One last thing I'd recommend when either reinstalling or distro hopping is to write-down all the packages you install, and/or make a simple script to reinstall them all. You will not believe how many packages you'll forget you had installed on your machine, and making these quick package installing scripts saves so much time. It also makes distro hopping easier, as you can just check each distro's repo to see if they have all the packages you need instead of installing a new distro, realizing they don't have your packages, and reinstalling your previous distro. You don't even need to laboriously write them down one-by-one either, I'm pretty sure every package manager comes with a tool to list all your manually installed packages, and a simple awk, grep, sed, and/or cut command can get you a ready made script containing all your packages Oh, and one last last thing I recommend is always use a spare computer when distro hopping! Doing so makes it so much less of a headache, and you can freely experiment with it until you get something to your liking for your main rig.
I'm gonna need to do the script idea lol. Once i decide to reinstall Linux I'll do the separate home dir as that's something I've been planning on doing, but not in the mood to reinstall Linux at the moment with all that work to be done. I'm defs in the mood to test diff distros tho, so I'm gonna continue doing that in a VM and see which one I'm gonna give a shot next for when I do decide to hop around 😅
@@morpheon_xyz If you're up for it, you can also try installing a more barebones distro like Debian, Arch, Fedora, and OpenSUSE. Not for any sort of "challenge" (Debian and Fedora aren't even that hard to install honestly), but because most distros are all based on one of these 5 distros, and all of them have their own quirks to them. Understanding those quirks will massively narrow down your distro choices, as instead of searching for "Distros that come with GNOME" you can instead search for "Debian based distros" (that's if you like Debian). Plus searching for advice becomes way easier once you know which base distro you're using. Heck, it might even make you prefer these baseline distros. Hope this helps, and I hope you find the distro that finally fits you.
@@vincentnthomas1 NixOS isn't the end-all be-all distro bud. Sure it can replicate your entire Linux install with one file, but at the cost of needing to unlearn everything you know about Linux. Also, NixOS just eats-up the root directory a bunch, which means you have to keep everything to one partition. Point is: everyone's got their own favourite distro. There is no perfect distro.
More of a why video rather than a How.. love to see a video on how you use github and nc to restore everything quickly. I want to swap away from windows, but losing all my files, aka configs, save files etc, everytime a distro breaks is a big hurdle.
Reminds me of how i was lol. Wanted to yeet windows but didnt wanna go through the efforts, but once windows screwed with my files it became more of a hassle to fix everything than what it was worth, so i just backed up everything to my external and wiped windows. Was the best decision of my life tbh, and now it's honestly not that bad to reinstall and setup everything again, takes less time, and less hassle, everything also feels faster than when i was running windows. Hope you find a vid that helps you with your use case tho, cuz in my case i literally just jumped ship cuz i was annoyed and had a screwed up system and broken apps within a month of getting a bigger NVME with a fresh windows install, so i basically had a backup of all my stuff already
Why would anyone with a proper backup process in place lose all of their files and configs when a distro breaks? Surely you just restore from a recent backup and then try to work out why the breakage happened. Ultimately it's your lack of due diligence that is the problem there.
for all guys, who don't want to put their info online, install cloud servers, etc, etc - just get an external hard drive (not ssd - make sure it's an actual hdd - hard drive -they tend to retain the info for longer and safer, than ssd) - and then rsync your entire home folder to that drive. On top of that you can use Timeshift to make snapshots of the entire system.
I’ve been using Linux Mint xfce as my daily driver for 12 years now. I only occasionally distro hop on my old laptop. My main computer is always Linux Mint!!
On a side note - Another method of backup of sorts would be to make an iso of your entire system, have an additional relatively small hdd attached to your system and literally use that , lets say 300gb hdd as a huge usb disk that has an installable live version of your OS as it is. I venture you could use said hdd in conjunction with ventoy. Due to the size there is possibly space for multiple bootable iso's including the snapshot of your system. So up system, instead of launching the usb disk, launch the hdd and take your pick of iso's to run, test or install. If shyte goes south, install your snapshot iso.
@@vonweiss7149I actually liked that it introduced me to symlinks in Linux. Which led me to search into them a bit more and I have to say, they are a powerful little thing. I also find them very clean, given the right use case.
I also have a notes folder for this kind of stuff. I should probably just make a shell function for some of the things I have notes on, like using ghostscript to merge multiple PDF's which it seems like I have to do at least once a week yet never remember the command. Definitely recommend a separate /home folder on its own partition or drive, but not just for distro hoppers, rather for everyone. If you have to reinstall your distro but want to keep the same distro, it makes things so much easier. You just need to remember to setup your different users in the same order.
Even if you don't have a second drive (laptops, etc.), you can still format your single drive to have an extra partition dedicated to your home/ directory.
@hashem4806 the users are the people making it in a lot of cases. So maybe in a way. But it's also, a bunch of software made by the community, vs Microsoft using the code on GitHub so they can train their ai in these two examples. And you can look at the cases where it's not a community effort with Linux, like canonical. It's pretty clearly not the same situation.
