The practice or habit of trying out many linux distributions one after another.
"I consider jumping from distro to distro a bad habit."
—anti, of desdelinux.net
Part of the appeal and joy of Linux is choice. We have the choice of when to update, choices in how it works, using whatever software and interfaces, and that is sometimes as much blessing as curse. This can lead to he disease of distro hopping, the habit of regularly trying new Linux distributions to explore for fun or to find the perfect distro (as if there were such a thing!).
Most people begin their journey using one of the popular distros: one of the Ubuntu Linux flavours, or Linux Mint, or whatever was recommended by a friend or The internet. Sooner or later, while everything may well work, there gets to be a nagging doubt about the current distro. Maybe they hear something negative about it, or begins to understand just how many other options there are. The grass may be greener elsewhere, perhaps, or maybe plain ol' curiosity sets in. Distrowatch currently lists hundreds of different distributions of Linus and the various BSDs, 276 at the time of drafting this. Sooner or later one hears the siren call and one downloads an image, burns it to a thumbdrive "Just to have a Look!" and sooner or later it gets installed, run and tested out. at this point it may already be too late; the bug has bitten and there are hundreds more to choose from (some easy to use, some not. Having started, it's hard to stop the process, and true addicts will switch every few hours, days or weeks maybe.
I'm fairly fortunate in being able to settle on something that worked well for me and was sufficiently configurable. I began my journey in the 1990s with an installation of Yggdrasil Linux, one of the first to offer a "live CD" option, which meant it could be tried out entirely by booting from a CD and not touching the hard drive. it worked, but I had continual issues with drivers for my laptop's wifi chipset, and getting bored of having to use a Windows driver using, if I recall correctly, ndiswrapper¹. From there I jumped to Debian Linux and even gave Red Hat's Fedora a whirl before giving up. When I finally decided to bite the bullet and quit Windows altogether, I tried first Ubuntu, then Linux Mint, neither of which really satisfied me. After trying Xubuntu, which uses he XFCE desktop environment, and decided that was the issue I needed to resolve, I took the advice of a friend of mine from our [Linux Users' Group and installed openSUSE with XFCE. i've been satisfied with that for what, eight years, and my distrohopping days are finally over (I hope)!
Some people truly never find what they're looking for; they will remain seeking something so elusive that they themselves cannot even define it. in other words, it becomes a wild goose chase, seeking some kind of operating system high, chasing the dragon. It's a seemingly impossible addiction.
How did I break my distrohopping? I made a list of things I liked or didn't like about previous attempts. I was honest with myself about the things I wanted and needed, and differentiated between needs and wants while learning about Linux itself, its strengths and weaknesses. Having broken the habit, I'm now free to tweak and improve upon what I already have.
¹ Yes, ndiswrapper
$ xclip -o | wc -w
577