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?
Own story (skip to the “—” if not interested):
Don’t worry yourself. If Mint works for you and you don’t have a good reason to switch. Just stay.
I started out with Mint as well. Switched from Cinnamon to Mate early on because I wanted to run a fancy compositor called Compiznand stay on that for like 2 years.
I still had a lot of free time, so I got “bored” by everything being so low maintenance compared to Windows 8. I checked out Arch and ran it for a bit with KDE 4 I think.
At some point I got a proper PC (was a crappy Laptop before) and wanted to Continue running KDE, so I chose KUbuntu because of that. I ran into some issues and a brick when upgrading that I couldn’t solve, so I went back to a rolling release distro to not need to worry about major updates again. I went with Manjaro as I thought it would be more stable than Arch (I didn’t have a problem with Arch, just craved max stability in general then).
In the meantime I since learned that Manjaro and Arch are about equally as stable from problems I needed solve and me sometimes running Arch on my old laptop when out.
I have been on Manjaro for about 7 years now (never re-installed), love it, KDE and don’t care about all the political stuff. I don’t care that people hate on Manjaro, never encountered a problem I couldn’t solve and will happily continue to use the distro until it breaks on me.
You can use whatever you like. Distro hopping can be fun, but is also a burdon and might prevent you from making your PC your home.
I wouldn’t switch especially for political stuff. Just use what you like. If you don’t wanna miss out, just watch some YT Videos of people testing out Distros/DEs or run some in virtual machienes. If you have a secondary device, you can also do hopping on that.
I hope this can help somewhat. Use whatever you like, don’t fret about political stuff. I used to kinda distro hop (not really) and now couldn’t care less about it.
You can easily check out other Distros using VMs, Docker Containers or even rented Servers for the most part.
If you have the time and are truely interested in Distro hopping (or just testing out a new DE) just go for it though. Just don’t let others dictate what you run.