I wouldn’t really call myself a distro hopper, but in the last few months I’ve had to do some fresh installs on a couple of machines and VMs for work
If these aren’t included by default, I’ll make sure to get em:
GUI:
- Firefox & Chromium
- Gimp & Krita
- VSCode/VSCodium
- Okular
- Libre office
CLI*:
- git
- wget&curl
- neovim
- zsh/ohmyzsh + plugins
- glow
- neofetch
- figlet/toilet
- zellij
- python
- nodejs/npm/nvm + nodemon globally
- ranger/rifle
Also, how do you go about migrating your old config and rc files? Start fresh or just copy em over and make adjustments where necessary?
I always need
- LibreWolf (privacy-focused Firefox fork)
- Some nice terminal emulator like Alacritty or Kitty
- A torrent client
- Emacs
- Strawberry (the music player)
CLI:
- fish shell
- bat
- neovim
- fd
- fzf
- zoxide
- Some other Rust alternatives for GNU coreutils
- GPG
- fun stuff like neofetch, lolcat, asciiquarium, cmatrix, etc.
- Firefox (often preinstalled)
- Thunderbird
- Code
- FreeTube & Stremio
- Apostrophe
- KeePass
- Nextcloud
- Syncthing
- yt-dlp
Step 1: install Debian 12 today, Step 2: upgrade to Debian 13 when available, then Debian 14, Debian 15 and so on… that’s the only hopping one should.
Gatekeeping Linux!? I certainly wasn’t expecting that… I think the state of Linux is needlessly fragmented, but even I won’t say a single distro will work best for every single person, business, school, government, or organization.
Recently, I’ve been changing distros about once a year. These are the things I install every time:
- hdparm - I use this to disable APM on my HDD which makes annoying sounds when it’s enabled. (Yes, my computer is old and still uses an HDD as the system drive.)
- KeePassXC - My preferred password manager.
- VeraCrypt - My external drives are encrypted with this.
- Joplin - I store my setup notes in here.
- Lutris/Steam/Wine - I’m a gamer.
As for the config files, I always start fresh.
byobu
Strawberry, qBittorrent, neovim
Nothing. I just install what I need when I need it.
Meaning that your distro of choosing comes with most of the stuff bundled in…?
No, I’m just a fan of lazy initialization.
Lazy installation?
Yeah I understand that but surely you have a list of hours you know you need almost every time?
Why bother, when I can install the tools I need in a matter of seconds when I need them? It’s not like the old days when I gotta pull out the crate of driver floppies.
I also don’t consider myself a distrohopper (I’ve only installed Ubuntu based distros), but I did recently install Ubuntu and KDE Neon on separate computers.
It really depends on what I’m using the computer for, but I’ll list my most commonly used applications by importance tiers:
A Tier (cannot live without these):
- Firefox
- Neofetch (obviously)
- A GUI file manager (doesn’t really matter which one)
- A usable Desktop Environment
B Tier (extremely useful but nonessential):
- LibreOffice
- Xournal++ (for taking notes, and editing PDFs)
- Baobab (for recording disk usage)
- Steam
- VLC (video player)
- Clementine (music player)
- htop (CLI system monitor)
- GUI “appstore”
C Tier (very useful, but quite niche):
- VSCode
- Vivaldi
- Retroarch
- Krita
- Kdenlive
- OBS Studio
- Wine
- GUI system monitor
- Standalone PDF viewer
Also, how do you go about migrating your old config and rc files? Start fresh or just copy em over and make adjustments where necessary?
I keep all of my important configs and dot files in a git repo. When setting up a new system I clone that repo and then symlink to them in the appropriate places
This Is The Way. My repo includes a setup.sh that uses ansible to setup the links. Clone the repo, run the script: home.
I have an init.sh file I run from my dotfiles. Pipe my sudo password to it and leave it alone for about an hour. Gets things 95% of the way to how I like them.
I should migrate to ansible like u/djehuti@programming.dev but time :(
