Distro Hopping

I'm somebody who gets bored pretty soon. This is very true with the different Linux distros atleast. I keep on hopping distros every now and then. I take a lot of pain to install a distro, then tweak and install the programs I want and everything. But once I feel everything is installed and the desktop is good enough for my daily uses, I get bored and want to try out some other distribution. Maybe I just like trying out new distros, installing and configuring them. Or maybe I'm searching for that perfect distribution for me.

For the moment, I have puppy linux and 2 different installations of arch linux (on different hard disks) on my desktop. I have Ubuntu and Debian on my laptop. My previous (very recent) distributions on my desktop are - Gentoo, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, LightHouse Pup, Sabayon, etc.

I don't even remember all the distributions I've tried (installed and used) in the past 9 years. There are just so many. Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake (these 3 have now changed to Fedora, OpenSuse, and Mandriva), Caldera, ELX Linux, Slax, Elive, DSL, Vector, Slackware to name a few. And I have a huge collection of CD/DVDs of most of these Linux distributions over the past 9 years. Linux has truly come a long way since then.

Out of so many distributions, I keep coming back to 3 of them - Arch Linux, Puppy Linux and Ubuntu.

Arch Linux does everything right. They follow the KISS principle and an arch system is really very simple and elegant. It is the perfect distro for anybody who knows a little about linux, is not afraid to use the command line and has heard of config files. It allows you to build a very minimal system with no bloat whatsoever. You can (and will) build YOUR perfect system using arch. The package manager is great. And their wiki is excellent. It is one of the best I've seen.

Puppy Linux is something I would recommend to everyone, not just newbies to Linux. It is just about the perfect system which has everything but the kitchen sink. It's minimal footprint, ability to run in RAM, support for everything (browsers, IM, multimedia, doc/image viewers, and just about anything you can name), excellent community, make it a perfect choice for everybody. It has applications for just about everything. The CD/DVD recording/burning software is the best I've ever used. The downside to puppy is it's package management (something that Barry is already working on. Check out puppy 5.0 / dpup).

Ubuntu is the community's favourite distribution. I keep coming back to it because of the apt package manager. It is THE best out there. But I always feel Ubuntu is very bloated.

For now, it's Arch and puppy for me. Who knows, next week, I could try out some other distro. :-)