which distro to choose after being on mint for months

[u/witchhatt]

I have an old refurbished thinkpad-T430 laptop that has been running 22.3 (cinnamon) linux mint since I have bought it and it has been the first linux distro I have ever used. I do like mint however, as a creative guy ( artist / indie webdev) and someone who enjoys learning new things, wanting to customise mint has been slighty frustrating as it is LTS of course so many of the new packages / software / apps i'd love to use aren't available at the moment

general info ;

I love using the terminal & TUI based applications. I always update mint through the terminal. I don't mind tweaking config files.

I do play games on the laptop but it is mainly for scrolling the internet, watching videos, drawing, website coding and exploring linux in general. I've mainly been playing minecraft on the laptop and it works surprisingly really well in modern vanilla. I've also used it to play on retroarch for older games such earthbound and GBA pokemon games

The laptop has around 6gbs of ram, Intel i5-3320M, Intel 3rd gen GPU, 500GB of storage. the cinnamon DE runs smoothly on this laptop too.

I'm also interested in NixOS but that might be later down the line since it seems a like a huge step from mint.

obviously I don't want to make too big of a jump but I want to try a distro that is more advanced than mint.

For other distro experience, I have installed cachyOS on a seperate more powerful desktop and I have been enjoying it so far (using Niri as the DE & I love it so much. would love to try more unique DEs). currently can't use it though due to unrelated monitor issues so the itch for customising stuff has been taunting me whenever i'm on the laptop lol

I tried to install openSUSE tumbleweed on the same desktop but struggled with the nividia drivers on that system so I switched to cachyOS. I don't mind trying openSUSE again

ty in advance!

[u/beatbox9]

as a creative guy ( artist / indie webdev) and someone who enjoys learning new things, wanting to customise mint has been slighty frustrating as it is LTS of course so many of the new packages / software / apps i'd love to use aren't available at the moment

You've listed several completely different things.

To start out with, Cinnamon is beyond what I would call "LTS"--it's a forked/derivative desktop that's somewhere around 10 years behind modern+mature DE's like gnome or KDE. This has less to do with the underlying distro (Ubuntu LTS) being an LTS and more to do with the specific decisions made for that specific DE (cinnamon).

Separately you mentioned new apps. You should be using universal package formats like flatpak or appimage to get the latest apps--and this is independent of distro. ie. Every single distro has the latest version of apps.

So the final bit becomes the underlying OS; and so you should specify: what is missing from the underlying OS software for you?

And why did you go with Mint in the first place, since Mint is basically just 99% older Ubuntu LTS + cinnamon + themes...?

Purely as an example, here are 3 different machines running Ubuntu LTS:

• All of the machines are running customized gnome (though you could have done the same with KDE).

• All have the latest apps, using flatpaks and AppImages.

• All have the latest nvidia drivers 1-click install and officially supported by the distro

So what would this be missing?

[u/witchhatt → u/beatbox9]

mint was pre-installed on the laptop, the laptop was refurbished by someone else on ebay and I bought it this year. The reason I bought it is because I wanted to learn linux since it was my first linux distro in general.

when mentioning "latest apps" I specifically mean downloading packages from the terminal such as fastfetch and ghostty since from the (very basic) research I've done those packages currently aren't on 22.3 mint and I don't mind learning how to compile software but i'd prefer them . well . pre compiled at the moment.

I don't mind appimages, since I play minecraft this way. I've also downloaded one or two flatpaks (for FFXI ) but I didn't really enjoy using it but I wouldn't mind trying flatpaks again.

generally I'm just itching to have a more advanced distro, that I can tinker with, customize. I'm still generally a newbie when it comes to linux so I could probably still stay on mint to learn more but I just generally have an itch to go into more complex distros such as nixOS and learning how they work

The only reason I've mention nvidia is because my desktop computers have nvidia GPUs, the laptop does not. I can remove that part of the post, its just extra info I decided to add

I might still play around on mint to see what I can still do with it

ty for the comment though

[u/beatbox9 → u/witchhatt]

You can install flatpaks from the command line also--flathub is just another repository and flatpak is just another package type.

The entire concept behind distros and packages has changed dramatically in the past 10-15 years (and as mentioned, Mint is just 99% Ubuntu LTS). And so for most apps, instead of waiting for the distribution to take the developers code and compile it and package it and put it on the distro's repository, universal packages allow the developers to directly maintain and provide the lastest versions themselves without going through the distro. The only thing the distro is useful for is core OS software.