How about a video which clearly shows your backup strategy, or maybe what directories are important to back up so that you can get up and running quickly. A demo perhaps of blowing away your install and getting back up to a similar place would be great. What I am struggling with is knowing I actually have enough of the critical stuff backed up and more important: how I would actually move everything back in place so things function. I am not talking about a home directory that is trivial. I am talking about the random config files and packages and libraries. I don't want to back all of those up but how do you ensure all of your config files and dotfiles are truly backed up when some programs might scatter them randomly?
something I've done with syncthing, is because you cannot sync to multiple drives - for my precious data (family media) I use syncthing to sync it to my local server, as well as use docker to make syncthing instances that allow me to have all my hard drives have a synced folder. I know that if one of my drives fails, I have my most precious data on my other 3 drives.
To add to that: create a post install script that's install packages, mount partitions and move all dotfiles to the right place. I can get a distro running in 5 minutes.
an external usb ssd with 2 terabytes costs about 150$; you can have all your data there and linked them to your home directory. Thus hopping or reinstalling becomes much easier. Thus my pc has an nvme and an internal ssd disk both of 512 GB, but they are 93% empty, since my main data are elsewhere, in the external ssd, which can be shared among several distros or installation. (In fact both my internal devices have the same distro, Lubuntu 22.04, a duplication which is a precaution, owing to grub's unreliability; I now use refind, much safer, to my mind.) Of course hopping is quite amusing and can become addictive, like wine and chocolate. What is more problematic is to save the configs in /etc, esp. with the labirynthic systemd. (When I was a Slackware user all was much easier.)
Funny, I guessed about the self documenting thing since I just naturally started doing it. Especially by my second time using Linux in a virtual machine. Just writing it down makes it both easier to remember and parse and you can just do step by step instructions, troubleshooting and the fixes and different configuration options, tools and how to use them again. If you like to configure your system in any way, even if it's just a plug and play one, you'll go mad if you don't do this. Just the idea that you have configuration backups is so much better than Windows. I can't tell how infuriating having to reinstall Windows was when something went so wrong with the system that the most I could do is backup my personal data while having to reinstall everything and reconfigure everything. With Linux you can automate that process. As for the separate drives you can do the same thing with having subvolumes using btrfs which I recently learned how to manually do. It's actually quite nice. Though I can understand wanting a second hard drive if you can afford it.
I'm really happy with Linux Mint but I've been considering installing the KDE Desktop (Desktop only) to have in addition to Cinnamon. Thanks for this video.
Having a separate /home partition or drive is something I should have done when I installed Mint because I'm tempted to jump to LMDE and update it to Debian Sid for fun, but I'll have to do the process manually and copy the dot config files.
Lmde felt exactly like Debian with Cinnamon DE 😂 if it's for fun running sid, id say go for it 🙌 wish i had newer mint packages with Debian, but i guess I'll just slap KDE onto my mint install and run it like that, cuz man Debian feels old 😅 plus im running mint 21.3 at the moment, not even 22😂
I try not to hop, but sometimes you just want an environment change without worrying about breaking the desktop adding or removing environments like kde, gnome, cinnamon, etc
You could possibly have some issues if hopping to a different distro if the versions of some of software is different. Sometimes, software changes the way their config files are structured, which could cause some issues. But that just means that you'd have to rewrite a new config file in the proper format.
I made a home partition to make distro change easier. But unfortunately I wanted to install Alpine. The installation has becomes so hard then I gave up my home partition, choose the automatic installation that erase the whole disk. I rsync my files from my external HDD, while crying 😅
i think separate home dir is pretty good solution, because there is zfs file system which allows you to separate home easier. And basically this system anyway will be best solution for average user (backups, compressing...) Edit: btrfs
@@Kokurorokuko Sure, btrfs just allows them to share same space so you don't need to think which one should be bigger. And, as i know, som other small issues
Now I gotta look through your videos for anything you've done on what software you use to organize and play classical music. Everything I've tried so far doesn't work well with the way classical is curated.
ive been going from ubuntu to ubuntu every 5 years for the paxt 25 years 0 issue on any of them, software engineer here..i only change my installation and ubunto ver every 5 years which is how often i update my pc
Hey, any advice about installing multiple distros into the same Btrfs filesystem? That is, under separate subvolumes .. I could still mount the home subvolume as my home dir (or maybe as a subdir of it), but I'd have subvolumes for each distro I'm hopping between. Good idea? Has anyone had success with this approach?
there's an easier way to self host nextcloud, without the limitations that the snap package has, there is a vm script for deployment, that streamlines and simplifies everything, you do need to have a clean ubuntu server install to deploy it, i'm currently running it on an old sony vaio (i3-3110m, 6gb ram) with an external ssd as storage and it works like a charm if you already self host other stuff then you might have to reconsider if it's worth doing a clean install or if you'd rather do it by hand, but that was my intro into selfhosting so it's super begginer friendly
I do pretty much the same thing except I use my own Synology instead of storing my information on someone else’s server. Yeah, it’s not a 100% FOSS, but I am not a puritan.
Simple. Get a 24 TB HDD. Install VirtualBox. Install and run hundreds or thousands of distros (preferably not at once, lol). Then, see which are stable, convenient, bleeding-edge, beautiful, fast, etc. Choose the top ten and narrow them down to one. Make it your main OS. Done (for a couple years).
