Do any of you people actually use your OS, or do you just distro-hop and tweak things all day?

OK so if you want my advice, if you wanna just try distros, use DistroSea. Let's you try out distros in your browser. But here we go:

On DistroSea

• Debian: There's a reason Mint and Ubuntu are based on Debian and it's always good to try out just straight up Debian. I know people are going to be all "uuugh but Mint is basically Debian with extra steps", don't care, try Debian, you might wanna use it for other things too. If you are familiar with LinuxMint, you're going to be familiar with
• Bunsenlabs Linux: Successor to Crunchbang, an OpenBox Ubuntu Distro. If you want something ultralight and different, you might wanna try Bunsenlabs. I used Crunchbang back in the day, may it rest in peace.
• Pop!_OS: Made for creatives and programmers, seems to be beloved, don't really care too much, ubuntu based.
• Fedora: Not a Debian/Ubuntu based system, instead a RedHat based system. Try it if you wanna check out a non Debian based system.
• Lubuntu: Is XFCE too heavy for you? Try Lubuntu, which used LXQT as it's desktop with an aim of being lighter than Ubuntu Mate or even Xubuntu. Aimed at old laptops and netbooks, and the website even brags that it can run on an rPi.
• Tails: Are you doing shit you don't want your ISP or Government to know about? Are you a Journalist or an activist? Well Tails is for you, designed to be installed on a pendrive for plug n' play action, this distro does everything through the Tor Network. It's also marketed to victims of abuse as well, but let's be honest if you trust the government these days you need to look at yourself in the mirror.

Not on Distrosea

• PuppyLinux: Holy ball this is a blast from the past. This is not available on Distrosea but it's available to download. It is designed to be tiny, and I mean smol. It's an example of how you can get a functional, low resource load OS.
• TempleOS: This is not a Linux distribution, it's barely usable as an OS, but it's legendary. TempleOS was created by Terry Davis, an extremely talented programmer and Schitzophrenic who created this OS to be the third temple of God. No I am not joking. It is, however, today considered a work of art by a troubled man.

I'm pretty comftable with linux mint right now

For the love of God, spare your free time and don't move from what works. Consider tweaking your system instead and moving only when you broke something

Alpine Linux, because it uses OpenRC and musl, it's an interesting choice a little bit different but I really like it nyself for servers.

Gentoo, the biggest source based distro, has Emerge, a very configurable package manager.

NixOS, uses the Nix programming language to install packages and configuring the system. Very powerful and breaks many conventions about Linux systems

Fedora Silverblue or any of the other Fedora Atomic distros

Have you ever heard of Bedrock Linux? Its an extremely interesting "meta-distro" that let's you run multiple different distros at the same time only marginally isolated. The whole premise is to merge the systems together instead of separating them with a container style workflow. Tons of stuff works cross distro to! Its extremely cool to have Debian AND Arch packages just installed the normal way on each distro. Its a beautiful and horrifying system, that warms my heart every time I remember it.

If you don't mind reading a little bit and "work hard" to get some things done and "have fun" then I'd suggest to try :

• NixOS (it can do magic!)
• Arch Linux (easiest is the Arch based EndeavourOS and the shiny colorful Garuda Linux), learn some pacman and AUR.

I used to install interesting and cool distros back in the 2000s. Now, I personally just want stability, and not bad surprises. So when I distro-hop, I only do it among well known, largely stable and well supported distros (e.g. mint, debian, fedora, ubuntu). I don't go for the weird anymore, although I did install Alpine on qemu in order to try it out. And the few times I feel adventurous, I try BSD or Haiku OSes.

Experiment with arch, void (musl), Nixos and atomic distros like fedora silverblue, bazzite

You could try a rolling distro like OpenSuse Tumbleweed, or something from the Arch lineage (Arch, Endeavour, Garuda, Manjaro in order from less to more handholding).

You could also try something from the Red Hat rather than Debian world,.for example Fedora has several interesting editions, there's the WorkStation desktop edition and Silverblue which uses Android immutable principles.

Linux from scratch, does that count?

(It isn't a distro, but more of a learning project that will expand your knowledge a lot, after you've emitted buckets of blood, sweat and tears)

@nicknonya If it truly is "different" you want, take a look at stuff like Tiny Core Linux, MenuetOS, or ReactOS. If you want a bit more milder different, may go with a BSD/UNIX. There's loads of really weird stuff out there if you dig around a bit. Or just plunder DistroWatch for somethin that strikes you. Who knows, you may just find a new comfortable on yer journey. 😁

I recommend a Fedora Atomic distro like Silverblue or Kinoite, or Universal Blue, which is based on Fedora Atomic. It offers 3 images: Bazzite (made specifically for Gaming), Aurora (featuring KDE Plasma) and Bluefin which uses GNOME.

I've been on an immutable distro and declaritive distro kick lately.

So the bluefin project, which has so much sugar it a damn cake (in a good way, lots of stuff to get you to a usable running state for a lot of Dev environment and gaming).

I'm digging into SUSE microos more now, mostly to play with elemental (I really want a featureful CI/CD env for my desktop, so containers to full VM and isos is neat to me).

Nix has been super, super useful for packages that I want between OSs, but the alure of getting better configuration with them on full nixos is slowly drawing me in.

Guix on the other hand is my current ideal, I am just super impressed with their full source bootstrapping and really love a lot of the philosophy of the project, but they don't get as much love from the professional crowd (nonacademic, non amateur).

I'm a huge proponent of Gentoo Linux as a learning experience. It's a great way to learn how the components of a system work together and the distro enables an amazing amount of configurability for your system.

Even following a handbook install in a VM can be a good experience if you're interested.

Rhino-Linux for rolling release Ubuntu-based. I never tried it myself as I'm not into Ubuntu much. I reckon it has UI for installs, so I'd recommend it to any non-technical person.

ZorinOS was my go-to recommendation due to it looking the most polished out of all distros I've seen, but I cannot recommend non-rolling-release as I don't believe anyone should ever need to re-install the system regularly like this when it's clearly not needed.

EndeavoursOS is terminal centric and the most easy to use distro I've had. I'd recommend it to anyone who is ok with no UI.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed was generally a weird experience. It has a UI, but it feels like a terminal with UI elements. I used to recommend it, but I don't feel like it's actually good tbh.

I stopped hopping thanks to EndeavoursOS. NixOS tempts with different folder structure, but I like things just working, so I think I'm gonna stay.

Nixos is a declarative distro, it's an interesting concept.

Also, Immutable distros:

• Fedora Universal Blue
• Bazzite OS
• Vanilla OS
• Blend OS

Take a look at gobolinux. It changes the filesystem in interesting ways. All programs are in their own directories under /Programs.

Install virtual manager (sudo apt install virt-manager)

From there you can spin up as many VMs are you desire as long as you have enough ram. I like Fedora