Go with EndeavourOS. It won’t “just work”, but it will be the best compromise between confusing abstraction and low level frustrations.
Fedora is good but it abstracts a little too much away, this is great when you understand how software works, but it’s very confusing when you’re new to Linux and programming.
Arch is good, but you won’t be able to hid the ground running, you’d have to sacrifice a weekend to learn.
Go:
[Optional] Fedora
Endeavour
Arch
Learning
Ghost BSD
Void
Gentoo
Tinkering with those in that order, after about 6 months, you’ll start to feel at home.
If you’re comfortable with Mint and don’t see a reason to switch, I don’t see anything wrong with staying with Mint. If you do want to try new distros, just use a VM.
You’re missing out on watching a lot of progress bars while you reinstall all the time. If you like what you have, keep using it. All you get from switching is a different package manager, a few slightly different package names, maybe faster updates and a new default desktop background. You’ll still be using all the same apps, probably similar versions, probably systemd. It’s a bigger difference logging into a new desktop environment than a new distro.
When distros make it the default DE, that’s forcing it on them. No different then Microsoft bundling a specific browser. I also disagree that it works well on desktops. It lacks features, and tweaking it to resemble and behave like a more common desktop design is cumbersome.
And? Who’s making you use them? Use one of the other distros that doesn’t use Gnome, or install a different DE after installation.
“It’s like Microsoft forcing Edge!!”
No it isn’t. For almost all PCs, Windows is installed by default with no other option.
If you’re using Gnome, it’s because you went out of your way to install it, or you went out of your way to purchase a Linux laptop and chose one with Gnome, which is far from the only option even in that space.
And you can disagree that it works on desktops all you like. All the people who use it on desktop would disagree with your opinion.
Just because something doesn’t work like Windows does, doesn’t mean it’s not for desktops.
Like some have mentioned, if you want to try different distros setup a VM (I would recommend KVM for better performance, but virtualbox is easier for beginners in VMing) with the iso of the distro you want to test out.
Like this you can keep a functional system without the hassle of having to setup on baremetal just for testing and having to go back again if doesn’t pay-out.
Also would suggest messing around with more tech-savy setups like debian and fedora (specially minimal ones) if you want to delve deeper into the Linux nerdiness.
My personal recommendation is Fedora, but the community recommendation will likely be Linux Mint, which is also a perfectly good recommendation. Either of them are “just works” distros. I prefer the update cycle of Fedora, and would certainly want to distance myself from Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives (even Mint), and Debian’s update cycle is painfully slow. Fedora manages what is seemingly a perfect balance of quick and stable updates.
Fedora comes with Gnome by default, but it has spins for other DEs like KDE Plasma if that’s more of your thing (I’ll be switching to Plasma when Fedora 40 releases with Plasma 6).
If you want to enjoy distro hopping, go find a cheap thinkpad as a secondary device, and have fun. Otherwise, you try out live discs/drives to see if you get full compatibility with your main device.
Truth is that you’ll have more difference in user experience DE hopping than distro hopping.
You only distro hop until you find what works right with an your hardware and preferred software, unless you’re doing it as a hobby. Now, the desktop environments? That’s where you’ll see the big difference.
Honestly, if Mint has been working fine then I see no reason that you’d need to switch. If you’re curious about trying out other distros, it could be worth using a program like Boxes to try out some VM’s. Otherwise, I say you keep doing whatever works well for you.
I’ve been daily driving boring Debian since RedHat Linux 8 came out 20 years ago now. I tried switching to openSUSE and just didn’t see the point after a bit, so I switched back. The only time I’m not on Debian is when I’m playing with FreeBSD or NetBSD.
Same for DE, I’ve been using XFCE for so long that I don’t get the fuss about pretty environments.
Not hopping does not mean you’re missing out, boring can be good. Things are stable and stay out of the way of you doing actual work.
There is a quote out there somewhere about how customizing FVWM can become an obsession.
There is nothing wrong about hopping, as long as you are doing it for hobbyist reasons, at the end of day the only difference is the package manager and the DE.
You’re not missing out on anything. Mint lets you install various desktop environments, they are all very well-configured and stable by default. You can just install the appropriate desktop environment meta-package using Apt:
apt install 'task-gnome-desktop’
apt install 'kde-plasma-desktop’
apt install 'cinnamon-desktop-environment’
apt install ‘task-xfce-desktop’
Then you can “hop” from one GUI experience to another by just logging out and logging in with a different session. You might have to add some additional Ubuntu repositories to your Apt config to get all of these meta-packages though.
Besides the desktop environment, the only other big difference between distros is how you use their package managers, which all do the same thing anyways, just with different CLI commands.
Probably the most important thing to consider in a distro is which versions of the latest stable releases of the big Linux apps are available in their distros. Arch-based distros (Garuda, Manjaro, ArcoLinux, EndeavorOS) are the most bleeding-edge but these operating systems tend to break after a software update if you fail to update often enough. Ubuntu and Fedora are the most bleeding-edge non-rolling release distros that I know of, and in my experience they never break after a software update.
You’re not missing anything really. For some reason some people like to say that Mint is a good distro for beginners and imply that you should change away from it when you’re more “advanced”. This is really nonsense. Mint is a good distro. I switched to Tumbleweed because I found one or two things I couldn’t do so easily in Mint, but if you’re not having trouble there’s really no reason to switch. And with tools like Flatpak and Distrobox available these days there’s even less reason to distro hop.
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