I’m pretty comftable with linux mint right now but i want to peruse the wares so to speak, what are some cool or interesting distros that do things differently than mint?

Edit: i dont wanna distro hop people cool your jets, i just wanna look around cos i find it neat :3

  • moreeni@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    I’m pretty comftable with linux mint right now

    For the love of God, spare your free time and don’t move from what works. Consider tweaking your system instead and moving only when you broke something

  • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    6 months ago

    OK so if you want my advice, if you wanna just try distros, use DistroSea. Let’s you try out distros in your browser. But here we go:

    On DistroSea

    • Debian: There’s a reason Mint and Ubuntu are based on Debian and it’s always good to try out just straight up Debian. I know people are going to be all “uuugh but Mint is basically Debian with extra steps”, don’t care, try Debian, you might wanna use it for other things too. If you are familiar with LinuxMint, you’re going to be familiar with
    • Bunsenlabs Linux: Successor to Crunchbang, an OpenBox Ubuntu Distro. If you want something ultralight and different, you might wanna try Bunsenlabs. I used Crunchbang back in the day, may it rest in peace.
    • Pop!_OS: Made for creatives and programmers, seems to be beloved, don’t really care too much, ubuntu based.
    • Fedora: Not a Debian/Ubuntu based system, instead a RedHat based system. Try it if you wanna check out a non Debian based system.
    • Lubuntu: Is XFCE too heavy for you? Try Lubuntu, which used LXQT as it’s desktop with an aim of being lighter than Ubuntu Mate or even Xubuntu. Aimed at old laptops and netbooks, and the website even brags that it can run on an rPi.
    • Tails: Are you doing shit you don’t want your ISP or Government to know about? Are you a Journalist or an activist? Well Tails is for you, designed to be installed on a pendrive for plug n’ play action, this distro does everything through the Tor Network. It’s also marketed to victims of abuse as well, but let’s be honest if you trust the government these days you need to look at yourself in the mirror.

    Not on Distrosea

    • PuppyLinux: Holy ball this is a blast from the past. This is not available on Distrosea but it’s available to download. It is designed to be tiny, and I mean smol. It’s an example of how you can get a functional, low resource load OS.
    • TempleOS: This is not a Linux distribution, it’s barely usable as an OS, but it’s legendary. TempleOS was created by Terry Davis, an extremely talented programmer and Schitzophrenic who created this OS to be the third temple of God. No I am not joking. It is, however, today considered a work of art by a troubled man.
    • neutron@thelemmy.club
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      6 months ago

      Puppy has saved my ass multiple times. Love that tiny dog.

      Speaking of Tails, a security minded user can also try out Qubes as well. It uses virtualization to separate different contexts like Work, Personal, Social, etc. You can have your Work profile connect to your workplace VPN while your Personal profile is on a torified connection in parallel. It does have its drawbacks, however. You need more system resources, and anything that requires direct access to GPU like videogames is not officially supported.

    • ulkesh@beehaw.org
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      6 months ago

      I like the concept of atomic distros, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired for me. Having to reboot after installing any software seems counterproductive to me (admittedly this was my very limited experience when I tried Bazzite).

        • ulkesh@beehaw.org
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          6 months ago

          Learned something new, thank you! I’m old school so it’s going to take some time to acclimate I think.

          • pipe01@programming.dev
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            6 months ago

            Awesome! Fedora Atomic definitely has a learning curve, but once you get used to it it’s one of the best experiences I’ve had

            • ulkesh@beehaw.org
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              6 months ago

              Well I’m not on it anymore because it frustrated this old aging brain. I’m currently on Garuda. But I may give it a go in a VM again.

  • aarroyoc@lemuria.es
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    6 months ago

    Alpine Linux, because it uses OpenRC and musl, it’s an interesting choice a little bit different but I really like it nyself for servers.

    Gentoo, the biggest source based distro, has Emerge, a very configurable package manager.

