I feel like I'm missing out by not distro-hopping

I’ve been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and “move on to something else” once I got comfortable with the OS.

I’m comfortable now, but I don’t really see any reason to move on. What would the benefits be of jumping to something else? Mint has great documentation and an active community that has answers to any questions I’ve ever had, and I’m reluctant to ditch that. On the other hand, when I scroll through forums, Distro Hopping seems to be such a big part of the “Linux experience.”

What am I missing?

ULS,

Just install windows.

tkk13909,

Why?

ULS,

Sarcasm.

walthervonstolzing,
@walthervonstolzing@lemmy.ml avatar

Dinsdale?

ULS,

Wrong number? This is Gandolf of The Shire.

Vilian,

nah mint is a good distro, dintro hooping is to find what suit you, you found it, congrats, mayme a dual boot to tosh other distros out of curiosity

BlanK0,

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.

Joker,

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.

tkk13909,

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.

____,

No harm enjoying a distro and being stable.

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.

xarexyouxmadx,

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.

xarexyouxmadx,

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

Molten_Moron,

how green everything was

Lol, first thing I did was change my keyboard to the same green as the desktop.

CrabAndBroom,

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.

LibreFish,

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.

WeLoveCastingSpellz, (edited )

Distro hoping is done yo find a ditro that you are comfortsble with if mint already works well for you, you should probably just stay on mint

ipsirc,
@ipsirc@lemmy.ml avatar

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/efe7969e-e264-4f63-97c8-69bfbea51e7f.jpeg

sag,

5

atzanteol,

Distro hopping is what you do when you don’t mind spending a week trying to get things “back the way they were”.

You’re not missing out.

LoveSausage, (edited )

If you are happy with the way things are no need to change, want to Ty something out ? Live CD or VM. Dual boot if you want to keep 2 systems. Mint is pretty good. I like peppermint myself. A halfway stop between mint and arch. Shit works out of the box but runs on 1 GB ram. Worth checking out if you want to get some extra out of you computer

gian,

What would the benefits be of jumping to something else?

None if you want to do it just because

What am I missing?

Again, nothing if you are not needing some very specific feature that only other distro offer or something that is easier on another distro.

kuneho, (edited )
@kuneho@lemmy.world avatar

What am I missing?

Nothing. If you are content with your current setup, you are missing absolutely nothing.

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