Hi, may name's Tavis, and I'm a distro hopper.
These are words I haven't said in probably a decade. Distro hopping is for the young, I would say. I need stability for my daily driver, not constant tinkering. That is still true, mostly, but after being a Kubuntu user for many years, I decided to explore the uncharted waters.
When I first entered the Linux world back in 2004, I bonded with Fedora. Eventually, I tried other distros, such as Mandrake (defunct), Mepis (also defunct), and a few others. I still found Fedora to be my favorite for quite a while.
When Ubuntu first came out, I disliked it greatly, mainly because I disliked Gnome. I put it on a couple of secondary devices but never my main machine. Over the years, it became more KDE friendly and eventually developed its own KDE spin: Kubuntu. For the most part, I have used it ever since.
I still love Kubuntu, but there has been some annoying creep over the years, such as their attempt to force Snaps down our throats, but that was easy enough to disable. As Linux gaming became more prominent, and I began to exclusively game on Linux, it became apparent that there were more issues. I found myself tweaking the OS more and more to keep up with Steam Deck innovations. I decided the time had come to find a more gamer-friendly OS.
I had been using Bazzite on my family-room TV, and I figured it might be worth giving the desktop version a shot. And, for gaming, it was brilliant. The number of custom just scripts they have to easily configure things like Sunshine and Waydroid is phenomenal. It even has a script to automatically fix Steam's frustrating download throttling.
As I said, it was great for gaming. The desktop experience, however, leaves a lot to be desired. First, it is an immutable operating system, and although I knew what that meant in theory, it's an entirely different ball of yarn to actually have to use one on a desktop. I know some people swear by Fedora Silverblue, but I found myself constantly having to come up wtih workarounds to do simple things.
Eventually, however, I got the hang of it, and using flatpaks and other things wasn't a bad experience. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the kind of KDE performance I was accustomed to on Kubuntu. For whatever reason, Bazzite's KDE implementation is laggy. I don't know if it's the btrfs file system, the immunitibility or something else entirely. I couldn't figure it out. And after reinstalling and trying again, I decided to move on.
Enter Manjaro. I'm sure those of you who are Arch and Manjaro fans are probably thinking, "Duh!" I admit that I do like it very much, though I'm not about to say that it's the "best" OS or superior in every way. It does certainly have its advantages though.
Forget immunitibility. With the pacman package manager, I can install whatever I want. And if it's not in the repository, I can use yay to easily compile applications from AUR while barely lifting a finger.
It has a mostly vanilla implementation of KDE, which is wonderful. It also has more up-to-date KDE packages than Kubuntu, so I can avoid the dreaded FOMO (fear of missing out) syndrome. Best of all, the performance is great, and gaming works just as I would expect. I even snuck over to the Bazzite Github to borrow a few of their scripts to make sure my gaming was tight. Hey, it's all about community, right?
I am hoping now that this old man is done with distro hopping and can go back to the stability of being a one-distro man...well, mostly. I still have Bazzite on my family-room box and Kubuntu on my home server. But for my desktop, Manjaro wins the day.