Sorry. It does not work this way. The reason is that VMs use a highly standardized and popular hardware drivers. Most distros will work well under VM because of the good driver support. When you install the distro into real hardware not VM, some drivers may not be available and it ends up completely different as in running under VM. So I hate UA-cam videos that review Linux distros all running under VM. It is good for video production but reflects zero percent real-life experience. Most people want to install their distro in bare metal PC and not run under a VM.
Most of the distros that im playing right now are Debian based...... I don't know what is wrong with me it like a sickness I guess but I like driving something different every now and then and one of the things I have wanted to try is what you are talking about like putting my home directory on a different drive... so my question is can I share this drive with other like Debian distors like Parrot, Ubuntu, MX Linux and now im wanting to try Mint again..... what is my best solution?
Maybe a stupid question - if the new distribution uses a different file system (say btrfs) than your other drives with home and say Music, will things work?
I guess usually yes. I'd expect any kind of modern distro will be able to mount any common filesystem (btrfs, ext4, xfs). Heck, Linux usually handles NTFS and vfat out of the box. Bitlocker encrypted Windows drive with minimal effort. Your drive has partitions, and what you put into which partition is pretty much your own choice. I personally am fond of LVM (logical volumes). So if some stuff is (example) on partition 3 and other stuff (Windows?) on partition 4 and 5, and after that still free space, you make partition 6 another LVM volume, add it to the Logical-volume-group in partition 3, and can distribute the new space you added to whatever logical volumes you have in that partition 3 so far. Perhaps / and /home. If things are on different drives, it becomes even more "do whatever you want", but for example above, you can do same: take one partition on new drive and add it to same volume group where / and /home are. You can even move stuff in logical volumes between the two disks - online, while you use it, even root partition. But that's just me. Never got warm with btrfs. Grown up with RHEL and CentOS servers last 15 years :)
Another comment: I do NOT have separate /home . Fedora upgrades to new release every ~6 months. Since Fed 24 (now we are at 40) _One_ single time I had problems. (So, good to copy everything important out anyway, just in case). Otherwise, I do upgrade for 6-10 versions. Then I might do a session where I copy everything I need from /home to my external 6TB drive (well, two of them), good opportunity to thin out what I don't need any more, reinstall, and copy back what I think I will still need in future (which might be less than what I backed up / intended to keep). For this copying out / comparing / checking (when I rearranged things), BeyondCompare (recursive directory tree comparing) is gold. Well worth the money for me. It's a lot of work, but it gives me the feeling of being in control what is there and what not.
IMO, all distros are the same when it comes to every day use for your average end user. the only things that really changes between them all is what kind of package manager they use, any maybe some kind of custom apps that the distro developer might have made specifically for their distribution. as long as people can get the software they need, it doesn't really matter if they get it via dnf or apt get
Not totally. As workstation I ever only used Fedora with KDE. For work I mostly had to do with RHEL and Centos. But from sysadmin perspective that's as similar as you can get. My daughter got from somewhere an Ubuntu with Gnome. Didn't last 3 days for me to find nothing, nada, getting annoyed, and resinstalled it with Fedora KDE. I imagine a lot of people who just want a computer to surf the web, write mails and some documents, and do not want to use Windows, they settle with one Distro and go with it. But what do I know. Distro hopping like DT and Brodie I guess is for people who generally enjoy tinkering with Linux. Like others spend time gardening :)
@ClemensKatzer Idk I do alot of tinkering, although just never felt the need to have other distress on my home machines. I've used fedora before too for school, and Debian. Never hooked me personally. The arch wiki is too powerful for me to walk away from lmao
@@Matt-sk6hi Yeah, everybody can do tinker with Linux as much or as little as he wants. Isn't that great? I personally *could* do a lot of tinkering (and enjoy doing it for servers) but most of the time I just want my Laptop to work as, well, personal PC to do Internet (UA-cam, Browser, Mail, Music, Documents, Scanning, Printing). So, as replacement for Windows, I would recommend Fedora with KDE any day of the week. With the start menu etc. it looks pretty similar to Windows, so that step from Windows to Linux is a lot easier than Gnome. Where the frog is this or that? How do I even do ... ? The things are called differently, but if you can use the start menu and task bar on Windows you can also use it on KDE. Both my wife and daughter use it (though they have also dualboot, if kid needs Windows for school).
I created Media folder which is stored on another hdd 1TB drive. System is on 128GB SSD and Media is a symlink at /home/USER/Media to /mnt/mediafiles/Media
I use rescuezilla and an nvme usb case. I can make an image of os in like 2 minutes on my new laptop and then i can switch os in like 2 minutes! Of course, I'm talking about an image that is configured without any data on it.
Distro hopping makes no sense to me. Theres basically only 3 distros 99℅ of people need to be using. Debian, Arch, or Fedora. Everything else can just be built on top of that. Most of the time people change distros, but really what they want is a new desktop environmwnt
For most Linux users, Linux is just a glorified browser with Steam. It's not difficult to reinstall an OS when you don't actually do anything productive on it.
NixOS made me stop distro hopping, I used to distro hop at least once a month. After switching to NixOS I haven't distro hopped in 2 years, so... NIXOS MENTIONED
"I want that package from that distro and this one from this distro, I want sprinkles on the top and it's all about me me me, now now now" - Pick 'n' NixOS, the distro for people that can't make their minds up as to what they want.
