this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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My understanding of "distro hopping" is reinstalling the OS to try something different, not just using something different throughout the day. I also use a few different distros for different reasons (openSUSE Leap for my NAS, openSUSE Tumbleweed for my desktop/laptop, Debian for my VPS, Alpine for containers, etc). The package manager is the main important difference between them, and that's really easy to look up as needed.
To an extent. A lot of people recommend "distro hopping" to try a different desktop environment or something, and I've always just configured those within whatever distro I'm using at the time. I only switch when I either need to reinstall anyway, or something with how the maintainers handle packaging annoys me enough to try something else.
So yeah, I only recommend "distro hopping" when first trying Linux because hopping is fun, but once you see what's available, I think it's counter-productive unless you have a clear reason why your distro won't work with what you want.
My point is that I will "never" learn a particular distro. And I very much argue there is no point. If you focus on learning all the quirks of Linux Mint then you are screwed if the team behind Mint make choices you disagree with. And if that sounds impossible because Linux is open source and people will just fork it and blah blah blah: Canonical. Or even the shitshow that is Centos/Rocky and RHEL.
I've worked with people who insist they are an expert server admin. And, when push comes to shove, they lose their mind over the idea of not running Debian Server or RHEL. That means they are who we call if we have an issue with one of those specific distros but they are pretty much worthless in day to day because they don't really learn how to debug or "learn" and instead just memorized all the quirks that one team have turned into Features.
Agreed. The only people who should "learn" a particular distro are the distro maintainers and support people. Everyone else should just learn Linux generally, and ideally get some exposure to a few different distros if they'll be doing anything admin-y. But "regular users" are fine sticking to one, provided it solves their problems.