Hello everyone, I need help to decide on a Linux Distribution to settle and finally stop distro hopping. I have quite some experience with Linux(1year Mint, a quarter year Arch, nixos, debian, manjaro, fedora, suse tumbleweed and kalpa…)I have been experimenting for now almost 3 years. Now I finally want to setlle but I just don’t know where. I like Nix’s shell but don’t like installing everything in five steps(with git because my brain can stand neither the dirty tree warning nor leaving out on the git push) and I don’t need the reproducibility. I like rolling so I don’t need to reinstall or do any major update, but even more appealing is low maintenance and stability in the sense of nothing unexpectedly breaking. I’ll use the computer as an daily driver mostly for programming & 3d design, university related work, streaming and also some gaming. Thank you for your answers. #linux #distrohopping. EDIT: I don’t want to have a company behind my distribution. And my specs: Nvidia RTX 4070, Amd Radeon 7 7840HS, 16GB of RAM

Conclusion: Thanks a lot for all of that feedback, I decided to go for Debian 13 Stable and might check out MX once.

The final conclusion :P: I will now install LMDE and either try to install KDE Plasma or just stick with Cinnamon. Its not as uncustomizable after all. And the flashbacks I got during the installation from me first stepping into Linux… …definetly the rabbit hole I should have fallen into, even though I can now never live a normal life again :/.

  • darklamer@feddit.org
    6·
    1 month ago

    Why not Debian? If you don’t have any specific reason for choosing something else, that seems like the obvious choice.

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    4·
    1 month ago

    It actually happens naturally, or it should at least. So don’t mind anyone. Distrohop until you find yourself settled.

    You seem to know enough distros. If none of them exactly clicked with you perfectly, continue your search.

    I stayed on Arch-based for more than 10 years and it was suppose to be temporary for me as I was keep saying that to myself. In reality I was settled. So, don’t mind others, find it yourself. It will happen sooner ot later.

    P.S.

    Void is good.

  • stuner@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 month ago

    To be honest, it sounds like you’ve tried the prime candidates. You probably know better than us which one fits you best. Ultimately, I also think that it doesn’t make that much of a difference for an advanced user. You can probably get almost any distro to do what you want.

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 month ago

    I wouldn’t call myself a distrohopper, but over the last 30 years I’ve daily-driven Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu (and derivates), Manjaro and now landed on EndeavourOS for the last four years.

    I enjoy the vast and up-to-date software that pacman and AUR have, but I don’t really need the exercise in system installation/building any more. So EndeavourOS it is.

    I’ve tried OpenSUSE and NixOS on virtual machines from time to time. I like, but I feel they’d be in the way for my computing needs at the moment.

  • tremble5218@programming.dev
    3·
    1 month ago

    Given the specs of your system, if you want productivity and gaming, I’ll suggest Bazzite. It runs Fedora atomic under the hood so it is extremely stable. It comes with everything you need for gaming. Installing additional software is trivial with flatpaks using Bazaar. Overall it meets all your criteria. It has been my daily driver for a couple of years and I think I’ve found my distro.

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    fwiw: distro hopping is an easy way to stay up to date on the things that are happening in the linux world.

  • yesman@lemmy.world
    31·
    1 month ago

    If you’re a good Linux user and keep your packages up to date; always say GuhNome; and trash M$ every chance you get, you’ll be given an .iso in the afterlife with the perfect distro. But not before.

  • JTskulk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Choosing a distro to stay on is a personal decision, it’s not one we can make for you. The real solution to distrohopping is to just keep doing it until you don’t feel like doing it anymore. There’s a spectrum between (trying new things and being unhappy) and (being lazy and settling). That’s a scale only you can feel.

  • Ostfriesentee@feddit.org
    2·
    1 month ago

    I can only tell you that I’m using CachyOS (Arch) with Wayland and the latest Noctalia, which is extremely customizable. I’m very content. My compositor is Hyprland, but Niri or Mango work, too. Noctalia even technically works with KDE, which I also used for quite some time, but I wouldn’t recommend using it on top of it. Noctalia (Hyprland) has been a standard installation option in the CachyOS .iso ever since August 2026.

    • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      And it has problems; try changing the color theme and it keeps requesting your password. Some stuff is seriously messed up in CachyOS’s Noctalia+Hyprland setup, which I tried in the past month. I’m gonna try Pop!_OS+COSMIC sometime soon; hopefully that’ll rock, or else I’ll revert to the tried-&-true Mint Cinnamon.

      • Ostfriesentee@feddit.org
        1·
        1 month ago

        It doesn’t do that. My color theme changes dynamically with my background. But even manual changes don’t require that. Did you enable polkit in the control center? Are you running Noctalia 5 or newer?

        Only when I want to update my greeter theme alongside everything else, I get polkit requests asking for my password. But I also got noctalia-greeter after having had installed another greeter. So maybe that messed it up. Anyway, you can disable auto theme update for the greeter. Or use a different greeter.

        I’m sure there are problems still, but it only just got implemented last month (Noctalia greeter is also super new). I think we can expect fixes. Maybe your particular issue has already been fixed. For some tools I’m using I’m getting daily updates by now, so last month is like ages ago in terms of updates. Not necessarily true for Noctalia, though.

        I did like Mint Cinnamon, as well. Pop!_OS I haven’t tried yet. I might hop a little on my second machine. But for now I’m happy with my heavily customized Noctalia setup on my main machine. What else did you find to be messed up?