Dis­tro Hop­ping

Rasp­berry Pi

As a kid, Win­dows and macOS were the only con­sumer-ready op­er­ating sys­tems that I knew ex­isted. Our first (family) com­puter was a desktop, and it used Win­dows 95. I had no idea about the un­der­lying dif­fer­ences in OS ker­nels, filesys­tems, and user in­ter­faces that make a system unique.

Playing with the little Rasp­berry Pi single-board com­puter got me hooked on Unix-like sys­tems— es­pe­cially working in the shell. This led me down the rabbit hole of in­stalling and cus­tomizing dif­ferent Linux op­er­ating sys­tems— distro hop­ping.

From Win­dows to Linux

On my first laptop— a Win­dows 10 ma­chine, I started using the Git BASH pro­gram in order to have the fa­miliar Unix com­mands that made soft­ware de­vel­op­ment com­fort­able for me on Linux. Later on, I dis­cov­ered WSL— the Win­dows Sub­system for Linux .

When I was using WSL, it was in its in­fancy. There were some lim­i­ta­tions— specif­i­cally ac­cessing your com­put­er's graph­ical hard­ware. The next log­ical step was to setup dual-booting — se­lecting ei­ther the full Win­dows 10 or Ubuntu sys­tems to load during the boot se­quence. This al­lowed me to use the full Ubuntu desktop en­vi­ron­ment and ac­cess my com­put­er's hard­ware without the lim­i­ta­tions of WSL.

In col­lege, Win­dows had been a ne­ces­sity for easy ac­cess to spe­cific soft­ware that was (at the time) only de­vel­oped for Win­dows— mainly CAD soft­ware for my ar­chi­tec­ture de­gree. Even­tu­ally, though, I dropped Win­dows al­to­gether for Ubuntu.

Around 5 years ago, at the start of the pan­demic lock­down, I took the plunge and made a ca­reer change to be­come a full-time pro­fes­sional soft­ware en­gi­neer. I ac­tu­ally started my soft­ware ca­reer as a Web de­vel­oper. Of­ten­times, the only soft­ware I'd use (a browser and a ter­minal) were gen­er­ally avail­able with any Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion.

What is a Distro?

A Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion (or distro) is a com­plete op­er­ating system built on the Linux kernel. It in­cludes the kernel, system li­braries, util­i­ties, and often a package man­ager to in­stall ad­di­tional soft­ware. There are many dif­ferent dis­tros, each with its own phi­los­ophy, package man­age­ment system, and user in­ter­face.

Ubuntu was the first Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion I used, and it soon be­came my daily driver. I used it for many years with the Re­golith distro . Under the hood, Re­golith is just a pre­con­fig­ured Ubuntu distro— pre­in­stalled with the i3 tiling window man­ager . The dis­tro's built-in util­i­ties— like a pop-up key­board shortcut legend— made it super easy to get started with i3wm.

The ability to cus­tomize the window man­ager and nav­i­gate vir­tual desk­tops and win­dows with key­board short­cuts was a game-changer. Using short­cuts to nav­i­gate the system cer­tainly fed my in­terest in Linux and made me feel like a system power-user.

RICE-ing

As someone with a back­ground in de­sign, the ability to deeply cus­tomize my system was an­other thrilling part of dis­cov­ering Linux. I quickly be­came a lurker on r/​unix­porn and learned about Linux RICE-ing (Race In­spired Cos­metic En­hance­ment).

RI­CEing is typ­i­cally as­so­ci­ated with the cus­tomiza­tion of cars. The term "RICE" is often used in a deroga­tory sense to de­scribe cars that have been mod­i­fied for looks rather than per­for­mance.

In the Linux com­mu­nity, RI­CEing doesn't nec­es­sarily carry the same neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions. Linux RI­CEing refers to cus­tomizing and per­son­al­izing your desktop en­vi­ron­ment to make it vi­su­ally ap­pealing and func­tional. This can in­clude changing themes, icons, fonts, and even the layout of your desktop.

