Distrohopping as Coping Mechanism
There's a war going on in the world. I can't fix that. But I can fix my operating system.
That's the Stoic bargain I made with myself somewhere between doomscrolling and stumbling onto r/writerdeck — a subreddit that, in hindsight, is a gateway drug for people like me. Writers who like keyboards a little too much. One scroll in and my long-buried distrohopping instincts came roaring back. Good thing I still had my Ventoy USB on standby, always ready for exactly this kind of productive procrastination.
The catalyst was getting back my Aspire 1830T — a 2010-era CULV machine I'd lent to a relative for his programming journey at STI. In hindsight, I may have handed him a headache: I'd left it running Fedora Cosmic, a distro that has no business being on hardware this old. I couldn't even do a clean install of Fedora 43 on it. The machine was basically staging a protest.
So the distrohopping began in earnest.
antiX was first. Philosophically perfect for the hardware — no systemd, IceWM, built for exactly this class of machine. The install got stuck at 93% for twenty minutes. Traced it back to the live persistence option and a failed zram setup. IceWM was snappy once I got in, but making an Obsidian shortcut executable felt like defusing a bomb. I already have law school. I don't need more things that require a manual.
I briefly installed XFCE. Bland. Then Fluxbox, which activated every "hacker-wannabe" neuron I have — I briefly imagined myself looking effortlessly leet at a café. Then I remembered the fan I replaced doesn't have a controller switch, so this laptop now announces itself before I even open the lid. It stays home.
Eventually I landed on MX Linux KDE — almost on a whim, since I'd downloaded the KDE, XFCE, and Fluxbox flavors anyway. I tried KDE first expecting to be disappointed.
It flies.
My best theory: beyond KDE Plasma's well-documented efficiency improvements in recent years, MX Linux runs sysvinit instead of systemd. Less overhead at boot, leaner at idle. The result is a 2010 machine running a modern desktop environment with no apologies.
Obsidian and Zen Browser installed via Flatpak without a single hiccup. No chmod. No terminal archaeology.
The only thing missing is COSMIC DE — I could genuinely see myself going mouseless with it. But COSMIC isn't packaged for MX Linux yet, and honestly, this machine doesn't need that ambition right now.
I have my writerdeck. The world can stay chaotic. My distro is sorted.
