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


I’ve always thought of Mint as a newbie-friendly distro because there is a convenient UI for everything that you want to do, but that doesn’t mean it’s somehow limited for more advanced users.
It’s friendly to new users but does not block things that more advanced users would want. I don’t think there’s any reason to stop using it as you become an advanced user.
The only reason to switch would be if some other distro has a specific selling point that you want to try. I’ve tried a few of them and always just end up going back to what I’m familiar with.