Desktop En­vi­ron­ments

By de­fault, Ubuntu uses the GNOME desktop en­vi­ron­ment. How­ever, there are many other desktop en­vi­ron­ments avail­able for Linux, each with its own unique fea­tures and de­sign phi­los­ophy:

Com­pos­i­tors and Window Man­agers

In ad­di­tion to desktop en­vi­ron­ments, Linux users can also con­figure dif­ferent com­pos­i­tors and window man­agers. Some of the func­tion­ality over­laps, but gen­er­ally these tools each serve a spe­cific role.

Window mangers (WMs) gen­er­ally con­trol how win­dows are dis­played on the screen and how they in­teract with each other— think of how you would ex­pand, min­i­mize, or drag a window in macOS or Win­dows. WMs can also handle window dec­o­ra­tions, vir­tual desk­tops, key­board short­cuts, tiling, and more.

i3wm

My fa­vorite window man­ager is i3. I love its quick-snap align­ment and re­cur­sive tiling me­chanics. It al­lows you to quickly and easily arrange win­dows on your screen, making it per­fect for mul­ti­tasking and lim­ited screen real es­tate.

Short­cuts make it super quick and help main­tain flow when editing text. i3 is a tiling window man­ager, meaning it au­to­mat­i­cally arranges win­dows in a grid-like fashion without over­lap­ping. Check out my dot­files for my i3 config and other goodies.

Com­pos­i­tors

Com­pos­i­tors are re­spon­sible for ren­dering the graph­ical ef­fects in a desktop en­vi­ron­ment. They can pro­vide things like window trans­parency and blur, shadows, an­i­ma­tions when opening or closing win­dows, and more. Some of the ones I've used in­clude:

You'll no­tice that some com­pos­i­tors in­ter­face with X11 (the X Window System ) while others use Way­land . Way­land was in­tended as a re­place­ment for the X11 window pro­tocol and in­tro­duces some par­a­digm shifts in how the com­pos­itor is used.

Of the above, Picom was my fa­vorite choice (paired with i3, of course) be­cause I was able to get some Apple-level luxury looking blur and back­ground trans­parency ef­fects.

Launchers and Info Bars

Launchers are pro­grams that allow you to quickly launch ap­pli­ca­tions or per­form ac­tions using key­board short­cuts. They can be used to search for files, run com­mands, or open ap­pli­ca­tions without needing to nav­i­gate through menus.

Win­dows users will be fa­miliar with the Win­dows-key start menu, and macOS users will be fa­miliar with Spot­light. Linux has many launchers— some pre­in­stalled with the desktop en­vi­ron­ment.

On macOS, the Al­fred app was once a pop­ular choice. I also re­ally like Ray­cast for MacOS.

On Linux, there are many launchers avail­able. Most desktop en­vi­ron­ments will in­stall their own by de­fault. The latest Re­golith distro ships with the be­spoke ilia launcher. I quite like the Rofi launcher be­cause it's fast, light­weight, highly cus­tomiz­able, and has good com­mu­nity sup­port.

There are also many status bars avail­able for Linux. The i3 window man­ager comes with its own status bar (i3bar), but you can also use other op­tions like Polybar or Waybar in Way­land.

On macOS, I use a com­bi­na­tion of Aero­Space , sketchybar , and Spaceman to mimic i3 window tiling and short­cuts— with a status bar that shows the ac­tive desktop and other custom op­tions.

Distro List

So which Linux distro is the best? It re­ally de­pends on your needs and pref­er­ences. Some dis­tros are more user-friendly— they have a lot of fea­tures and con­trols out of the box.

Other dis­tros are more min­imal and re­quire more con­fig­u­ra­tion to get started. Some are de­signed for spe­cific use cases— like gaming versus hosting cloud ap­pli­ca­tions. Others still are de­signed for spe­cific hard­ware— like Rasp­berry Pi OS and the Rasp­berry Pi.

