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
If you’re happy with things and nothing is acting weird or badly, You’re more or less golden, like folks are saying.
Where you might find that one day you want a newer kernel or packages (which is why you’d switch to Arch or one of its derivatives), is if you ever have very new hardware (or very old hardware that just got a driver pulled into the kernel - I own a Digidesign 002Rack that is ancient, but someone finally wrote a driver for it, and it’s still a great piece of audio hardware) that only has drivers in the latest kernels.
But if you’re just doing web, Office type stuff, even Steam games, you shouldn’t need anything more than you have already.
I am a fan of the KDE desktop, myself, and I recommend that everyone try it out at some point. But you should be able to install it onto Mint and just choose it when you login, again, no need to change distros.
Just a warning, installing too many WMs or DEs can cause…… issues. Two will probably be fine, but before you go wild and install all of them, just be wary as it can cause conflicts between apps and shit. So yeah, just be wary.