My history of distro-hopping between 1993 (or 1994) and early 2025 is worth a story. The first time I installed GNU/Linux (on my Toshiba Laptop), the choice was between FreeBSD and "Linux." I downloaded Slackware, through the kindness of the owners of Kuentos Communications on Guam. I knew nothing of Linux, but after installation, faced with a terminal, I did not know what to do. What I did was a head-scratcher: I typed "top". It was a propitious choice: top is a system monitor that I still use in 2025, in it's modern iteration, as "htop." Slackware is still alive.
I did not install, Yggdrasil, even though it looked.
At some point, perhaps 1995, I finally abandoned Slackware, for Debian, which was connected with the Free Software Foundation. I stuck with Debian for a while. One thing I noticed about Debian, and perhaps other distros further on down the line (Ubuntu) was the impatience of the developers who inhabited the help mailing list. Instead of a simple answer, one would receive a sharp rebuff because he did not RTFM. (Read the Fine Manual). Another problem still persist, and has become even more egretious, IMHO: list lurkers who answer questions with "I don't know."
In about 1996, I hopped over to Ubuntu. This was inspired because it was easier to install than plain Debian; but in fact it was a version of Debian that was easeir to install and maintain. But Ubuntu was frequently problematical, for me. Others seemed to be fine with it.
Next was Knoppix was an interesting side-trip; I installed Cluster-Knoppix on three computers which I built for my classroom at Marianas High School. With a student, we actually got a cluster working, at least for a while. Knoppix, in it's own rite, was easy to install. It was possibly the first Live CD distribution, and it was simple to install onto a hard drive.
One issue that required constant head banging, was installing printers. Even until this day, most printer manufacturers do not support GNU/Linux. There are exceptions.
Another problem has been incompatibility of software. This was expected; however, the worst was software---often developed with Government funding---for educational use.
It has been worth the trouble.
I do not remember when, at some point I started getting in over my head---with Gentoo. With Slackware, I had learned to install Unix software by compiling it from "upstream" source code; this means, the original code. Debian in particular had painted this upstream code with another layer of patches, and generally made it available as pre-compiled binaries. This approach was a little uncomfortable for me; I always had hoped for a distro that used upstream source code. This brought me to Gentoo.
Computers are tools. I am interested in them, sure, but as tools. Tools for functional purposes. Gentoo's approach was elegant; but frequent updates led to collisions between library versions---especially with KDE's libraries---and routinely to gordion entanglements. I install a large number of software packages, which leads to a large number of such problems. The tedium started to bother me: the all night updates, the need to reinstall---often taking days---when things got too complicated.
This is true: Gentoo had the very best documentation, by far, of any distro. That was, however, until a fork in the road when developers went through some life changes that caused the documentation system---alas! the distribution itself---to cease to be accessible to mere mortals like myself.
Ubuntu was visited a few more times, and Mint Linux. Neither of these worked for me. Ubuntu---for reasons I never will understand---often abandoned me at a black screen of death. Mint was not my cup of tea.
I landed on Arch Linux.
Arch is touted as a learning experience. Sure, it's difficult to install, but every user needs to learn the system from the inside out. After many re-installs---probably often as a consequence of my own incompetence---I realized that I had not learned the lessons, as I had to repeat the same steps over and over again, cluelessly. Eventually, though, I found Manjaro.
Manjaro, IMHO, is the best of the Arch derivatives. Manjaro (along with Arch Linux) will best be treated separately. Suffice it to say, I have not hopped from Manjaro---save a few short-lived adventures with other Arch based distros---for well over a decade.
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