Why they distro hop? simple; no linux 0/s is stable. Windows is stable, not linux. Linux Light was stable and the other 60+ other linux distros were not stable. Not even Linux Mint (which is a joke btw)...
Do let me know when someone gets that "sleek and fast" Wayland running on a Pentium III laptop from 22 years ago as well as "bloated and broken" Xorg does on it today, won't you?
@@exnihilonihilfit6316 Perhaps you not being able to visualise the reason demonstrates the limitations in your own thought processes? Just a thought. So run along (again), sonny, you seem obsessed with "mental states" but not computers, Mr. Amateur Internet Psychologist. Don't you know much about computers then? You don't seem to be able to talk about them much?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Don't get mad at me for having 22 year old hardware lol not my problem go run Debian with like xfce or something idk with that i really don't care.
@@ImChaotic1 Okay, I won't get mad at you for having 22 year old hardware. Did you want to add anything else? But this time with a bit more punctuation?
Yes, Spotify is for people who steal music because they have no value for it - it's just a commodity they can chop and change when they want to, it's typical of the "me me me now now now" generation that need everything always available to them. I buy CDs, I have a collection of more than 4000 now. I rip them to my music server and then they sit on a shelf as their own backups. Because I paid good money for them (a greater proportion of which goes to the artist than when you and others steal it on Spotify or iTunes), I appreciate them fully which means that two or three times a week, I can just go sit in a nice comfortable armchair, with a coffee or a beer, close my eyes and just listen to a classic album from start to finish... ...unlike your modern generation that treats it like "Pick n Mix sweeties" ("I want that track over there and this one over here...") and only ever listens to it in the background while doing something else.
@@terrydaktyllus1320someone with sense 🙌 im in the generation where i use UA-cam music for streaming while driving or whatever, and to be honest we dont "own" the music on there, and it can be taken away from us in an instant (just as we receive it instantly), but actual hard copies of music will always be better, because nobody can take it away, even if the internet dies. I personally buy music discs and even purchased an album on an LP set from the artist's themselves, as that money goes directly to them, and doesn't fill the pockets of the streaming platform. Artists' music get 1000s of plays via streaming and it doesnt even come close to a hundred dollars. If you buy a CD for 15 bucks, youve already paid an artist for '15 individual streams" which is more than they even get for over 700+ streams. Keep supporting the artists, not the companies making money off of the artist's ✌️
@@exnihilonihilfit6316 This isn't a discussion about me, sonny. Put your "amateur Internet psychologist" books away and run along. I'm only here to talk to adults about computers, remember that next time we meet.
@@exnihilonihilfit6316 This isn't a discussion about me so put your "amateur Internet psychologist" books away now. We're talking about computers. If you cannot contribute because you know nothing about computers then sit down, read and learn or just run along.
One last thing I'd recommend when either reinstalling or distro hopping is to write-down all the packages you install, and/or make a simple script to reinstall them all.
You will not believe how many packages you'll forget you had installed on your machine, and making these quick package installing scripts saves so much time. It also makes distro hopping easier, as you can just check each distro's repo to see if they have all the packages you need instead of installing a new distro, realizing they don't have your packages, and reinstalling your previous distro.
You don't even need to laboriously write them down one-by-one either, I'm pretty sure every package manager comes with a tool to list all your manually installed packages, and a simple awk, grep, sed, and/or cut command can get you a ready made script containing all your packages
Oh, and one last last thing I recommend is always use a spare computer when distro hopping! Doing so makes it so much less of a headache, and you can freely experiment with it until you get something to your liking for your main rig.
I'm gonna need to do the script idea lol. Once i decide to reinstall Linux I'll do the separate home dir as that's something I've been planning on doing, but not in the mood to reinstall Linux at the moment with all that work to be done. I'm defs in the mood to test diff distros tho, so I'm gonna continue doing that in a VM and see which one I'm gonna give a shot next for when I do decide to hop around 😅
@@morpheon_xyz
If you're up for it, you can also try installing a more barebones distro like Debian, Arch, Fedora, and OpenSUSE.
Not for any sort of "challenge" (Debian and Fedora aren't even that hard to install honestly), but because most distros are all based on one of these 5 distros, and all of them have their own quirks to them.
Understanding those quirks will massively narrow down your distro choices, as instead of searching for "Distros that come with GNOME" you can instead search for "Debian based distros" (that's if you like Debian). Plus searching for advice becomes way easier once you know which base distro you're using. Heck, it might even make you prefer these baseline distros.
Hope this helps, and I hope you find the distro that finally fits you.
Ask chatGPT for the necessary commands
NixOS
@@vincentnthomas1
NixOS isn't the end-all be-all distro bud. Sure it can replicate your entire Linux install with one file, but at the cost of needing to unlearn everything you know about Linux.
Also, NixOS just eats-up the root directory a bunch, which means you have to keep everything to one partition.
Point is: everyone's got their own favourite distro. There is no perfect distro.
There's no NixOS on the thumbnail because you can't distrohop away from NixOS
NixOS worths?
