I'm pretty new to Linux and cut my teeth on mint 20.2 cinnamon. What was the next distro you tried after you were familiar with Linux? Tia

The one I run now, and since late 2002, early 2003. Slackware. Redhat 8.0 was my first, and after wiped my hard on the first install and got familiar with the system, I had to find a home. Slackware doesn't follow the crowd, we usually are at least one release major release behind everyone else. That being said, I've had it break behind something I didn't do. It works. And try leaving a 7 year old laptop running windows up for 3 months without a reboot, or 3 days even. And I'm certain that if tomorrow Pat, AlienBob, rworkman, and company walked away, the rest of us could keep right on updating our slackware using our trusty slackbuilds.

My point is that you have find a Linux community thats a good fit for you. No one distro is really better than any other. Slackware is what is best for me. But I know that everyone isn't like me. I drive a 20 year old car for the same reason I run slackware. Because it works. Shop around, find a community that's a good fit for you. If you like Ubuntu's community, but you want your machine to look like Black Arch, make Ubuntu look like Black Arch. That's the beauty of Linux. You are in control, not those people in Redmond.

2 members found this post helpful.

I started with some Ubuntu derivates, then moved on to the now defunct Crunchbang Linux, which was flawed in many ways, but a true "intermediate beginner" distro which gave you preinstalled stuff, but encouraged you to edit text files for customisation, and use the terminal more. This distro has now morphed into Bunsenlabs; but IMO it is also developing away from Crunchbang's original paradigm, trying to be its own desktop environment.

Both distros are/were built on Debian stable. Thinking about it, that might be a suitable criterium for your choice.

Suck it up, make a decision for yourself.
KVM or VBox make it easy to quickly spin up a VM to test a new system. When you find one that hits the sweet spot, off you go.

KISS.

1 members found this post helpful.

Rather than trying a new distro, why not get (more) familiar with basic tools such as Bash scripting, and using tools such as awk, find, grep, sed, vim/emacs, etc? That's knowledge which would be of use in most any distro (assuming you don't mind using a terminal).

Yeah, very much this. When I started it was much more difficult. If you don't know how to use Virtual Box, now is a good time to learn. Virtual machines make it so easy to experiment with different distributions these days.

I'm old school, so I'd try to settle on one of the originals... RedHat, Debian or Slackware. Coming from Mint, you'll probably be most comfortable with Debian.

I'd ask the question of "Why?" If you're using Mint and like it, what's the point of switching? Unless you're needing very long-term support for a server with some esoteric hardware, Mint is 98% identical to pretty much every other distro for 'consumer' use. You're not missing anything, and can do everything every other distro can.

Asking people what they tried is entirely unhelpful and just generates noise - you are not those those people and everyone has varying needs and preferences.

The only way you might get reasonable answers is if you state what aspects of Mint/Cinnamon you like and - more importantly - which aspects you dislike.

If you cannot identify a problem with your current OS, you don't need to switch.

1 members found this post helpful.

"Differences" between Linux distributions are mostly superficial – they simply reflect the preferences of the distro-packagers who put them together, usually with the goal of "trying to make things easier" for one target audience or another. As for me, I simply "picked one" and moved on. (Although, over these many years, I have made different choices.) The operating system, after all, is just "the car." Figure out how to drive the thing, then use it to get to where you want to go ... learning to ignore the various "odd noises" that crop up now and then.

I'd agree with those who say stick with it and explore it. After 20 years, I still occasionally find new things! Explore your software and discover new features in that. How about this trick to check all document files in the given folder to see which has the search text:
If you want to explore the command line, look at Bash Guide

I started with Fedora 1 back in 04' then switched to OpenSuse, Ubuntu, CentOS then back to Fedora.

Now I am using Debian as my daily driver and for all my servers. (Recently I had to migrate from CentOS 8 to Debian 11)

I am very happy with the stability of Debian...it might run older version of programs but perhaps, that is what makes it stable.

Cheer!

PS. I tried FreeBSD just for kicks! a lot of work to get a GUI working but it was fun!

More important to me than the distro is the Desktop Environment. My personal favorite is Mate - not that it's any better or worse than any of the others, it's just the DE I prefer. As for distro, Mate on Fedora, Mate on Ubuntu, Mate on Linux Mint, Mate on Manjaro, Mate on Debian, Mate on PCLinuxOS are all sufficiently identical as far as I'm concerned that it doesn't matter which distro I use. Unless you're running into problems with Cinnamon on Mint, there's really no reason to switch.

But to answer your question, I believe the second distro I tried was Mandrake.

I started with Slackware, then moved to Debian when a newer Slack would not install on my laptop. (I turned out that the CD drive was dying and would not take the second Slack disc, but the Debian web install worked just fine. The whole machine died about six months later.) Currently, I'm running Mageia, Ubuntu MATE, and Debian, as well as various VMs that catch my fancy.

I would tend to second hish2021's advice. Rather than distro-hopping (which, admittedly, is fun), I'd suggest focusing on learning more about how Linux works underneath and how to get stuff done with the command line. Lifewire (was linux.about.com) has some excellent resources. So to does Going Linux. Another thought is to pick something you want to do with a computer (edit photos, record and edit audio, design a web site, etc.) and learn how to do them with Linux

Just a few thoughts.