I’ve been having a big think over Linux distros. See, I’ve been looking back at my still-new Linux experience of nine months, and wondering how my own journey can help other people get started with FOSS operating systems. Whenever the topic of a Windows refugee-friendly OS came up, I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.
I always follow that up with a comment about how you don’t have to stick with Linux Mint if you don’t want to. You can do what I did, which is to dip your toe into the Linux distro water and find something that suits you better. But if I’m setting up Linux Mint as “my first Linux distro,” why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?
Thank you! I switched to Linux last year after a few years of flirting with the idea. My main work computer is a 2011 iMac and I got really tired of not being able to run some things and the whole planned obsolescence aspect despite the hardware being perfectly serviceable. So, I went and, I kid you not, borrowed Linux For Dummies from the local library. Prior to this I had no idea what a shell was or even a “distro”. And, honestly, the For Dummies book over complicated Linux a bit. It front-loaded everything and made it way more intimidating than it needed to be (and I’ve been using computers since DOS days and built a PC back in 2000). Which I feel like a lot of Linux guys do as well.
Realized that Linux was lots of things and felt a pull toward Ubuntu, I installed it on the iMac and was instantly in love. After a few months, though, Canonical started pulling some nonsense and making changes to my system with updates like they were Apple. So I hopped over to Mint as I kept reading about how great it was and how “it just works” (a sentiment that brought me to Apple back in 2005). Now I stick Mint on everything. I kind of want to distro hop for the fun of it, but I’ve tested a few on distrosea and haven’t really found anything that draws me away from Mint. Yeah, I’m a bit of a normie. But normies deserve better OSes too!
Totally. Linux is (in part) about choice. If you like Mint, use Mint.
I’ve been a Linux user for 5+ years and played with a bunch of different distros. I have Arch (btw) on a laptop that I don’t have to depend on. But my gaming rig is still running Pop. Why? Because I like it and it’s stable. A bonus that it’s now bundled with Cosmic, because I like Cosmic too.
But at the end of the day, it’s true that you can kind of do anything with any distro. The package manager is one obvious difference. I do like Pacman (from Arch) more than apt on Debian derivatives, but like, it’s just a package manager. Not worth changing a comfortable system over.
Don’t listen to people who say you can’t run a “beginner distro” until the end of time. If you like it, you like it.