Un­der­standing the key fea­tures and philoso­phies of each distro can help you make an in­formed de­ci­sion about which one is right for you. Below is a list of some pop­ular Linux dis­tros that I've tried— along with my two cents.

NixOS

NixOS Foun­da­tion
https://​nixos.org/

This is a distro un­like most others you'll come across. NixOS cre­ates a spe­cial, im­mutable Nix store at /nix/store. Im­mutability means that the store cannot be di­rectly mod­i­fied. It will iden­tify each in­stalled package (and its spe­cific ver­sion) by a unique ID— in fact, it's a cryp­to­graphic hash of the pack­age's build de­pen­dency graph.

Nix is a purely func­tional package man­ager. You can save the state of your system and should be able to load the en­tire thing from scratch on an­other ma­chine. It's a bril­liant de­sign, but has a steep learning curve and re­quires you to adopt the Nix con­fig­u­ra­tion lan­guage and phi­los­ophy.

NixOS also pro­vides a suite of com­mands like nix-env and nix-shell to quickly swap be­tween en­tirely dif­ferent en­vi­ron­ments without needing to use yet an­other tech­nology to con­figure vir­tual ma­chines or vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments. You can in­stall, up­grade, and re­move system pack­ages and lan­guage bi­na­ries in any number of iso­lated en­vi­ron­ments.

XDG Config

A lot of Linux users might be fa­miliar with the FreeDesktop.org pro­ject, for­merly the X Desktop Group (XDG). The $XDG-CONFIG-HOME pat­tern spec­i­fies a way of con­fig­uring dot­files under the ~/.config/ di­rec­tory.

Un­like XDG, NixOS is a unique Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion that uses .nix con­fig­u­ra­tion files to func­tion­ally de­fine pack­ages. It is de­signed to be de­clar­a­tive, meaning you can de­fine your en­tire system con­fig­u­ra­tion in a single file or set of files. This should make it easy to re­pro­duce and share con­fig­u­ra­tions across dif­ferent ma­chines.

To me, NixOS is wizard-tier Linux. The con­cepts of atomic up­dates and re­pro­ducible sys­tems are super sexy, but in prac­tice I often found it very dif­fi­cult and te­dious to manage my pack­ages and con­figs. The ini­tial trans­la­tion to .nix was a daunting task. You'll need to take some time to rewrite your XDG-style config to .nix and gain a firm un­der­standing of the Nix lan­guage.

I have a lot of re­spect and ad­mi­ra­tion for those Unix wiz­ards who have the un­der­standing and ex­pe­ri­ence to use NixOS ef­fec­tively, but I don't think it's the right choice for be­gin­ners.

En­deav­ourOS

Open Col­lec­tive
https://​en­deav­ouros.com/

En­deav­ourOS is a user-friendly distro that pro­vides a great bal­ance be­tween ease of use and cus­tomiza­tion. It gives be­gin­ners easy ac­cess to the Arch Linux distro— a light­weight and flex­ible Linux distro that gives Unix power users a lot of freedom to cus­tomize their system.

Like Arch Linux, En­deav­ourOS uses the pacman package man­ager giving it ac­cess to a vast package ecosystem. Un­like Arch Linux, on first boot En­deavour pro­vides a graph­ical in­staller to con­figure a desktop en­vi­ron­ment along with the base system. This lets you get started quickly without needing to man­u­ally con­figure every­thing from scratch like you might on bare Arch.

The de­sign is sleek and modern, and it has a large com­mu­nity of users who pro­vide sup­port and re­sources. En­deav­ourOS is a great choice for anyone who wants to use Arch Linux without having to con­figure it from scratch.

Man­jaro

Man­jaro GmbH & Co. KG (de­vel­oper)
https://​man­jaro.org/

Man­jaro is an­other user-friendly Arch Linux-based distro. It doesn't offer quite the same freedom as En­deav­ourOS— you can't se­lect the desktop en­vi­ron­ment from a drop­down. But it does a great job of pro­viding a sleek pre­con­fig­ured desktop en­vi­ron­ment.