Arch better @@lisanalghaib
lol same nix ganggggggggg
if u can learn then yeah, it's hard but the best@@lisanalghaib
I actually did, haha
More of a why video rather than a How.. love to see a video on how you use github and nc to restore everything quickly. I want to swap away from windows, but losing all my files, aka configs, save files etc, everytime a distro breaks is a big hurdle.
Reminds me of how i was lol. Wanted to yeet windows but didnt wanna go through the efforts, but once windows screwed with my files it became more of a hassle to fix everything than what it was worth, so i just backed up everything to my external and wiped windows. Was the best decision of my life tbh, and now it's honestly not that bad to reinstall and setup everything again, takes less time, and less hassle, everything also feels faster than when i was running windows. Hope you find a vid that helps you with your use case tho, cuz in my case i literally just jumped ship cuz i was annoyed and had a screwed up system and broken apps within a month of getting a bigger NVME with a fresh windows install, so i basically had a backup of all my stuff already
Why would anyone with a proper backup process in place lose all of their files and configs when a distro breaks? Surely you just restore from a recent backup and then try to work out why the breakage happened. Ultimately it's your lack of due diligence that is the problem there.
I have to say, Good Quality Video = Good lens * Good light * Good Mic. Keep up the Good Work, Thumbs Up.
for all guys, who don't want to put their info online, install cloud servers, etc, etc - just get an external hard drive (not ssd - make sure it's an actual hdd - hard drive -they tend to retain the info for longer and safer, than ssd) - and then rsync your entire home folder to that drive.
On top of that you can use Timeshift to make snapshots of the entire system.
Did not expect to see those great classical composers on a distro hopping video 👍🏿
I’ve been using Linux Mint xfce as my daily driver for 12 years now. I only occasionally distro hop on my old laptop. My main computer is always Linux Mint!!
On a side note - Another method of backup of sorts would be to make an iso of your entire system, have an additional relatively small hdd attached to your system and literally use that , lets say 300gb hdd as a huge usb disk that has an installable live version of your OS as it is. I venture you could use said hdd in conjunction with ventoy. Due to the size there is possibly space for multiple bootable iso's including the snapshot of your system. So up system, instead of launching the usb disk, launch the hdd and take your pick of iso's to run, test or install. If shyte goes south, install your snapshot iso.
Haven't hopped from Void in years. Main purpose is gaming too. I approve of the thumbnail.
Besides the system links if you're a newcomer Yea it's great distro
@@vonweiss7149I actually liked that it introduced me to symlinks in Linux. Which led me to search into them a bit more and I have to say, they are a powerful little thing. I also find them very clean, given the right use case.
I started with Manjaro, Arco and Arch. I tried many others over the years, but always come back.
I also have a notes folder for this kind of stuff. I should probably just make a shell function for some of the things I have notes on, like using ghostscript to merge multiple PDF's which it seems like I have to do at least once a week yet never remember the command. Definitely recommend a separate /home folder on its own partition or drive, but not just for distro hoppers, rather for everyone. If you have to reinstall your distro but want to keep the same distro, it makes things so much easier. You just need to remember to setup your different users in the same order.
Even if you don't have a second drive (laptops, etc.), you can still format your single drive to have an extra partition dedicated to your home/ directory.
Correct. Partitions are just logical, not physical, divisions of drives.
Just remember is something is free you are the product. Especially with something microsoft owned like github.
Nothing wrong with being "the product", commie.
Linux is free, are you the product?
@hashem4806 the users are the people making it in a lot of cases. So maybe in a way. But it's also, a bunch of software made by the community, vs Microsoft using the code on GitHub so they can train their ai in these two examples. And you can look at the cases where it's not a community effort with Linux, like canonical.
It's pretty clearly not the same situation.
How about a video which clearly shows your backup strategy, or maybe what directories are important to back up so that you can get up and running quickly. A demo perhaps of blowing away your install and getting back up to a similar place would be great. What I am struggling with is knowing I actually have enough of the critical stuff backed up and more important: how I would actually move everything back in place so things function. I am not talking about a home directory that is trivial. I am talking about the random config files and packages and libraries. I don't want to back all of those up but how do you ensure all of your config files and dotfiles are truly backed up when some programs might scatter them randomly?
something I've done with syncthing, is because you cannot sync to multiple drives - for my precious data (family media) I use syncthing to sync it to my local server, as well as use docker to make syncthing instances that allow me to have all my hard drives have a synced folder. I know that if one of my drives fails, I have my most precious data on my other 3 drives.
To add to that: create a post install script that's install packages, mount partitions and move all dotfiles to the right place. I can get a distro running in 5 minutes.
an external usb ssd with 2 terabytes costs about 150$; you can have all your data there and linked them to your home directory.
Thus hopping or reinstalling becomes much easier.
Thus my pc has an nvme and an internal ssd disk both of 512 GB, but they are 93% empty, since my main data are elsewhere, in the external ssd, which can be shared among several distros or installation. (In fact both my internal devices have the same distro, Lubuntu 22.04, a duplication which is a precaution, owing to grub's unreliability; I now use refind, much safer, to my mind.) Of course hopping is quite amusing and can become addictive, like wine and chocolate.
What is more problematic is to save the configs in /etc, esp. with the labirynthic systemd. (When I was a Slackware user all was much easier.)
