- Apostrophe
- KeePass
- Nextcloud
- Syncthing
- yt-dlp
-
Nvidia proprietary driver
-
Docker Engine (Portainer, AdGuardHome, LibReddit, Nitter, Invidious)
-
Install and tweak Firefox setup
-
Steam Client
-
Gnome extensions
-
Gnome Shell Theme and Icon themes
-
Nextcloud Client
-
Nothing. I just install what I need when I need it.
Meaning that your distro of choosing comes with most of the stuff bundled in…?
No, I’m just a fan of lazy initialization.
- Yay
- Nano
- Mullvad VPN
- Mullvad browser
- Keepassxc
- Blue.sh
- Rtorrent-ps
- Steam
- Freetube
- Ranger
I have an auto installer for arch based distros that’ll automate installation of yay then grab a text file with a list of presorted applications from github and auto install them as well as my sway, waybar and bashrc scripts.
Very clean and easily deployable with git then sudo bash ~/autoinstaller
Auto correct :/ *ble.sh and it adds more functionality to bash
- GNOME Tweaks
- Firefox
- VLC
- Blender
- FreeCAD
- Godot
- VSCodium
- PrusaSlicer
- Steam, Lutris, Proton
- KDE Connect
Idk if it is distro hopping because I have been trying distros on my main system and usually for months at a time. It’s messy but I have a separate filesystem for /home and hope my current rc files don’t bork up whatever I’m running next. The transition from Cinnamon to Gnome went poorly for a while.
I should probably automate the must have packages.
Some applications are not packaged so I install ~/.local, e.g. Arduino, Eagle, Minecraft, etc.
Packages… Hm. Direnv is all I can think of. I just use the system until something is missing, curse briefly, and install it.
Cli
- helix
- ranger
- mpv
- YouTube-dl
- epy
- fanficfare
- aria2
- zellij
- gotop
GUI
- qutebrowser
- zathura
YouTube-dl
Just a heads up, yt-dlp is a far more active fork with more features.
This is true, has mpv started working with it? The reason I have it in the first place is to stream Lofi /synthwave/jazz audio via mpv rather than specifically for downloading. Back when I’d last looked, mpv needed the old fork specifically, but if they’ve updated I’d be more than happy to switch
It should switch to it automatically now, but you can try the manual flag if it doesn’t.
If neither works, symbolic linking yt-dlp and youtube-dl should.
Basically testing different Fedora Variants, so:
- fish
- bat, eza
- waydroid, distrobox, qemu-kvm, virt-manager
- flatpak
- copr-command
- kde sysinfo cli
- braveinstall
Hardening the kernel:
rpm-ostree kargs --append="init_on_alloc=1" --append="init_on_free=1" --append="slab_nomerge" --append="page_alloc.shuffle=1" --append="randomize_kstack_offset=on" --append="vsyscall=none" --append="debugfs=off" --append="lockdown=confidentiality" --append="random.trust_cpu=off" --append="random.trust_bootloader=off" --append="intel_iommu=on" --append="amd_iommu=on" --append="iommu.passthrough=0" --append="iommu.strict=1" --append="mitigations=auto,nosmt" --append="module.sig_enforce=1"
yeah I basically distrohop between Fedora atomic images