Distrohoppers' Digest

In episode 62, Dale and Majid are back with another round of distro hopping. In “Beautiful Failures,” Dale finishes his highly customized Xfce desktop on Debian stable. He also makes the case for using AI sensibly: it helped him find failed systemd units on his old ReadyNAS, write a Syncthing update script, and track down a file with a hidden line feed in its name. His rule is to trust but verify, and to be careful what you paste in. Majid fits a trip to India and a conference in Spain around some local LLM experiments on Fedora. He also tells the story of his third attempt to make an iPad work for him, which ended after two days with a profit on eBay. In the updates, Majid reports on a buggy Kubuntu 26.04 LTS install, and Dale explains how an MX Linux boot partition filled up.

This month’s reviews cover two very different distros. Majid takes on Omarchy, the Arch-based, Hyprland-powered setup that installs in under four minutes. It looks great and has AI agents built in, but he found it overwhelming as a non-developer, and he and Dale discuss how much the project’s high-profile creator affects its appeal. Dale reviews RakuOS, an atomic Fedora spin built on a bootc container image. It keeps DNF packages and Flatpaks, and it has its own package manager, Rum. He covers the long installs, a bad update that he fixed with a quick bootc rollback, and whether this could be the future of Linux.

In episode 61, Dale flies solo while Majid is away and shares a month of Linux tinkering—starting with an unsuccessful attempt to install PicaOS on a Dell Inspiron 13. He also highlights useful discoveries, including LuckyLUKS for quickly opening encrypted containers, XFCE’s Docklike Taskbar, and positive early impressions of the Liquorix kernel on MX Linux.

The main review focuses on Odyssey Linux, a new Void-based rolling-release distribution that aims to make Void more approachable. Dale finds its installer, polished welcome screen, GUI package manager, service-management tools, and Control Center impressive for a first release, while noting a few quirks in defaults, window controls, browser syncing, and XFCE configuration. Overall, Odyssey Linux earns a positive recommendation for users who want Void’s performance and flexibility with less reliance on the command line.

In this episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Dale and Majid dig into two very different Linux experiences: the stripped-down, do-it-yourself world of Void Linux Base ISO and the sleek but opinionated desktop of elementary OS 8.1. Along the way, they also share what they’ve been tinkering with lately, from replacing Pi-hole with Technitium DNS to hopping back to Debian Xfce, plus a few monthly mishaps and surprises that remind us Linux experimentation doesn’t always go to plan.

They also revisit past distro experiences, including Firefox oddities on Zorin OS and a recovery story involving Fedora after CachyOS trouble. The episode wraps with listener feedback, more thoughts on Bodhi and MX Linux-style system rescue options, and the usual appreciation for the tools, people, and open-source projects that keep the Linux community thriving.

We reviewed Pika OS and MX Linux Plasma Edition. Dale tends to the server farm and Majid takes on Waydroid.

Jim from mintCast joins us to review Puppy Linux TrixiePup 64 Wayland. Along with Jim’s grub issue and Dale’s adventure with QEMU/KVM.

Majid reviews CachyOS, Bill from mintCast, and Linux OTC joins us to talk about Arch Linux.

In this episode Dale uses his iPad as a laptop and Majid fights with Windows 11 and bought a new to him Lenovo Chromebook. We review Ubuntu Budgie 25.10 and Pop!_OS 24.04 with the new Cosmic Desktop.

This episode was recorded on the 20th of December, 2025. For this show, we will be reviewing Ultramarine Linux Plasma Edition and Ghost BSD.

The pod is being rebooted. We discuss our activities during the past year. Our experiences with Fedora, LMDE6, Debian 13, and more.

Link To Full Show Transcript

This month Eric reviews Bluefin Project and Dale reviews Archman. In Monthly Foibles, Dale had a productive month setting up Nextcloud, Pi-Hole, Ubuntu Server, and various other systems, while Eric discusses his experience setting up a drawing tablet for his wife using a Dell Active Pen and Windows 11. In Updates, we cover Debian’s adoption of Tmpfs for its /tmp folder and upcoming changes to APT. Beautiful Failures covers challenges encountered by Dale during while attempting to move a hard drive to a new system. Reviews focuses on Archman and Bluefin Project distributions, but specific information is not included in the excerpt. We also cover some New Releases and get some Feedback.