#distrohopping

So I leave this to you tumblr what distro should I put on my work laptop

i use Void, bc Arch was too mainstream slkdfjsdlk (okay no fr i use Void bc i kept seeing it on r/unixporn and i wanted a distro that had the "go nuts show nuts" curate-your-own-experience style Arch has but without systemd - no judgement if you like it, but it's not my vibe).

i used to use Mint and have done on-and-off since version 4 Daryna - Crunchbang was discontinued around that time and i wanted another Ubuntu-based distro to switch to.

so, if someone were looking to try something new (hypothetically, of course d: ) i would recommend considering the following first:

what's aer typical workload (and therefore what would be suitable) ?

how far would ae be willing to explore beyond aer comfort zone ?

how much time would ae have to learn new things ?

trying one or two distros out in a VM might be a good way for aem to familiarise aemself w/ any immediate quirks and pick a distro to install on bare metal (perhaps alongside aer existing distro ?)

for something more familiar i might recommend Debian Testing or LMDE (the version of Mint based directly on Debian) as they share much of the same internal architecture. i believe Debian offers a netinstall that's barebones like Arch/Void/Gentoo if trying new software (perhaps including a new DE/WM/Wayland compositor) without losing all familiarity would be of interest to this person.

for something more adventurous i would suggest Arch and perhaps picking a full DE to start with, then maybe trying an install that's more uh selective. personally, Void is no harder than Arch but the community is smaller and a person who hypothetically chose this as their new distro would not only have the barebones nature of that class of distro + an unfamiliar package manager to contend with, but additionally an unfamiliar init system (though runit is terrifyingly simple, i must say). there's also Artix, which is Arch but w/out systemd (i think they offer runit or openrc).

there are plenty of wacky distros (Bedrock, Fedora Silverblue, NixOS, Qubes, Gentoo) that would be fun to experiment with on a non-critical system/VM but they're very far removed from a decade of Ubuntu.

i appreciate this is a long answer, but you asked a lovely question and it's fun to indulge in uh um what's definitely totally a hypothetical d: if someone were to change distro i hope ae know ae can reach out to ask further questions :3