this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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I'm thinking of trying something different from Mint, any tips?
Look at Fedora perhaps. It's often the first steps into the wider seas of distro hopping, (if your into that sort of thing). You will get a stable distro with a good number of spins to try out and up to date software with regular upgraded versions every 6 months. The Atomic spins are super stable. The "regular" spins can be a good gateway to advance your skills a bit.
If you are a gamer, checkout Bazzite maybe. Bazzite makes gaming easy.
In hopes of this question not being a practical joke π :
The desktop environment makes more of a difference than the distro. Switching distros will also give you a different desktop environment (because not much else uses the Cinnamon desktop environment that Mint uses), but yeah, you'll probably care the most about the desktop environment.
So, instead of choosing between distros, I would recommend choosing a desktop environment, for example look at KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell.
And then you can either:
I will say that option 2 is kind of 'cleaner'. It will be better tested and integrated, if it's officially supported by the given distro + you start from a clean slate where Cinnamon isn't also installed.
But yeah, I would actually recommend starting with option 1. You won't have to learn both a new desktop environment and distro at the same time. And it's less big of a step in that you can easily switch back, if desired.
As per usual, do make a backup whichever option you go with. Sometimes, it can cause problems to have two desktop environments installed, because they might edit the same config files, so it's good to be able to revert...
Thanks, it was only a partial joke. I discovered years ago that the best support comes from meme communities. Whatever the issue is, make a meme or wait for a relevant one.
I'm having a lot of stability issues on Mint and Cinnamon lately and if I have to make a clean reinstall why not try something very different. I'd just like to reduce the distro hopping period as much as possible.
I switched from openSUSE to Fedora because SUSE was a little too bleeding edge for me.
If you're coming from Debian, Fedora will be right in the middle of bleeding edge and Debian stable.
I think. :-P
why, what are you missing? that'll lead you to radically different answers
Not really missing anything, I just had a lot of stability issues lately and since I'm about to reinstall everything I feel like trying something different.
Depends why you are having stability issues to begin with. My issues with anything based on Debian with a specific computer were always hardware related for example. A problem I do not have with Fedora or anything Arch based.
My main suspicion is that is SSD related, that poor thing is old, but I don't know, those crashes are quite random.
The Debian version of Mint. :D
Most Linux distros have live DVDs that let you try it out without installing it... Try a few of the major distros and see what you like best? You could also install a few and dual-boot (multi-boot I guess?)
Personally when I stopped using Ubuntu (this was years ago), I hopped around different Ubuntu distros for a long time. Probably a good place to start, especially since Mint is based on Ubuntu.
After that I used Garuda (fairly user friendly, does require some terminal usage), then Arch, then NixOS, back to Arch, and now I'm pretty happy with Gentoo.
My main piece of advice when doing this: Set up the install to use a separate /home partition. It makes things way easier. You keep all of your configurations and such, just have a different OS under the hood.
I've been liking Zorin as an easy to use alternative to Mint
Same, I had a lot of performance issues with Mint, for some reason. It was using tons of memory, and then freeze crashing (it is an old laptop), no matter what I tried. I switched to Zorin, and now I do not have many issues, the memory consumption is a lot less even with fancy interface grapchics. I feel like Zorin also runs Windows-stuff a lot easier, with Mint I had complicated (for a beginner) wine issues from the start. It really boils down to, what ends up working for you, and your machine, in the end.
I've been using Bazzite on my desktop PC for a little over a month now. I'm mostly using my PC for games, so it was a logical choice. It's also pretty stable because it's based on Fedora and has atomic releases, so you can easily roll back updates if they break something.
As a longterm ubuntu user, I lately dared to try cachyOS and so far it has been smooth sailing. I "just" had to learn how use pacman instead of apt (the package software manager).
One advantage of Mint: more drivers from third parties are available as deb packages, but my printer/scanner works with open drivers, too. Also there is AUR as a last resort (to my understanding).
Be careful with the AUR. Anybody can upload anything and there has been a lot of malware attacks of late. The best advice is to learn to read pkgbuilds and always check them before installing or updating something from the AUR. If in doubt, ask in the forum.