So have you ever took a distro hop that turned out to be an olympic leap? Why did you move to something considerably different? How did it work out?

I don't want this to be a "what distro for me?" thing. I want to hear about how others have made a change to a really different linux if they ever have made such a change.

Myself I am facing challenge to change to something derived from another distro, pkg mgmt, and possibly a change in DE. Complicating it is trying out with XFCE is different depending on what distro. In some performance is great and in others a dog for a lighter desktop. Myself, this change is because a dependable distro that has been a good daily driver for years is using Snap heavily and it is changing the performance of my most-used apps to a dog on my very modest laptop. New laptop is not in the cards. Even KDE is quite light on some distros but a burden on others. The choices are just too many for me as I have been linuxing around 20 years and seek something more familiar. But have been playing with shiny objects. Could this really be an itch?

Oh, did you end up going back to your ex?

my "olympic leap" were Arch linux, i have used it as a daily Distro and it has been pretty solid one.
one time i messed up my installation when i fat-fingered one command and bcus of that i destroyed it.

i just reinstalled it and i am using still that same Arch installation.
Arch has one of the best wiki's available also.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yep, done that. Went from Mandrake to suse to compile LFS, then HLFS, then Kevux(Yes, Kevux)! Then I promoted myself to Slackware, slamd-12.2 & back to slackware ever since.

It's ok. You might tear hair out, or jump up and down for a while, but it's ok really. Do back things up or have a powerful live usb key. I had Tomsrtbt all the days of the floppy drive.

1 members found this post helpful.

It's funny, I have Manjaro cinnamon or XFCE on my short list. I have done Debian and derivatives for years but had a long stretch with PCLOS too (while seeing Mageia on the side even) but never dabbled with Arch family. I always heard it was too hard. But they say Manjaro is friendly and so far had only a little trouble configuring to my liking and even pacmanned for the first time. I want to see more than just the one or two updates before making a decision.

I know I will never be up to LFS or Slack But it does seem more people opt for something more challenging in their next "one" while I am a little reluctant due to a couple of factors beyond my control. Just hoping for something stable and aesthetically pleasing. When I looked back over years of my posting in forums such as this I am like, "I really knew how to do that and that?" But now, eh. Complicated life and limited resources compared to those days and I am ready for the PCLOS Retirement Home or the safety of Linux mint. But Manjaro is tempting me. I have short-listed it and maybe keep my recent Debian bookworm as a sidepiece.

Ubuntu to Slackware, from doing lttle more than apt-get install to hunting down and compiling required dependencies deciding for myself what optional deps I wanted/needed etc etc, hellava culture shock, but well worth it. Now I use LFS as my main OS.

I can't answer this question here, because we shouldn't talk dirty.
I not only made a lot of distro hop, but I wanted to keep/save my extremely important and useful settings. It was always lost and had to be recreated from scratch again and again. Finally I gave up. I could never go back, basically I just lost my previous workspace several times.
To be honest there were HPUX, SunOS, RedHat, Solaris, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian, Sco Unix, Sinix, cygwin amongst others. the most important thing is not the distro itself, but the DE, which means almost everything, like menus, keyboard shortcuts and a lot of other changes. The only thing that survived everything that is still in use is my vimrc.

Seeing my old posts struggling to compile one little working kernel I don't envision myself doing anything but avoiding trying to do so again. It does seem almost everyone moves onto something more challenging. Well, for me these days learning a new packaging system seems daunting enough. But I can see me maybe being able to move up to Arch itself if I master Manjaro. Keeping debian stable on a spare partition or drive would maybe be a good safety net.

We used to have a name for people like you here or was it at one of the other forums?

I agree about the DE, I am pretty comfortable with KDE and it was my first but XFCE in some of the distros is nice and clean- I can make it pretty with reasonable consistency. I don't have the resources for all-out flashy eye-candy but I like to personalize my ride. It will just feel strange to have a new distro, DE and pkg mgmt all rolled up in one dive to the deep-end of the pool (for me, I am short)

I used various members of the Red Hat family for two decades, apart from a brief (one month) foray into Debian, which I hated. Then when I needed a new computer four years ago I made a careful study, did some testing, and ended up with something completely different — PCLinuxOS. Happy ending!

Yes, I've done a bit of distro-hopping. I did brief stints with RedHat (cli only), Ubuntu, Arch and Gentoo before finding a real home with Crux. I stayed with Crux until they stopped supporting 32-bit systems, then switched to Debian where I stayed for quite a while. I really liked the Debian net-install option. When I moved to 64-bit, it was Debian plus LFS plus Crux for quite a while. I avoided Slackware because it had a reputation for being difficult, but when I finally decided to tackle it, I found it a very friendly system and it's my main one now.

Only the first one felt that way back in the Slack on floppy days. Second was getting a distro installed on PowerPC VME boards with Xenomi real-time for plant control systems. All behind me. Now I just want a nice stable LTS OS to get 'real' work done. Do not want to ever fight again with the OS side of things. Complete waste of my time.

I just compromised and went with mint cinnamon and PCLOS KDE on the side. Cinnamon different enough that it feels like a change. And no snap firefox...so far. If mint gets too awful for me I could just enlarge the smaller partition PCLOS is on and make that my daily. Manjaro and XFCE still waiting in the wings for another chance.

I hear you. My laptop too modest to have a good try-out of most on live USB with package installing and such on just RAM but I have done enough installing and bootloader fixing that I will just pick one distro from column A with a DE from column B. I am tired of spending all my time fixing EFI/grub. My time staying up all night googling and forum posting is in the past.

I went from command line Red Hat that came in a book, hosting Samba and a music server on 386s to Debian scratch. I liked the plasma desktop, as its desktop slideshow feature will parse all the subfolders of your images directory. Don't know why that isn't universal. Nothing else will do.

I have tried Manjaro, Fedora, Slackware (not for me), Mint. Arch (still no GUI yet), Knoppix, Parrot OS, Kali (not allowed to register on their forum), BlackArch, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Neptune, and Tails.

None of this adventuring would happen with a 14,400 modem, that's for sure.

Learned quite a lot trying to get hardware to work, wifi in particular. Arch has a great WIKI, although I end up with multitudes of pages open trying to follow the core of a problem. I figure Arch was my biggest step to the wild side.

Sometimes one wants to tinker, other times one just wants to use the computer.

For me it was Slackware to Debian, nearly two decades ago. Note that I was using Slackware simply because it was the first distro I was able to install successfully; otherwise, I knew nothing about it other than that it was a Linux. I can't even remember how I stumbled across it.

I had Slackware on my laptop--putting it on my laptop, which was my primary computer, was really when I committed to Linux--and went to install a newer version (this was before DVDs became common) and the second CD refused to load, so I installed Debian. The Debian web install worked just fine and so did the Debian OS. (I learned about six months later that my CD drive was on its last legs, as was that particular computer.) I forget exactly why I picked Debian, probably because by then I was already a member of LQ and had learned some stuff.

Over the next six months, I came to be really fond of Debian. Slackware and Debian remain my two favorite distros, with Mageia a close third.

Later on, I learned about VirtualBox thanks to a Linux podcast that has since pod faded and have used that to play with many distros. I think the podcaster was based in Belgium and called himself Dmitri, but I will always be grateful to him for introducing me to VB.

And that's my ramble down memory lane for what it's worth.

Apart from distro hopping at the start of my journey, I stayed with Debian based distros, until they forced systemd on everyone, & went to Devuan, (a no systemd version of Debian).

Now, I have returned to antiX, because it is less resource hungry, which suits my purchase of some thin client computers better.

However I do also use BSD sometimes, NetBSD & OpenBSD mainly.