11mo ago

Distro hoppers, what's always on your install list when you've finished setup and logged in for the first time?

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?

80 comments

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.

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.
- Another fish and modern Unix user 🫶
  PS. Try out lsd if you haven't already - a nice ls/eza/exa replacement.
  
  I absolutely forgot about lsd, I used to use exa but recently I switched to lsd, it's fantastic.

fish
tmux
sshfs
htop
nmap
distrobox (haven’t tried this yet but looks amazing)
zfs (and any utilities that go with that)
sanoid
syncoid
tailscale
snapper (if using btrfs)
As far as config files go, I haven’t gotten around to automating those so I usually search my nas for old ones and copy/paste what I need

First I install home-manager, then home-manager installs and configures everything else I've added to my config over time
- Any issues with home manager?
  
  I've not had any but I'm using NixOS, have yet to try it on other distros. (though it supports other distros)
  
  Using it on Nixos, Debian (wsl) and was using it (in the transition to nixos) on arch. Works flawless!

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.
- What is APM? And that's a interesting list, ngl.
  
  APM is Advanced Power Management. I'm having trouble finding an official explanation for it, but it basically allows the hard drive to park the head when the OS thinks it's idle. My hard drive makes a loud "click" every time that happens. APM is too aggressive, so my hard drive is constantly clicking unless I disable APM.
- Man, do yourself a favor and get an SSD. You can get a 512 GB for as cheap as $30 and a 1 TB for as cheap as $60 on Amazon. The speed difference is night and day. That's probably the single best upgrade you can do to an old machine.

Usually I install:
Steam
flatpak
discord
gimp
vlc
lutris
protonupQ
protontricks
The rest I install once I need it. Plasma delivers also many of my programs.
- ProtonUpQ hell yeah

Use Ansible for package installations and configuration, and a git repository & GNU stow for dotfiles.

Nvidia proprietary driver
Docker Engine (Portainer, AdGuardHome, LibReddit, Nitter, Invidious)
Install and tweak Firefox setup
Steam Client
Gnome extensions
Gnome Shell Theme and Icon themes
Nextcloud Client

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 :(

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.

Oh, this is a flipping great question. So much fun as I've just settled on one distro. M$ won't allow me to transfer my transferrable Windows license and I refuse o pay yetagain for Windows so Linux is my sole OS from now on. I have had so many weird issues or configuration woes with a ton of OSs ive been trying. So I tell ya, I sure have installed my fair share of them in the last month or so.
GUI:
Steam (Gotta get my game on)
ProtonPlus
Lutris
Heroic
Winetricks
Protontricks
VLC
Brave
Bitwarden(Probably the second most important software in my life)
Authy
Krusader (No idea why but Ill use this before the built in file manager sometimes)
Plex htpc
Kate - Notepadqq (havent decided which one i like best yet)
PolyMC
LibreOffice
Flatpack (I always prefer the native package but flatpack has almost anything the repositories lack)-
Appimagelauncher (Just for ease of use, appimages are a always third fiddle but are a great backup as flatpacks can be - limited in available software compared)
Gimp (Almost exclusively because the name makes me giggle)
OBS Studio
CLI:
MC (100% always the first this I ever install no matter what)
HTOP (Not standard in all as many distros as i would think)
Openssh
Cifs-utils
Starship
Zsh
Neofetch
Tmux (Cant live without it)
Of course there are tons of other small things I add but those are the ones I will have installed likely before I go to reboot for the first time. The rest of what I interact with is generally running on my server so it's all web based stuff for the most part. I use VNC often to interact with virtual machines, do tech support for my son so i don't have to get up (disabled). I haven't really found a Linux VNC client i genuinely like. I used to use TightVNC with Windows and it's about the only thing I miss. I do have a Guacamole docker running on my network but unless you have a physical KB/M it's less than preferable to use. I'll find something I like eventually I'm sure. 👍-----

