Switching from Linux Mint to an Arch-based Distro - Part 2: The Shortlist

Peter — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 16:53:54 +0000

I decided to switch from Linux Mint to an Arch-based distro. I compiled my shortlist of distros I want to have a closer look at mainly from recommendations by friends and colleagues and which seem to meet my requirements:

stable: I use my notebook everyday for development, so it must just work reliably and I don't want to spend much time fixing issues.
btrfs: Since many years I've been using btrfs for both root and home partition (sub volumes in fact) and I'm really happy. btrfs has very handy features, first of all volumne snapshots (see next point also), compression and copy on write.
automated system snapshots: #linuxmint has the very nice Timeshift tool included and at the (very few) occasions where an automated updated (or I) did crash something, I could simply boot into an previous snapshot within seconds and without needing to copy backups around. I really don't want to miss this!
flexible: I like to have a very tailored work environment, so tweaking should be possible
documentation and community: As I never did use Arch Linux before, I'm pretty sure I need some help to get along from time to time. And good documentation is an important aspect.

The Candidates

Mainly based on the recommendations from friends and colleagues, I came up with this short list of arch-based distributions, I want to have a closer look at:

Manjaro has been recommended to me by several people. It seems to be well integrated and I like the idea that their repo is a bit better tested than the original Arch repo, where I heared that it's a bit too cutting-edge sometimes... I need a system that is reliable as possible as I use it every day for development and I just don't want to invest time in fixing issues. A while ago I did a test install of Manjaro on my previous notebook and this worked well out of the box. For my test I downloaded manjaro-kde-22.1.0.
EndeavourOS seems interesting, because it offers quite a lot of flexibility. I like the idea that you can choose your primary desktop environment during installation, but also add others you want to give a try. And also configure the packages you want to install. For my test I downloaded the EndeavourOS_Cassini_Nova-03-2023_R1.iso
Garuda Linux might not be as popular as the other two. I think I found it while looking for some btrfs tool. As I want a smooth btrfs experience, I decided to try this as well and downloaded garuda-dr460nized-linux-zen-230501.iso.

So, let's see how I get along with them.

Switching from Linux Mint to an Arch-based Distro - Part 1: Why?

Peter — Tue, 23 May 2023 19:24:28 +0000

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...

DEV Community: Peter

Switching from Linux Mint to an Arch-based Distro - Part 2: The Shortlist

The Candidates

Switching from Linux Mint to an Arch-based Distro - Part 1: Why?