I’m on Linux for a couple of years and I love it. Distrohoping never interested me though, I’m content with my flavour. But I need to reinstall my OS soon and it gives me headaches. So many settings I changed, applications I installed, configured and forgot about.
Now I read about all you guys constantly distrohopping for fun, how do you even do this? Do you start from scratch, explore everything and leave after months of putting in all the work of making an OS your own!? Or do you just casually check it out a couple of days? What do you do with all your music, pictures, addons, portable software?
I don’t distrohop but I do backup my home folder which also contains most of my settings & tweaks. I also keep a simple list of all the apps/packages I have installed in a text file.
I had to reinstall a few weeks a go (new SSD) and it took me maybe 10 minutes to make the base install + all my apps ( ‘sudo apt install’ with a copypaste of my list of apps), and then the time required to copy my home folder too (which was fast). Add to that the couple apps I have to manually install (like Filen for the cloud, Bitwarden for passwords) and that’s it. It’s really one of the things I appreciate since I switched to Linux (coming from Mac where a fresh install now takes… a lot of wasted time).