Strawberry, qBittorrent, neovim

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

Firefox (often preinstalled)
Thunderbird
Code
FreeTube & Stremio
Apostrophe
KeePass
Nextcloud
Syncthing
yt-dlp

Basically testing different Fedora Variants, so:

fish
bat, eza
waydroid, distrobox, qemu-kvm, virt-manager
flatpak

Some own CLI tools

copr-command
kde sysinfo cli
braveinstall

Hardening the kernel:

 undefined

    
 rpm-ostree kargs --append="init_on_alloc=1" --append="init_on_free=1" --append="slab_nomerge" --append="page_alloc.shuffle=1" --append="randomize_kstack_offset=on" --append="vsyscall=none" --append="debugfs=off" --append="lockdown=confidentiality" --append="random.trust_cpu=off" --append="random.trust_bootloader=off" --append="intel_iommu=on" --append="amd_iommu=on" --append="iommu.passthrough=0" --append="iommu.strict=1" --append="mitigations=auto,nosmt"
--append="module.sig_enforce=1"

yeah I basically distrohop between Fedora atomic images

ansible

I don't distro hop, but I keep my most commonly used programs as appimages in my home, as well as some locally compiled programs that I install in ~/.local/bin and ~/.local/lib.
Those include essentials like:
i3wm
polybar
rofi
handlr (regex one)
And for the programs, those include:
brave
ferdium
freetube
gimp
librewolf
libreoffice
That way I can drop my home onto any distro and everything will work at once. No need to manually install programs.
I also have wrapper scripts on my PATH that force applications that don't comply with the xdg base dir spec to use a fakehome in ~/.local, like steam and the web browsers.

Idk if it is distro hopping because I have been trying distros on my main system and usually for months at a time. It's messy but I have a separate filesystem for /home and hope my current rc files don't bork up whatever I'm running next. The transition from Cinnamon to Gnome went poorly for a while.
I should probably automate the must have packages.
Some applications are not packaged so I install ~/.local, e.g. Arduino, Eagle, Minecraft, etc.
Packages... Hm. Direnv is all I can think of. I just use the system until something is missing, curse briefly, and install it.

Cli
helix
ranger
mpv
YouTube-dl
epy
fanficfare
aria2
zellij
gotop
GUI
qutebrowser
zathura
- YouTube-dl
  Just a heads up, yt-dlp is a far more active fork with more features.
  
  This is true, has mpv started working with it? The reason I have it in the first place is to stream Lofi /synthwave/jazz audio via mpv rather than specifically for downloading. Back when I’d last looked, mpv needed the old fork specifically, but if they’ve updated I’d be more than happy to switch

GUI: Firefox, nautilus, libre office, alacritty, mpv
CLI: git, helix, zellij, python, rust, wget & curl, neofetch
- if you add fish to this it's literally me
  
  Ive never tried fish, many people in this thread wrote that actually. Ill try

The things I tend to gravitate towards:
Flatpak
Firefox of some kind (lately been loving Floorp)
Keeper Password Manager extension on Firefox
try to install some form of backup
git (if not already available)
nvm (Node version manager, usually I install the latest LTS)
Go (sometimes I write Go programs)
Steam (if I plan to play games)
Sometimes I'll install Zsh, sometimes Fish, then oh-my-zsh / oh-my-zsh
Fastfetch (Neofetch is so slow?)

Check my 64-lines-long checklist.txt document which I've obsessively prepared for months

For CLI, I would like to add:
tmux
mosh
btop
asdf
direnv
- btop is awesome. RIP htop
  
  It even shows gpu load in the recent version.
- asdf is so good

cherrytree If I could only install one program it would be this,

Yay
Nano
Mullvad VPN
Mullvad browser
Keepassxc
Blue.sh
Rtorrent-ps
Steam
Freetube
Ranger
I have an auto installer for arch based distros that'll automate installation of yay then grab a text file with a list of presorted applications from github and auto install them as well as my sway, waybar and bashrc scripts.
Very clean and easily deployable with git then sudo bash ~/autoinstaller
- What's blue.sh?
  
