LFS -Linux From Scratch. Or if you can’t handle that, either Slackware or Arch - I don’t run Arch by the way. Maybe try some obscure distro produced and maintained by one person.
On my main workstation I’m on windows but somebody suggested Mint for a smooth transition and I made a VM just to emulate it and try it. Cinnamon 21.3.
My takeaways:
I honestly have no idea if it’s the Debian version of mint or which version of Debian. Kind of important to figure out what software can be used on it.
It’s really easy to glitch the screen while changing resolutions. No idea what the hotkeys to change it back to default would be, so hard reset time when that happens.
TBH I’ll probably just delete it and start on something more standard for my intended use cases. It’s main feature appears to be limited Windows program compatibility but… I have a Windows, so…
Use arch if you want more compatibility. Debian is stable but it also means their official package repository will lag behind some feature that is present on the bleeding edge. IMHO, stability is good if you are already familiar with Linux AND want it that way, but when compatibility as it is (emphasis there), it is better to go bleeding edge for new users since you are transitioning anyway, you might as well try the latest feature available. Also, the biggest game changer, valve and steam, is basing their OS on Arch.
No chance of overwriting your bootloader when you distrohop using LiveUSBs and LiveCDs.
But srsly, Trisquel GNU/Linux is a distro that provides Ubuntu with all the non-free and contrib removed. Parabola GNU/Linux-libre is Arch with all the nonfree packages removed. Worth a look if you support software freedom and transparency.
I don’t want you to download Manjaro, but I had one partition as root and another as home and Manjaro just asked me to install itself in root, to replace my previous borked Ubuntu installation and use old home without data loss, instead of making me set everything myself again, like Ubuntu does.
What’s the advantage of NixOS? The thing about package isolation to overcome dependency issues sounds attractive but surely that comes with at least some kind of disadvantage.
The disadvantage is there’s no global libraries. If you want to run a plain executable you need to steam-run it instead of just launching it and it will create an environment similar to Ubuntu
The advantage is you just run things and they work. I heard there was some packaging issue with hyprland because of different library versions, but it never affected NixOS because there’s no global library
But it sucks in ways you can always find a solution for. You’re never like “oh so these two packages have incompatible dependencies and I can’t have both”
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