Of that 100, do you have a couple of ones you’d consider using if the current ones go belly up. For me it would be either LMDE or CachyOS. I did like Bondhi a lot, mostly for the DE, but likely wouldn’t run it as my primary driver.
I can relate to the storage pileup, I had binders full of CDs until I started using USB sticks. I still have a container of about 20 on the shelf next to my computer table. Remember Knoppix? I’d carry that around with me when I made house calls in case Windows wouldn’t boot and I had to salvage documents or other info off the system.
I do like some recent releases, like CachyOS, which I fully installed and used for about 10 days on my secondary system. I like the look of Spaced Linux too, though I haven’t tried it out. Not a fan of Omarchy yet, mainly because of the vibe coding and AI underpinnings, and that it seems more like an Arch distro with a bunch of scripts.
If you’re a former Windows user, do you remember manipulating autoexec.bat and config.sys files, just to get games and programs to work?
Yes. MX Linux, antiX Linux, Endeavour OS are not only installed, I have snapshots and multiple hardware. Only Hurricane Helene took our entire area off the Internet for a few days and we had a generator onsite; otherwise we would have been out of power completely.
When it all came back all of my stuff worked fine. Actually I shut everything off before it hit to protect the hardware plus I also have surge protection on multiple outlets.
I actually know what I am doing even after all these years!
Multi-distro…yes and er…no. I still have a PC and the heavy lifting on it is almost all done by antiX. I use it nearly all the time. I do have Debian and Xubuntu installed though. My laptop doesn’t like antiX for some reason and any attempt to run a X session with NVIDIA drivers gives me a black screen. So I use Debian on it.
So that’s three distros technically. Debian and two Debian eggs.
You had to remind me…autoexec.bat and config.sys. I used to run memmaker for ease then reorder the loading to get the big memory hoggers hammered in first. Makes creating a wineprefix look trivial.
I jumped ship around 2005/6 after dabbling with Slackware before that. Of course, I started with Gnome 2 Ubuntu, but fled to Mint post Gnome 3/Unity. I tried antiX to try to free up system resources for gaming and well…ahem, never left.
Garuda is my daily driver, and EndeavourOS is my backup.
It’s good to have a backup that you use and stay up to date with in case something happens with the daily driver that drives you away from that distro.
For example, I use to use CentOS 7 on the servers in my homelab until, I’ll you fill in the blank here about what happened with CentOS 7, now I run Debian.
So I use Debian on it. 
