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
Experiment with arch, void (musl), Nixos and atomic distros like fedora silverblue, bazzite
I’ve been enjoying bazzite!
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
Nixos is a declarative distro, it’s an interesting concept.
Also, Immutable distros:
- Fedora Universal Blue
- Bazzite OS
- Vanilla OS
- Blend OS
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
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
Definitely KDE Plasma.
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.
Fedora Silverblue or any of the other Fedora Atomic distros
Or something Universal Blue-based like Bazzite or Aurora.
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
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 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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Linux from scratch, does that count?
(It isn’t a distro, but more of a learning project that will expand your knowledge a lot, after you’ve emitted buckets of blood, sweat and tears)
Gentoo is a good alternative to this - at least after you are done setting it up you will have a useable, updateable OS.
Take a look at gobolinux. It changes the filesystem in interesting ways. All programs are in their own directories under /Programs.
NixOS, Guix System, SerpentOS, Bedrock and T2 Linux? Meta-distributions (could be either simple config-based reproducible systems, immutable atomic distros or functional transitive-dependency package managers), micro-kernels and distributed systems are the next cool, bleeding-edge stuff in FLOSS OSes, and most of those projects are still in development.
By the way, NixOS and Guix System use Stores, instead of FHS (File Hierarchy Standard). To take it up one notch, Guix uses shepherd instead of systemd, so if anyone over here dislikes Lenning or systemd for some irrational reasons, you’ve got a nice distro, I guess. But do note that you don’t get to swap init systems in both NixOS and Guix System - you’re stuck with systemd and shepherd respectively.
