If I had a suitable internet connection, with enough download limit I would change distros regularly. As it is, I have to get distros from the covers of magazines. Hence it costs money to change distro, which I don't have :)

--Ian

A number of distros now offer 'live' versions that are on a bootable cdrom. They'll run slower than a hd installed system, but you still can get a general idea of the "look and feel".

A good way is to put your /home on a seperate partition, you'll loose a lot of your programs but you keep all your settings o you just have to reinstall them :)

However I'm very happy with Arch and don't plan on changing any time soon.

I've been with Slackware for half a year, but now I want to take advantage of my AMD64 and so I was looking for an alternative. Being a Slack I couldn't go with something like Fedora or Suse, so I choose Gentoo, I also have a need for always having the newest apps, so Gentoo is what I want, and since it's something like LSF I think I won't change it anytime soon, because I have more decissons to make with Gentoo than choosing a distro, so I am pretty occupied for the next years I hope.

Never touch a running system!

I started with Mandrake, and when I got sick of all the bloat I thought, ok, I'll try to uninstall kde and if that screws up the comp I'll install Gentoo. It did screw up, and I installed Gentoo. After some time I thought, hmm, maybe the new Mandrake would be nice to try. Then I got annoyed with it very soon, it didn't ran smooth on my comp. I then tried Suse 9.2, which also ran like crap on my comp. So, now I'm back to Gentoo :) Suse is still on another comp though. I switched from Gentoo first because I was tired of editing configuration files etc, but then I found the GUIs more annoying so I went back :D

My reson for switching used to be out of date software on the installs I had. Last couple times has been to follow what I'm using at work. I installed RH9 and had that for a few months until redhat came out and said that they wouldn't support basic Linux now - you had to buy rhes to get support so we switched to suse at work. still have to buy support but it's much cheaper and buy as you need it. Ended up liking Suse a lot more anyway

I was using suse with kde for a long time but now my lab has forced me to work with debian n gnome