It has a large com­mu­nity of users who pro­vide sup­port and re­sources. Sim­ilar to En­deav­ourOS Man­jaro is a great choice for anyone who wants to use Arch Linux without having to con­figure it from scratch.

The KDE Plasma desktop en­vi­ron­ment is the de­fault, but you can also choose from other desktop en­vi­ron­ments like Xfce and GNOME. Man­jaro also uses the pacman package man­ager, giving it ac­cess to a breadth of soft­ware in the Arch User Repos­i­tory (AUR).

Ubuntu

Canon­ical (de­vel­oper)
https://​ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu is a great choice for be­gin­ners and ex­pe­ri­enced users alike. It has a large com­mu­nity, ex­ten­sive doc­u­men­ta­tion, and a wide range of soft­ware avail­able. It's also one of the most pop­ular dis­tros, so you'll find plenty of sup­port and re­sources on­line.

It's good for a desktop en­vi­ron­ment, but it can also be used headlessly for cloud servers. Hard­core Linux users might bash Ubuntu for being too bloated. It does in­stall a lot of soft­ware by de­fault, but it's still a great starting point for anyone new to Linux.

Be­cause Ubuntu is based on De­bian , it has a large repos­i­tory of soft­ware avail­able. This makes it easy to in­stall and up­date soft­ware using the apt package man­ager.

Ubuntu is user-friendly, has a large com­mu­nity, and is easy to get started with. How­ever, it can be a bit bloated for some users, and the de­fault GNOME desktop en­vi­ron­ment may not be to every­one's liking. If you want to use KDE Plasma, you can in­stall the Kubuntu flavor of Ubuntu.

Re­golith

Ken Gilmer and others (de­vel­oper)
https://​re­golith-desktop.com/

Re­golith is an Ubuntu de­riv­a­tive that comes pre­con­fig­ured with the i3 tiling window man­ager. It pro­vides a great starting point for anyone who wants to use i3 without having to con­figure it from scratch.

The base theme is well de­signed and min­imal— and you still get all the ben­e­fits of Ubun­tu's package man­age­ment and soft­ware avail­ability! It in­cludes a pop-up key­board shortcut legend, a be­spoke launcher, and a better com­pos­itor (picom).

I put Re­golith in the A tier. It's great for power users while still pro­viding the com­mu­nity sup­port of an Ubuntu distro. One down­side is that it doesn't have the backing of a large com­pany like Canon­ical, so it may not be as well sup­ported in the long run. How­ever, the com­mu­nity is ac­tive and re­spon­sive, and the distro is reg­u­larly up­dated.

Alpine Linux

Alpine Linux De­vel­op­ment Team (de­vel­oper)
https://​www.alpinelinux.org/

Alpine Linux is a se­cu­rity-ori­ented, light­weight Linux distro. It uses the apk package man­ager (Alpine Package Keeper) and has a super small foot­print, making it ideal for run­ning on low-re­source de­vices or in con­tainers.

Alpine's de­sign phi­los­ophy is to keep things simple and se­cure. It uses the musl libc li­brary in­stead of the more common GNU C Li­brary (glibc), which makes it smaller and faster. Alpine also uses the OpenRC init system in­stead of sys­temd, which is a more light­weight al­ter­na­tive.

The Alpine Linux com­mu­nity is ac­tive and re­spon­sive, and the distro is reg­u­larly up­dated. It's a great choice for anyone who wants a light­weight, se­cure, and fast Linux distro.

A lot of its se­cu­rity is in­herent in its lack of bloat— by in­cluding fewer pack­ages by de­fault, Alpine re­duces the at­tack sur­face of the system.

Using Dock­erHub as a ref­er­ence, the latest Ubuntu re­lease (25.04, Plucky Puffin) has 3 medium- and 5 low-severity CVEs at the time of writing. Alpine Linux (3.22.1) has 0. Ubuntu in­cludes 122 pack­ages in its SBOM while Alpine in­clude 20.