Funny, I guessed about the self documenting thing since I just naturally started doing it. Especially by my second time using Linux in a virtual machine. Just writing it down makes it both easier to remember and parse and you can just do step by step instructions, troubleshooting and the fixes and different configuration options, tools and how to use them again.
If you like to configure your system in any way, even if it's just a plug and play one, you'll go mad if you don't do this.
Just the idea that you have configuration backups is so much better than Windows. I can't tell how infuriating having to reinstall Windows was when something went so wrong with the system that the most I could do is backup my personal data while having to reinstall everything and reconfigure everything. With Linux you can automate that process.
As for the separate drives you can do the same thing with having subvolumes using btrfs which I recently learned how to manually do. It's actually quite nice. Though I can understand wanting a second hard drive if you can afford it.
I'm really happy with Linux Mint but I've been considering installing the KDE Desktop (Desktop only) to have in addition to Cinnamon. Thanks for this video.
Having a separate /home partition or drive is something I should have done when I installed Mint because I'm tempted to jump to LMDE and update it to Debian Sid for fun, but I'll have to do the process manually and copy the dot config files.
Lmde felt exactly like Debian with Cinnamon DE 😂 if it's for fun running sid, id say go for it 🙌 wish i had newer mint packages with Debian, but i guess I'll just slap KDE onto my mint install and run it like that, cuz man Debian feels old 😅 plus im running mint 21.3 at the moment, not even 22😂
@@morpheon_xyz I'm also still on Mint 21.3 haha. Gotta upgrade to 22 when I find a good time to do so.
Agree debian looks and feels old back to endeavouros love it. 😅
LMDE to SID? Don't do this, it will be a disaster.
@@armanis1234 lol, nah i use apt and got used to it, so old habits die hard i guess 🤣 but ya i must get used to endeavour 👀
I try not to hop, but sometimes you just want an environment change without worrying about breaking the desktop adding or removing environments like kde, gnome, cinnamon, etc
8:44 150 GB great
i have a similar folder with 3011 songs upto 50GB
so i feel it!
Currently at 217 GB after 22 years of collecting.
@@50-50_Grindthat’s a lot of music
I have less than 10GB and I thought that was a lot, haha
always have /home on a seperate partition
You can set up NextCloud yourself on your own local server.
8:30 Hey DT! When will you release a mixtape of the top 25 DistroTube certified bangers?
whats up dt thanks for the vid
Aren't there any conflicts between your current dot files and the new distro dot files?
You could possibly have some issues if hopping to a different distro if the versions of some of software is different. Sometimes, software changes the way their config files are structured, which could cause some issues. But that just means that you'd have to rewrite a new config file in the proper format.
I had a long time of distro hopping behind me, I finally decided on Linux Mint Debian edition! Sorry for my bad english, i'm from Germany!
Your third option is what i do. I have a huge nvme for my home drive. Specifically for the home. But i backup to a HDD
I made a home partition to make distro change easier. But unfortunately I wanted to install Alpine. The installation has becomes so hard then I gave up my home partition, choose the automatic installation that erase the whole disk. I rsync my files from my external HDD, while crying 😅
i think separate home dir is pretty good solution, because there is zfs file system which allows you to separate home easier. And basically this system anyway will be best solution for average user (backups, compressing...)
Edit: btrfs
lol, i meant btrfs, not zfs, zfs a bit harder (but pretty same)
ext4 allows to have a separate home folder partition too, without any problems, as far as I'm aware
@@Kokurorokuko Sure, btrfs just allows them to share same space so you don't need to think which one should be bigger. And, as i know, som other small issues
Now I gotta look through your videos for anything you've done on what software you use to organize and play classical music. Everything I've tried so far doesn't work well with the way classical is curated.
Powerful hints
ive been going from ubuntu to ubuntu every 5 years for the paxt 25 years 0 issue on any of them, software engineer here..i only change my installation and ubunto ver every 5 years which is how often i update my pc
Hey, any advice about installing multiple distros into the same Btrfs filesystem? That is, under separate subvolumes .. I could still mount the home subvolume as my home dir (or maybe as a subdir of it), but I'd have subvolumes for each distro I'm hopping between. Good idea? Has anyone had success with this approach?
there's an easier way to self host nextcloud, without the limitations that the snap package has, there is a vm script for deployment, that streamlines and simplifies everything, you do need to have a clean ubuntu server install to deploy it, i'm currently running it on an old sony vaio (i3-3110m, 6gb ram) with an external ssd as storage and it works like a charm
if you already self host other stuff then you might have to reconsider if it's worth doing a clean install or if you'd rather do it by hand, but that was my intro into selfhosting so it's super begginer friendly
Very helpful Thanks
I do pretty much the same thing except I use my own Synology instead of storing my information on someone else’s server. Yeah, it’s not a 100% FOSS, but I am not a puritan.
Doesn't it make more sense to just create a seperate /home and just reinstall in / partition?
Simple. Get a 24 TB HDD. Install VirtualBox. Install and run hundreds or thousands of distros (preferably not at once, lol). Then, see which are stable, convenient, bleeding-edge, beautiful, fast, etc. Choose the top ten and narrow them down to one. Make it your main OS. Done (for a couple years).
