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?
I used to think that I wanted to distro hop. Turns out that what I wanted was a bare bones OS that gave me the freedom to rice in strange and unnatural ways.
After 25(!) years of battling X11, dependency hells, and the early days of desktop compositing, I finally realized that what I wanted was Arch, and a few window managers to play with. SwayWM, and now Hyprland.
Unless you have some niche needs (real-time audio encoding) or want to play with more esoteric experiments (Nix, OSTree, etc), distro hopping is overkill.
But most distros have homogenized to the point to where all you need is knowledge about systemd to go from one to the other.
Just pick your favorite, non-snap distro and hack on it.