  Auto correct :/ *ble.sh and it adds more functionality to bash

GNOME Tweaks
Firefox
VLC
Blender
FreeCAD
Godot
VSCodium
PrusaSlicer
Steam, Lutris, Proton
KDE Connect

GUI:
GnuCash
Firefox
CLI:
aptitude

Apart from what you mentioned:
Steam
Darktable
cmatrix (very important)
pfetch
vim
Hugo
clipboard manager
I think that’s about it!
- I understand disto hopping when you’re first getting into Linux. But are there really people who do it regularly? What’s the point?
  
  I was using Ubuntu LTS for a while, then it dropped or of support, so I decided to upgrade. It totally shit that bed, and I wasn't really happy with Ubuntu at that point so I hopped.
  I tried a rolling release (one extreme to another!) and found it problematic with Nvidia drivers. So eventually I hopped again.
  Now I'm back in ol' reliable (Debian) and I've decided that the grass was never really greener anywhere else. If I need newer things I'll backport them, or use Flatpak or Distrobox or something like that.
  I'm happy with Debian now, but we'll see what the situation is with Plasma 6 after its final release. If it's too much trouble to backport I might hop again.
  
  I know some who do it as a spare time relaxation exercise, install something new (to them) configure, boot, reconfigure, explore. But they have a steady system they use daily.
  @NegativeLookBehind @tourist @chris
  
  Well, I’ve only changed distros a handful of times. But, I’ve broken my system more than a few times, as well. Back when I had more time I tinkered a lot more than I do now haha

Keepass

fortune, cowsay

guix home reconfigure home-config.scm

ne is my preferred CLI text editor... others would be: ranger, rtorrent, irssi, git, btop, and others that are not coming to mind right now..

I prefer btop to htop.

Turn on night light and install syncthing to move over dotfiles

Before I do anything at all my VPN gets installed, then whatever firewall gui along with OpenSnitch.
Keepassxc
Librewolf
Signal
Element
OpenRGB
OpenRazer
Game stuff
I have a text file that lists everything I need to do on a clean install - a list of programmes and bits that need to be set in each programme. It's really easy to forget important stuff - like making sure my refresh rate is set at 165hz and not left at whatever the default is.

nomacs

byobu

git clone ssh://theseus@hive2.local/~/dotfiles.git

CLI:
git
zsh
neovim
lazygit
my dotfiles (i have them on gh and then use a bare repo)
a few extra utilities: htop, ripgrep, tree, exa
yay (I use Arch btw)
tools for whatever langs I'm using, usually rust or golang
GUI:
Steam - games are on a separate disk that I add to /etc/fstab so I just need to add it to Steam and I'm good to go
Lutris
Sublime Text
Spotify
Discord
Flameshot
psensor

I don't migrate any config file, always from scratch. My setup isn't that complicated. Fedora for a long time.
GUI (mostly Flatpaks):
Firefox
Chromium (for Xbox Cloud Gaming)
Extension Manager
Flatseal
VeraCrypt
Stremio
CLI:
Syncthing
- Does the cloud gaming work pretty well? I'm trying to consider how to move my main rig to Mint, but also not lose my three years of game pass. I think dual boot is likely but feels purpose defeating haha.
  
  I have no technical problems. The only tricky part was setting up my controller (good old PS2), as I did have to mess with emulation and things like that. In the end, I just have to run a xboxdrv script before running the game. If you have an original Xbox controller it shouldn't be a problem.
  Anyway, if you encounter any issue: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamepad
  EDIT: If you were asking about the cloud gaming experience, it's pretty good I would say. The image will not be as good as a "physical" Xbox, and probably you will have to deal with queues depending on your location. But, overall, it's a pretty good deal.

80 comments