Sorry. It does not work this way. The reason is that VMs use a highly standardized and popular hardware drivers. Most distros will work well under VM because of the good driver support. When you install the distro into real hardware not VM, some drivers may not be available and it ends up completely different as in running under VM. So I hate UA-cam videos that review Linux distros all running under VM. It is good for video production but reflects zero percent real-life experience. Most people want to install their distro in bare metal PC and not run under a VM.
Most of the distros that im playing right now are Debian based...... I don't know what is wrong with me it like a sickness I guess but I like driving something different every now and then and one of the things I have wanted to try is what you are talking about like putting my home directory on a different drive... so my question is can I share this drive with other like Debian distors like Parrot, Ubuntu, MX Linux and now im wanting to try Mint again..... what is my best solution?
Yes
He has a whole video on that topic (Move Your Home Directory To A Second Drive) linked in the description. Does that video not answer your question?
Maybe a stupid question - if the new distribution uses a different file system (say btrfs) than your other drives with home and say Music, will things work?
I guess usually yes. I'd expect any kind of modern distro will be able to mount any common filesystem (btrfs, ext4, xfs). Heck, Linux usually handles NTFS and vfat out of the box. Bitlocker encrypted Windows drive with minimal effort. Your drive has partitions, and what you put into which partition is pretty much your own choice.
I personally am fond of LVM (logical volumes). So if some stuff is (example) on partition 3 and other stuff (Windows?) on partition 4 and 5, and after that still free space, you make partition 6 another LVM volume, add it to the Logical-volume-group in partition 3, and can distribute the new space you added to whatever logical volumes you have in that partition 3 so far. Perhaps / and /home.
If things are on different drives, it becomes even more "do whatever you want", but for example above, you can do same: take one partition on new drive and add it to same volume group where / and /home are. You can even move stuff in logical volumes between the two disks - online, while you use it, even root partition.
But that's just me. Never got warm with btrfs. Grown up with RHEL and CentOS servers last 15 years :)
Another comment: I do NOT have separate /home . Fedora upgrades to new release every ~6 months. Since Fed 24 (now we are at 40) _One_ single time I had problems. (So, good to copy everything important out anyway, just in case). Otherwise, I do upgrade for 6-10 versions. Then I might do a session where I copy everything I need from /home to my external 6TB drive (well, two of them), good opportunity to thin out what I don't need any more, reinstall, and copy back what I think I will still need in future (which might be less than what I backed up / intended to keep).
For this copying out / comparing / checking (when I rearranged things), BeyondCompare (recursive directory tree comparing) is gold. Well worth the money for me. It's a lot of work, but it gives me the feeling of being in control what is there and what not.
i distrohopped a few times and id like to say that gentoo is my final stop
After years of distrohopping I 1) learned how to change a distro in 10 minutes keeping my apps and data 2) stopped hopping landed on cachyos
IMO, all distros are the same when it comes to every day use for your average end user. the only things that really changes between them all is what kind of package manager they use, any maybe some kind of custom apps that the distro developer might have made specifically for their distribution.
as long as people can get the software they need, it doesn't really matter if they get it via dnf or apt get
Am I the only linux user who just doesn't distro hop? I've used like 2 distros in my life. One of them I only used for like a month before going Arch
Not totally. As workstation I ever only used Fedora with KDE. For work I mostly had to do with RHEL and Centos. But from sysadmin perspective that's as similar as you can get. My daughter got from somewhere an Ubuntu with Gnome. Didn't last 3 days for me to find nothing, nada, getting annoyed, and resinstalled it with Fedora KDE.
I imagine a lot of people who just want a computer to surf the web, write mails and some documents, and do not want to use Windows, they settle with one Distro and go with it. But what do I know.
Distro hopping like DT and Brodie I guess is for people who generally enjoy tinkering with Linux. Like others spend time gardening :)
@ClemensKatzer Idk I do alot of tinkering, although just never felt the need to have other distress on my home machines. I've used fedora before too for school, and Debian. Never hooked me personally. The arch wiki is too powerful for me to walk away from lmao
@@Matt-sk6hi Yeah, everybody can do tinker with Linux as much or as little as he wants. Isn't that great?
I personally *could* do a lot of tinkering (and enjoy doing it for servers) but most of the time I just want my Laptop to work as, well, personal PC to do Internet (UA-cam, Browser, Mail, Music, Documents, Scanning, Printing).
So, as replacement for Windows, I would recommend Fedora with KDE any day of the week. With the start menu etc. it looks pretty similar to Windows, so that step from Windows to Linux is a lot easier than Gnome. Where the frog is this or that? How do I even do ... ?
The things are called differently, but if you can use the start menu and task bar on Windows you can also use it on KDE. Both my wife and daughter use it (though they have also dualboot, if kid needs Windows for school).
@ClemensKatzer I usually recommend Mint, but tbh haven't used either in awhile.
no mention of Nix or even Ansible ???
Just put your Home Dir on a separate partition and not overwrite?
Or just make /home on a separate partition :)
I created Media folder which is stored on another hdd 1TB drive.
System is on 128GB SSD and Media is a symlink at /home/USER/Media to /mnt/mediafiles/Media
NixOS is the best OS in the world, but you probably shouldn't use it
I use rescuezilla and an nvme usb case. I can make an image of os in like 2 minutes on my new laptop and then i can switch os in like 2 minutes! Of course, I'm talking about an image that is configured without any data on it.
