I've been using Linux Mint for many years now on my notebook for my day-to-day work environment. I think, I started using it also on the desktop, when Windows 7 had reached end of lifetime and I did not want to switch to Windows 10. Mint proved to be very reliable in all these years. In fact, I only had problems a couple of years ago when I bought a new notebook with a i7 10. Gen and this was a bit too new for the Ubuntu kernel included with Mint, and the drivers for WiFi and display were not working. This got better after a while and I discovered the Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel, which also did help. And recently, there was a bug introduced in the ALSA part of the kernel which caused my audio to be crashing. Quite annoying during web meetings 😊. But here, I could simply rollback to the previous kernel, until the next one did fix the issue again.
So, why should I change?
In fact, there is one main reason: I experienced the distribution upgrades for major version as really painful.
Linux Mint 21 is now out for a while, and I'm still running the 20.3. There is a blog post from April 2022 that claims that the upgrade tool got improved. However, when I tried, it did complain about many custom repositories and PPAs and reports that they are not supported by the target release. So I aborted the process after 1-2 hours of trying. And decided to go for some distro that doesn't require system upgrades.
A minor reason is: A while ago I switched from Cinnamon to KDE. I really liked Cinnamon and Nemo, but there are a few minor things that work better for me in KDE. One aspect is the way that multiple monitors are handled. KDE seems to be better in detected and remembering monitor setups. In our office we don't have fixed desks, so I tend to use different monitors there and at home as well. Also, Dolphin works a wee bit more intuitive for me and I need some key strokes less. And I have the impression that GTK apps look better running under KDE than the other way around. But there is no official KDE version of Mint and the integration of e.g. the very nice system update tool is not as good as in Cinnamon.
So I started looking for something else.
The obvious candidates appear to be Arch-based distros, so I decided to have a look at some of those, instead of investing more time in the Mind upgrade.
Or are there other distros, you can recommend? Let me know in the comments!
To be continued in the next post...
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