I fre­quently reach for Alpine Linux when I need a light­weight con­tainer image for a Dock­er­ized ap­pli­ca­tion. How­ever, it may not be the best choice for be­gin­ners or those who want a more user-friendly desktop en­vi­ron­ment.

Void Linux

Void Linux Team (de­vel­oper)
https://​voidlinux.org/

Void Linux might be de­scribed as an indie distro— it's not based on an­other Linux distro. It's an in­de­pen­dent dis­tri­b­u­tion de­vel­oped en­tirely by vol­un­teers.

It's a unique distro that uses the xbps package man­ager (X Bi­nary Package System). xbps is also be­spoke soft­ware and fea­tures de­tec­tion of in­com­pat­ible shared li­braries and de­pen­den­cies while up­dating or re­moving pack­ages.

It uses the runit init system in­stead of sys­temd, which is a more light­weight al­ter­na­tive. Like Alpine Linux, it also sup­ports the musl libc— as well as the GNU libc im­ple­men­ta­tion.

Void Linux is a great choice for anyone who wants a light­weight, fast, and simple Linux distro. It won't have the same sup­port as Ubuntu or an­other big-name distro, but it still has a ded­i­cated large com­mu­nity of users who pro­vide sup­port and re­sources.

Red Hat En­ter­prise Linux (RHEL)

Red Hat (de­vel­oper)
https://​redhat.com/

I've only used RHEL in a pro­fes­sional set­ting, but it's worth men­tioning here. RHEL is a com­mer­cial Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion de­vel­oped by Red Hat. It's de­signed for en­ter­prise use and pro­vides a stable and se­cure plat­form for run­ning ap­pli­ca­tions.

Al­though, in my ex­pe­ri­ence, I've found it to be more bloated than Alpine Linux or Void Linux and pro­duces more vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in a CVE scan. It uses the dnf package man­ager (Dan­di­fied YUM) and has a large repos­i­tory of soft­ware avail­able.

Red Hat is the base for many other Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions, in­cluding CentOS, Fe­dora, and Rocky Linux. It's a great choice for anyone who wants a stable and se­cure Linux distro for en­ter­prise use.

Wrap­ping Up

This is just the tip of the ice­berg. I know there are many other distro hop­pers out there who have ex­plored even fur­ther reaches of the Linux uni­verse.

Distro hop­ping can be a fun and re­warding way to learn about Linux in all its glo­rious shapes and forms. Each distro has its own unique fea­tures, philoso­phies, and com­mu­ni­ties. By trying out dif­ferent dis­tros, you can find the one that best fits your needs and pref­er­ences.

I'm leaving out a lot. De­bian is at the heart of Ubuntu— and many other dis­tros. Fe­dora , Linux Mint , and Pop!_OS are all great dis­tros that I haven't had the chance to try yet. I though I'd never see the day, but now I'm pri­marily using macOS for my daily driver.

Let me know your distro hop­ping sto­ries in the com­ments. What dis­tros have you tried? Which ones are your fa­vorites? Do you have any tips for be­gin­ners who want to get started with Linux?

Bonus Distro List

Tem­pleOS is a unique op­er­ating system that was cre­ated by Terry A. Davis. It is a light­weight, 16-bit op­er­ating system with a unique pro­gram­ming lan­guage called HolyC, which is used to write pro­grams for the OS. It is re­li­giously themed and has a unique user in­ter­face that is rem­i­nis­cent of early com­puter sys­tems.

Tem­pleOS is not a prac­tical choice for everyday use, but it is an in­ter­esting pro­ject that show­cases the cre­ativity and in­ge­nuity of its cre­ator.

Hannah Mon­tana Linux is a parody op­er­ating system that was cre­ated by a group of de­vel­opers as a joke. It is based on Kubuntu and in­cludes a number of fea­tures and themes based on the pop­ular TV show Hannah Mon­tana.

While it may not be a se­rious choice for a daily driver, it can be a fun way to learn about Linux and its ca­pa­bil­i­ties.