    NixOS, uses the Nix programming language to install packages and configuring the system. Very powerful and breaks many conventions about Linux systems

  • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
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    6 months ago

    Have you ever heard of Bedrock Linux? Its an extremely interesting “meta-distro” that let’s you run multiple different distros at the same time only marginally isolated. The whole premise is to merge the systems together instead of separating them with a container style workflow. Tons of stuff works cross distro to! Its extremely cool to have Debian AND Arch packages just installed the normal way on each distro. Its a beautiful and horrifying system, that warms my heart every time I remember it.

      • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
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        6 months ago

        Those are distinct distros, while Bedrock is a layer that sits on top of multiple different distros and actively merges them together. At a glance, vanilla doesnt look like they merge/manage other distros at all? So I’m not sure the comparison makes sense. BlendOS is a completely different approach by using containers to isolate the different systems. Bedrock wants to merge the different systems where ever possible. I wouldn’t say either is better or worse as their goals appear to be entirely different.

  • lemmyreader@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    If you don’t mind reading a little bit and “work hard” to get some things done and “have fun” then I’d suggest to try :

    • NixOS (it can do magic!)
    • Arch Linux (easiest is the Arch based EndeavourOS and the shiny colorful Garuda Linux), learn some pacman and AUR.
    • pukeko@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      I look back on learning to live with NixOS and laugh. It made my brain hurt, and if I’d only found the Misterio77 repo sooner, it would’ve saved a lot of premature aging. But, if you have some basic familiarity with programming concepts, it’s an easy OS to live with, just different. And so, so, so, so powerful.

      They do desperately need a set of opinionated example builds and much better documentation.

      • Shareni@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        Nix + home-manager are a much better starting point than NixOS

        • your system still respects FHS and can still use like npm
        • you can still leverage decades of Linux knowledge
        • it’s much easier to slowly build up knowledge than to have to immediately learn everything
        • pukeko@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          That’s pretty much how I got where I am. Started with Fedora, then Silverblue, then Ublue, then fleek (a custom front end for Home Manager), then, when I saw what Home Manager and Nix could do, dove into NixOS fully.

    • amber (she/her)@lemmygrad.ml
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      6 months ago

      What actually makes Endeavor easier than Arch? I switched to Arch from Mint a few months ago, and so far I don’t think it’s that difficult.

    • Glitch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      Garuda has been great on all my computers, even handled the upgrade to kde 6 without issue. It’s a bloaty boi tho. But that’s why I picked it, every tool I’ve looked for was either installed or easily installed via the pre setup chaotic aur

  • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    NixOS, Guix System, SerpentOS, Bedrock and T2 Linux? Meta-distributions (could be either simple config-based reproducible systems, immutable atomic distros or functional transitive-dependency package managers), micro-kernels and distributed systems are the next cool, bleeding-edge stuff in FLOSS OSes, and most of those projects are still in development.

    By the way, NixOS and Guix System use Stores, instead of FHS (File Hierarchy Standard). To take it up one notch, Guix uses shepherd instead of systemd, so if anyone over here dislikes Lenning or systemd for some irrational reasons, you’ve got a nice distro, I guess. But do note that you don’t get to swap init systems in both NixOS and Guix System - you’re stuck with systemd and shepherd respectively.

  • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    I used to install interesting and cool distros back in the 2000s. Now, I personally just want stability, and not bad surprises. So when I distro-hop, I only do it among well known, largely stable and well supported distros (e.g. mint, debian, fedora, ubuntu). I don’t go for the weird anymore, although I did install Alpine on qemu in order to try it out. And the few times I feel adventurous, I try BSD or Haiku OSes.

    • ReallyZen@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      That’s how I was on Slackware at the time. Reputable, functional, stable - and totally tailorable to your exact needs.

      Everybody talks about Arch as a “pedagogic” distro, but you’ll learn a lot working with Slackware. I wonder if Lilo is still around.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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    6 months ago

    You could try a rolling distro like OpenSuse Tumbleweed, or something from the Arch lineage (Arch, Endeavour, Garuda, Manjaro in order from less to more handholding).

    You could also try something from the Red Hat rather than Debian world,.for example Fedora has several interesting editions, there’s the WorkStation desktop edition and Silverblue which uses Android immutable principles.

    • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      please for the love of god do not use Manjaro and if you do forget about using the AUR, Manjaro claims to be more stable by waiting 1 week before adding Arch’s packages to their repo, this breaks the AUR packages you use which may need newer dependencies. They also often forgot to renew the security certificates of their website.

      Arco is better but frankly all being Arch distros the differences are close to none.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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        6 months ago

        Oh no, too late! 😲 I’ve accidentally used Manjaro for 4 years and it’s been an amazing distro that’s one of the top three most used in the Steam Survey and you don’t know what you’re talking about! If only you had warned me sooner! 😔

        .

        • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I’m sure you can have a good experience on it just like you can have a good experience on Windows, etc. But first of all if we are recommending stuff then either Arch & derivates shouldn’t be recommended at all if it’s a newbie or one should recommend straight up Arch (if it’s not a newbie and needs Arch) and frankly if you want Arch made easy either going to OpenSUSE tumbleweed if the issue is stability or EndeavourOS/Arco if it’s the installation will probably net someone a better experience, so what’s the point of Manjaro anyways, and secondly none of that invalidates the bad practices by the manjaro team

          • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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            6 months ago

            I did mention both Tumbleweed and Arch so not sure what the problem is. Unless it’s that you just had to comment because you saw the word Manjaro.

            It’s very tiring to get this sort of comments at the mere mention of it, “hur dur manjaro.org didn’t renew their certificates” — which is not even relevant in any way for the distro since it’s not the distro maintainers managing the site. So it just comes out as stupid.

            If you don’t get the point of Manjaro you can just ask. All distros have a point, none of them exist just to be pointless and they definitely don’t rise to the top of Steam charts by being pointless.

            Manjaro serves a useful niche of people who would like a rolling distro but don’t want bleeding edge and the risks that to with it. Manjaro takes the unpredictability down a notch. It also includes all kinds of helpful management tools.

            I can apreciate that it’s not for everybody but some people find it useful and shitting on other people’s distro choices is crass. Especially if you don’t even know what point the distro serves, and especially in a thread about trying out new things.

  • Mambert@beehaw.org
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    6 months ago

    Most distros are the same under the hood. I’d recommend downloading different desktop environments. You can stay on Mint and keep all your files.

    • (⬤ᴥ⬤)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      6 months ago

      oh I’m doing this for fun, i don’t plan to actually switch any time soon

      what are some desktop environments you’d recommend aside from cinnamon

      • rutrum@lm.paradisus.day
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        6 months ago

        You could always dip your toe into a tiling window manager instead of a desktop environment. Its got an initial learning curve, and it helps to have something to do to learn it, and not just playtesting it.

      • Mambert@beehaw.org
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        6 months ago

        I’d recommend KDE and Gnome. They’re the two most popular and mainstream DEs. If you ever plan on switching to another distro, being familiar with these two will benefit you.

        If you feel really confident, you can start playing with window managers.

        • pukeko@lemm.ee
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          6 months ago

          Day 1: Sway looks cool Day 11: SwayFX looks cooler Day 29: Hyprland looks wild Day 44: niri looks fun Day 63: This WM I found on a repo by a random Serbian guy looks great. Day 97: I WROTE MY OWN WAYLAND COMPOSITOR AND WINDOW MANAGEMENT CONCEPT FROM SCRATCH

  • krash@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    Linux from scratch, does that count?

    (It isn’t a distro, but more of a learning project that will expand your knowledge a lot, after you’ve emitted buckets of blood, sweat and tears)

    • steeznson@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Gentoo is a good alternative to this - at least after you are done setting it up you will have a useable, updateable OS.

  • eshep@social.trom.tf
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    6 months ago

    @nicknonya If it truly is “different” you want, take a look at stuff like Tiny Core Linux, MenuetOS, or ReactOS. If you want a bit more milder different, may go with a BSD/UNIX. There’s loads of really weird stuff out there if you dig around a bit. Or just plunder DistroWatch for somethin that strikes you. Who knows, you may just find a new comfortable on yer journey. 😁