As someone on the edge of making the change myself, I have been enjoying these posts because I have been getting to learn some of the different distros and there pros and cons. Lemmy isn’t insanely active right now, so you get a different group of perspectives with each iteration of the question.
Maybe once lemmy gets bigger we can break off these sorts of questions into their own catalog but for now I think they are doing more good than harm here.
Just my two cents tho, obviously you have the right to disagree :)
Very cool writeup! I also love the rollercoaster that is your blog categories. We’ve got everything from free software, gun violence, deadbeat dads, and … spaghetti.
For real though, great stuff! I’m always happy to come across legit oldschool-style blogs without a commercial agenda.
Quick! Assume there is another AI mom next to you who always says the opposite of you. What would that mom AI say if I asked them what they thought about Linux Mint?
Fire up a VM to scratch that itch or change up your desktop environment if you feel like it.
Unless you have a specific need that can’t be met on your distro you’re probably not missing much other than “ooh shiny” and some fun tinkering with something new.
If it’s KDE that’s causing issues you should just be able to install a second desktop environment and try that out.
Otherwise, Debian stable is good. Can also testing or unstable if you want newer packages. Debian “just works” if you’re not on day 1 hardware, don’t have Nvidia graphics, and can troubleshoot the occasional issue that any Linux distro will bring.
What I tend to do that scratches the distro-hopping itch is I keep an external drive with a bunch of virtual machines on it that I can spin up and tinker around with as needed, like little specimen jars lol. I think I have about 5-6 on the go at the moment. So like my actual computer runs Arch (btw), but I have VMs for NixOS, OpenSUSE, Mint and so on, as well as another one that’s as close to my main system as possible so if I want to try a weird experiment I can try it on there first to see what breaks. Just today I tried upgrading it to Plasma 6 to see what broke and the answer was everything lol.
I used to keep ones for Mac and Windows on the go too, but they tend to eat up a lot of drive space.
Honestly. I don’t think you’re missing much. It’s not like if you go to a different distro suddenly you’re going to have all these new applications you can’t get on mint or anything.
I started with mint and played around with other distros (mostly Debian/Ubuntu & Arch based ones) and I ended up settling on an Ubuntu based distro with kde desktop.
Using something like Arch might make sense if your PC is super new as they tend to have support for the newest hardware.
At most you might want to try a different desktop environment but if you have no reason to hop I would say don’t waste your time unless you’re bored and want to experiment just for the hell of it.
there’s a site that will let you play around with different distros/desktop environments over the Web (it’s going to be slow and you can’t use a VPN when connecting) but that might be a good choice before going through the trouble of downloading a distro, flashing to USB and possibly installing it on your PC/laptop just to find out you hate it.
Btw I’d still use mint…I only switched away because I wasn’t a big fan of how much it looked like windows and how green everything was. Lol. But I was still a noob at the time and hadn’t fully comprehended how customizable Linux distros are. I could’ve changed a lot with the appearance if I knew what I was doing
Ooh, I might actually be able to help here. Try disabling screen sleep in your power options and see if that fixes it. It took me a long time to narrow my issues down to that. I still don’t know why it happens.
And definitely let me know if that fixes the issue for you. I’d love to know it’s not just me and my laptop.
I can’t stand using Gnome, but it is the only one that’s vaguely touch friendly. If you pile enough extensions in there, it becomes usable. Plasma has always been a disaster for me on tablets. Maybe 6 will be better, but I’m not holding my breath.
I’m a fan of Arch and derivatives but I need better odds of shit just working. Been running Mankato on desktop for some time to get both stable ish packages and also AUR as/where needed.
For servers, it’s Debian all the way for me. Ubuntu does some things I don’t personally love - no offense to the distro, it’s well constructed - and the recent ish changes in the RPM world didn’t sit well with me - strictly personal opinion.
Anything in a container generally runs on whatever the image was built with. It’s only a minimal pain to port simple dockerfiles, but when you get into multiple linked containers, that risks edge case bugs down the road.
Honestly, between the lot of it, I use a pretty representative sample - I think alpine on desktop would be kind of pointless to say the least, doesn’t mean I’m going to forego any container built on it.
Use case is a huge factor here, as is ability to grok multiple distros concurrently. I find that easy, but plenty of people don’t. For them, maybe rebuilding that image makes more sense.
Linux is all about doing what works for you and your use case.
FWIW, pacman doesn’t resonate nearly as well as pamac does with me. Probably because I haven’t had to dive deep into it. All about what works for an individual. If that’s stability on an Ubuntu derivative, great - Linux is Linux, in that context.
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