Linux Distro Hopping

Back in college and shortly after, I would hop between different Linux distributions. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, OpenSuse, Slackware, Gentoo, Debian, and I’m sure a few others were all on my desktop at some point. It was fun trying to see what the differences were and which one I liked best. Now, it’s a little different.

Now, I want stability. I want something that works. Originally I had tried Fedora and Ubuntu, and while they worked well enough, I had just enough issues with each. I forget what my issues with Fedora were, but I remember my biggest issue with Ubuntu was that I couldn’t get Entity Framework to work for .NET. Since I do a fair bit of .NET development, this was kind of a showstopper. I’d gone through countless forums and Stack Overflow posts, but came up empty. It was frustrating.

Since I was not completely set up, I decided to change to Linux Mint. I was debating between Mint and Debian but opted for Mint since I was slightly more familiar with it. I was concerned that I'd face the same thing since it's based on Ubuntu, but happily it worked (it was the first thing I set up and tried as I didn't want to get too attached if it wasn't going to work). I could build my migrations and continue work on my side project. I had my stability.

I say all of this because my desire to tinker has never gone away. I still see others using different distros, singing their praises, and wonder if I’d like them better. The grass is always greener, right?

At this point, I’m not making any plans to switch again, but I wonder what other distributions might provide. The one I think about most is Arch Linux. It’s often brought up as a great distribution, and while that most certainly be true, I am having a hard time moving away from the idea to not fix what ain’t broke.

Maybe at some point if I finally give Windows the boot from its hard drive, I'll dual boot between Linux Mint and Arch, but for the moment, despite all my itching to play around, I want a stable, working computer, and Linux Mint fits the bill.

But I'm still peeking...