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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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I feel like I'm missing out by not distro-hopping (lemmy.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and "move on to something else" once I got comfortable with the OS.

I'm comfortable now, but I don't really see any reason to move on. What would the benefits be of jumping to something else? Mint has great documentation and an active community that has answers to any questions I've ever had, and I'm reluctant to ditch that. On the other hand, when I scroll through forums, Distro Hopping seems to be such a big part of the "Linux experience."

What am I missing?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

What I tend to do that scratches the distro-hopping itch is I keep an external drive with a bunch of virtual machines on it that I can spin up and tinker around with as needed, like little specimen jars lol. I think I have about 5-6 on the go at the moment. So like my actual computer runs Arch (btw), but I have VMs for NixOS, OpenSUSE, Mint and so on, as well as another one that's as close to my main system as possible so if I want to try a weird experiment I can try it on there first to see what breaks. Just today I tried upgrading it to Plasma 6 to see what broke and the answer was everything lol.

I used to keep ones for Mac and Windows on the go too, but they tend to eat up a lot of drive space.