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