I’m pretty comftable with linux mint right now but i want to peruse the wares so to speak, what are some cool or interesting distros that do things differently than mint?
Edit: i dont wanna distro hop people cool your jets, i just wanna look around cos i find it neat :3
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Qubes OS
Install virtual manager (sudo apt install virt-manager)
From there you can spin up as many VMs are you desire as long as you have enough ram. I like Fedora
Most distros are the same under the hood. I’d recommend downloading different desktop environments. You can stay on Mint and keep all your files.
oh I’m doing this for fun, i don’t plan to actually switch any time soon
what are some desktop environments you’d recommend aside from cinnamon
You could always dip your toe into a tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment. Its got an initial learning curve, and it helps to have something to do to learn it, and not just playtesting it.
Definitely KDE Plasma.
I’d recommend KDE and Gnome. They’re the two most popular and mainstream DEs. If you ever plan on switching to another distro, being familiar with these two will benefit you.
If you feel really confident, you can start playing with window managers.
Day 1: Sway looks cool Day 11: SwayFX looks cooler Day 29: Hyprland looks wild Day 44: niri looks fun Day 63: This WM I found on a repo by a random Serbian guy looks great. Day 97: I WROTE MY OWN WAYLAND COMPOSITOR AND WINDOW MANAGEMENT CONCEPT FROM SCRATCH
Fedora Silverblue or any of the other Fedora Atomic distros
I like the concept of atomic distros, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired for me. Having to reboot after installing any software seems counterproductive to me (admittedly this was my very limited experience when I tried Bazzite).
On Fedora you can run
rpm-ostree apply-liveto apply any changes you make without rebootingLearned something new, thank you! I’m old school so it’s going to take some time to acclimate I think.
Awesome! Fedora Atomic definitely has a learning curve, but once you get used to it it’s one of the best experiences I’ve had
Or something Universal Blue-based like Bazzite or Aurora.
Nixos is a declarative distro, it’s an interesting concept.
Also, Immutable distros:
- Fedora Universal Blue
- Bazzite OS
- Vanilla OS
- Blend OS
I recommend a Fedora Atomic distro like Silverblue or Kinoite, or Universal Blue, which is based on Fedora Atomic. It offers 3 images: Bazzite (made specifically for Gaming), Aurora (featuring KDE Plasma) and Bluefin which uses GNOME.
I used to install interesting and cool distros back in the 2000s. Now, I personally just want stability, and not bad surprises. So when I distro-hop, I only do it among well known, largely stable and well supported distros (e.g. mint, debian, fedora, ubuntu). I don’t go for the weird anymore, although I did install Alpine on qemu in order to try it out. And the few times I feel adventurous, I try BSD or Haiku OSes.
I’ve been on an immutable distro and declaritive distro kick lately.
So the bluefin project, which has so much sugar it a damn cake (in a good way, lots of stuff to get you to a usable running state for a lot of Dev environment and gaming).
I’m digging into SUSE microos more now, mostly to play with elemental (I really want a featureful CI/CD env for my desktop, so containers to full VM and isos is neat to me).
Nix has been super, super useful for packages that I want between OSs, but the alure of getting better configuration with them on full nixos is slowly drawing me in.
Guix on the other hand is my current ideal, I am just super impressed with their full source bootstrapping and really love a lot of the philosophy of the project, but they don’t get as much love from the professional crowd (nonacademic, non amateur).
I’m a huge proponent of Gentoo Linux as a learning experience. It’s a great way to learn how the components of a system work together and the distro enables an amazing amount of configurability for your system.
Even following a handbook install in a VM can be a good experience if you’re interested.
If you don’t mind reading a little bit and “work hard” to get some things done and “have fun” then I’d suggest to try :
- NixOS (it can do magic!)
- Arch Linux (easiest is the Arch based EndeavourOS and the shiny colorful Garuda Linux), learn some pacman and AUR.
What actually makes Endeavor easier than Arch? I switched to Arch from Mint a few months ago, and so far I don’t think it’s that difficult.
Garuda has been great on all my computers, even handled the upgrade to kde 6 without issue. It’s a bloaty boi tho. But that’s why I picked it, every tool I’ve looked for was either installed or easily installed via the pre setup chaotic aur
I look back on learning to live with NixOS and laugh. It made my brain hurt, and if I’d only found the Misterio77 repo sooner, it would’ve saved a lot of premature aging. But, if you have some basic familiarity with programming concepts, it’s an easy OS to live with, just different. And so, so, so, so powerful.
They do desperately need a set of opinionated example builds and much better documentation.
Nix + home-manager are a much better starting point than NixOS
- your system still respects FHS and can still use like npm
- you can still leverage decades of Linux knowledge
- it’s much easier to slowly build up knowledge than to have to immediately learn everything
That’s pretty much how I got where I am. Started with Fedora, then Silverblue, then Ublue, then fleek (a custom front end for Home Manager), then, when I saw what Home Manager and Nix could do, dove into NixOS fully.
Have you ever heard of Bedrock Linux? Its an extremely interesting “meta-distro” that let’s you run multiple different distros at the same time only marginally isolated. The whole premise is to merge the systems together instead of separating them with a container style workflow. Tons of stuff works cross distro to! Its extremely cool to have Debian AND Arch packages just installed the normal way on each distro. Its a beautiful and horrifying system, that warms my heart every time I remember it.
Take a look at gobolinux. It changes the filesystem in interesting ways. All programs are in their own directories under /Programs.
Alpine Linux, because it uses OpenRC and musl, it’s an interesting choice a little bit different but I really like it nyself for servers.
Gentoo, the biggest source based distro, has Emerge, a very configurable package manager.
NixOS, uses the Nix programming language to install packages and configuring the system. Very powerful and breaks many conventions about Linux systems
@nicknonya If it truly is “different” you want, take a look at stuff like Tiny Core Linux, MenuetOS, or ReactOS. If you want a bit more milder different, may go with a BSD/UNIX. There’s loads of really weird stuff out there if you dig around a bit. Or just plunder DistroWatch for somethin that strikes you. Who knows, you may just find a new comfortable on yer journey. 😁
Also Haiku. I was impressed by the amount of software available for it.
It may be remarked that ReactOS is not unix-like, but a Windows NT clone.
@Successful_Try543 Fair point, yes! …but I did recommend it as a “truly different” choice. 😉
