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
anecdotal experience tells me people who use arch break their system way more than people who use mint, not exactly sure why that happens
I assume that’s because Archlinux is designed to be minimal and you to add and change things. You are expected to understand and people maybe experiment or do things wrong. On top of it, the ever changing nature of always up to day can break sometimes (usually it doesn’t, but its more prone to breakage than a cyclic upgrade).
My above suggestion wasn’t actually using Archlinux directly, but more like EndeavourOS or CachyOS in example. Arch was just an example, there are also Rolling Release models for Fedora and openSUSE as well. I just mentioned this type of Rolling Release as to why you would want to switch off from Mint, as this could be a good reason for.
What do you get out of a rolling release? I get that you get newer stuff faster, but what does that do for your day to day use?
Depends on what exactly we talk about. I don’t need to wait years for the new updates of specific programs, where I need or want to have the new features and improvements. RetroArch is such a case. I even compile it from source nowadays, because they don’t update it in over a year. And imagine this was part in the distributions stable repository, which would take even longer to get the new version. The Linux Kernel is also updated frequently and contains improvements for performance or compatibility. I used Ubuntu for 13 years straight, starting as my first main distribution. And I was sick of this “stable” thing, where in example GIMP wasn’t updated in the repository. I used PPAs to mitigate this, and it was a horror. In example when GIMP released to support long standing requests for features, it was painful not able to use them, because it would have helped me a lot back then.
These are just a few things, not a list of all reasons. With AppImages and Flatpak (or Snap), there is less reason to use Rolling Releases than ever, but its not a full replacement for distributions repository.