[dagw]

It is a stupid Endeavour

Installing and switching between a half dozen distros (plus a couple of BDSs and Open Solaris) when first learning to use *nix really taught me a lot about all kinds of different aspects and philosophies of the *nix world and getting all those distros to actually install and run gave me lots problem solving skills.

Now I've settled on Ubuntu, been using it basically exclusively for the past 10+ years (minus a short affair with Arch a few years ago) and have no plans on switching. But having that initial experience with lots of different OSs was very educational.

[case0x]

Quite interesting to see how our experiences differentiate as I never got the chance to really understand what I was doing or what is going on but maybe that depends on our different approaches when switching distros

[smoldesu]

It really is a matter of perspective. I ended up doing the same thing as the parent comment, switching to Linux after being fed up with Windows and MacOS. It took me a few tries to find a package manager that worked for me (and I certainly borked my fair share of systems in the first few months), but Linux just worked in ways that MacOS and Windows never really did for me. Software installed quickly and flawlessly. Dev tools like git, docker and make were no longer second-class experiences. My coreutils were up-to-date, out-of-the-box. I could test and compile stuff on my own system and reliably deploy it to the cloud without needing to account for different architectures, kernel breakage or ABI incongruity. Virtual machines and containers executed faster than any other system I had tried. Microsoft Edge wasn't begging me to leave it as default. I didn't get notifications about The New Safari.

It ultimately comes down to workload, I suppose. If you're a creative professional or build iPhone apps for a living, I doubt you'll enjoy your time on Linux very much. As someone who does neither of those things very often, Linux feels like home to me.

[dagw]

I think it also depends on which distros you choose. Installing 6 different Debian/Ubuntu flavours, might not teach you much. Installing Debian, Gentoo and OpenBSD will at least open you up to several different ways of solving the same problem.

I also think it really depends on what your end goal for doing it is. Do you just want to get to the point where you have a working dev environment as quickly as possible or do you want to learn about Operating Systems and hardware for its own sake. For me, at the time, getting NetBSD working on a 'no name' PowerPC dev board I bought off of eBay was a fun goal in it self.

[noisy_boy]

As a long-time user of Ubuntu (and derivative distros) who has always wanted to checkout Arch, what made you get back to Ubuntu from your fling with Arch?