Years ago, I started using ArchLinux because I wanted to spend a lot of time tinkering with it. I was a student so had plenty of free time, and Arch's installat

Years ago, I started using ArchLinux because I wanted to spend a lot of time tinkering with it. I was a student so had plenty of free time, and Arch's installation process and lack of any assumptions about what DE/WM you might want to use was a great opportunity to get to know Linux a bit better. And using AwesomeWM was even better; now I had to learn a new programming language just to configure my desktop! Years later, I stick with the same setup for exactly the opposite reasons. I don't have as much time to tinker about with my setup and in those intervening years I have gotten Arch + Awesome running just the way I like them. Distro hopping can be fun if treated as an end in itself, but as a means to an enjoyable and stable OS experience, it is self-defeating. Chances are you can probably achieve roughly the same user experience with any of the major distros, if you try. Package managers are different, but all ultimately adequate. It might be the case that some distros are more or less compatible with certain hardware, but I feel like that problem has become less significant over time. The main thing to differentiate distros these days is probably where they lie on the spectrum between highly stable and bleeding edge.