Idk if it is distro hopping because I have been trying distros on my main system and usually for months at a time. It's messy but I have a separate filesystem for /home and hope my current rc files don't bork up whatever I'm running next. The transition from Cinnamon to Gnome went poorly for a while.
I should probably automate the must have packages.
Some applications are not packaged so I install ~/.local, e.g. Arduino, Eagle, Minecraft, etc.
Packages... Hm. Direnv is all I can think of. I just use the system until something is missing, curse briefly, and install it.