Seperate /home partition or drive, this is the way.
I've heard you can also do it with a btrfs subvolume instead
I hope you got your "music"-HD in a RAID-I config (mirrored). -
😎Pro user always set couple of btrfs auto snapshots per day for time shift if they messed with system.😂
Qubes?
How? Just make a home partition.
it linux magic 😁
I have a script that does all the things for me
Just stop distro hopping guys💪
Saludos
🐧 🖥 🐧 🖥
Distro hopping makes no sense to me. Theres basically only 3 distros 99℅ of people need to be using. Debian, Arch, or Fedora. Everything else can just be built on top of that. Most of the time people change distros, but really what they want is a new desktop environmwnt
Linux power user DT is
or just use nixos
For most Linux users, Linux is just a glorified browser with Steam. It's not difficult to reinstall an OS when you don't actually do anything productive on it.
NixOS made me stop distro hopping, I used to distro hop at least once a month. After switching to NixOS I haven't distro hopped in 2 years, so... NIXOS MENTIONED
"I want that package from that distro and this one from this distro, I want sprinkles on the top and it's all about me me me, now now now" - Pick 'n' NixOS, the distro for people that can't make their minds up as to what they want.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 something else is going on here.
@@bologna3048 "something else is going on here."
Do feel free to enlighten me, then, Sherlock.
I literally hopped 3 times over the weekend coz arch broke.... I didn’t like any of them and went back to a fresh re-install of arch 😂
I hopped 3 times over the day😂
nixos has rollbacks out of the box btw 🥶
I went with gentoo 3 years ago and haven't reinstalled since
@@gksudolol translate this into your language “بخوای هم نمیتونی چون دوباره نصب کردنش کار حضرت نوحه”
@@Ar1yan824 reinstalling it is the work of hazrat noha? Wtf?
Why they distro hop? simple; no linux 0/s is stable. Windows is stable, not linux. Linux Light was stable and the other 60+ other linux distros were not stable. Not even Linux Mint (which is a joke btw)...
Fedora + Hyprland = never hop again.
Do let me know when someone gets that "sleek and fast" Wayland running on a Pentium III laptop from 22 years ago as well as "bloated and broken" Xorg does on it today, won't you?
@@terrydaktyllus1320Why would someone do that, unless they're insane?
@@exnihilonihilfit6316 Perhaps you not being able to visualise the reason demonstrates the limitations in your own thought processes? Just a thought.
So run along (again), sonny, you seem obsessed with "mental states" but not computers, Mr. Amateur Internet Psychologist.
Don't you know much about computers then? You don't seem to be able to talk about them much?
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Don't get mad at me for having 22 year old hardware lol not my problem go run Debian with like xfce or something idk with that i really don't care.
@@ImChaotic1 Okay, I won't get mad at you for having 22 year old hardware.
Did you want to add anything else? But this time with a bit more punctuation?
Did you steal all that music?
I don't know of a service that gives you files with music...
Did you steal the words you're using?
My music is from my own CDs.
why do you save music? ever heard of spotify? wtf
some of us like to bave the files on our machines
Go back to windows, you're not ready.
Yes, Spotify is for people who steal music because they have no value for it - it's just a commodity they can chop and change when they want to, it's typical of the "me me me now now now" generation that need everything always available to them.
I buy CDs, I have a collection of more than 4000 now. I rip them to my music server and then they sit on a shelf as their own backups. Because I paid good money for them (a greater proportion of which goes to the artist than when you and others steal it on Spotify or iTunes), I appreciate them fully which means that two or three times a week, I can just go sit in a nice comfortable armchair, with a coffee or a beer, close my eyes and just listen to a classic album from start to finish...
...unlike your modern generation that treats it like "Pick n Mix sweeties" ("I want that track over there and this one over here...") and only ever listens to it in the background while doing something else.
You mean Plex or Jellyfin?
@@terrydaktyllus1320someone with sense 🙌 im in the generation where i use UA-cam music for streaming while driving or whatever, and to be honest we dont "own" the music on there, and it can be taken away from us in an instant (just as we receive it instantly), but actual hard copies of music will always be better, because nobody can take it away, even if the internet dies. I personally buy music discs and even purchased an album on an LP set from the artist's themselves, as that money goes directly to them, and doesn't fill the pockets of the streaming platform. Artists' music get 1000s of plays via streaming and it doesnt even come close to a hundred dollars. If you buy a CD for 15 bucks, youve already paid an artist for '15 individual streams" which is more than they even get for over 700+ streams. Keep supporting the artists, not the companies making money off of the artist's ✌️
1min gang
Imagine using Linux 😂😂
I found Gentoo in 2003.
My distro hopping ceased in 2003.
You're welcome.
"You're welcome"? How old are you, 13?
@@exnihilonihilfit6316 This isn't a discussion about me, sonny. Put your "amateur Internet psychologist" books away and run along.
I'm only here to talk to adults about computers, remember that next time we meet.
@@exnihilonihilfit6316 This isn't a discussion about me so put your "amateur Internet psychologist" books away now.
We're talking about computers. If you cannot contribute because you know nothing about computers then sit down, read and learn or just run along.
Expecting to see you with that MAGA hat again this year.