this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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On mint for a while now, people usually call mint a newbie distro, any reason to "upgrade" to a different distro? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago by SlayersFan@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world
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Hi, how's it going? I've been daily driving mint with i3 for a while now, (takes like 500mb idle ram) but I always hear mint being called a newbie distro, I know arch is harder to set up and more customizable for example, but overall im wondering, in which cases one would go from mint to another distro? what can make other distros "better" than mint? i'll end up using a window manager (i3 or if thats not availible some other lightweight one) so differences in desktop environments i dont really care that much about

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[โ€“] JTode@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I have only skimmed the comments so someone might have already mentioned it, but distrowatch.com is an excellent site to get your head around the differences between distros. For instance, they have a direct comparison page that will list all the package and kernel versions side by side. Here is Mint and Arch - as you can see, Mint is at a 6.14 kernel (fine for most apps and hardware) but Arch has the very recent 7.2.11, which if you have very new hardware, could matter to you.

I run Debian, which has even older packages and kernel, and everything works great. Very recently though, I switched my firefox to the flatpak version, because the Debian package version didn't have the fairly recent Split View feature, where you can put two sites side by side in your browser window - this has been desperately needed for as long as we've had wide screens. So that's one example of a more recent package being more desirable.

And speaking of Flatpak, that's yet another reason not to sweat your distro, cause you are not just limited to your apt packages, you can use snaps, you can use flatpak, You can use Nix. There's endless ways now of getting the latest version of anything, on any version of Linux.

Don't sweat it.

[โ€“] SlayersFan@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

I was setting up mint for my mom the other day, and put kernel 7 on it, i thing it has been enabled recently as an option.