I know a lot of you follow me over on The Linux Cast, but for those of you who don’t, it’s probably odd to hear me say that I’ve hopped to a different distro. What’s a distro? What’s Linux?

Well, that’s fine if you don’t know what those are, it’s really not the point of today’s ramble. Instead, I want to discuss change and how hard that can be.

I have used the same distro for the last two years. This was a challenge I set myself in 2023, hoping to curb my distro-hopping addiction. And it worked spectacularly well. I love openSUSE.

But I’m aiming for a new challenge, so I’ve chosen a new distro. What I didn’t really expect was how hard it was going to be to say goodbye to openSUSE. I was comfy using that distro, more than I even thought, and that made leaving it behind really hard. It was kind of like leaving behind a good friend, it was sad.

Change is often like that. I’m very much a creature of habit, and I enjoy my routines just as much as anyone else. I may have serious ADD, but I have systems in place for that kind of thing, and ways of dealing with things that don’t fit into the way I do things. Change disrupts all that. It makes a mockery of any plan or structure. It requires that new structure be made.

It makes you uncomfortable, pushes your limits, and changes the way you view your environment. It also adds challenges that weren’t there before. Those challenges can foster growth like nothing else can. It’s amazing. It’s hard. But without it, we’d never get better at anything.

That’s why I’m moving on with another Linux challenge, despite my comfortable home with openSUSE. I want to learn new things and expand my abilities. So, I changed to something new, something harder. Leaving the comfortable behind to seek growth was harder than I thought it would be. And this is just a silly Linux distro. Anything bigger would have been much more difficult.

A lot of the posts here on my blog are about changes I’d like to make, or changes I’m in the process of making. Blogging has really helped me structure my thoughts and find the areas of my life that need improvement or are getting stale. I truly do believe that change is the best thing that can happen to a person. I want to use that to better myself, grow, and be happier. Seems like a worthwhile goal.