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.
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.
It’s all open source. You can merge them yourself. It is a massive technical challenge and pretty much impossible, it’d be like merging minecraft and fallout together.
People do make money off of open source projects, not just from donations, but sometimes providing prenium features, or providing their own servers instead of you maintaining your own.
There are project leaders, Linus has the final say in what does and does not make it into the Linux kernel.
Sir this is the Linux instance.
I’d start with Ubuntu. If there’s any niche software, it will probably run on Ubuntu/debian distros.
I’ve never used Wayland, x11 is fine for me.
I have also had issues with Wayland, but I have heard issues with Nvidia cards and Wayland.
Yeah, you look at how there are a handful of package managers, and hundreds of distros, they’re pretty much all the “same”
But yes gentoo and NixOS do things the most differently. But even on those you can game on them.
I mostly want to discourage distro hopping with the belief that they’re missing out on a program or desktop, only to end up on windows because they’re tired of reinstalling everything.
One important thing you need to know about distros: they’re all the same under the hood.
You can have any desktop you want on any distro. But some customizations are redone in some distros. In terms of programs you want to run, they pretty much all work on any distro. If a distro is “better for gaming” it usually just means the programs are pre-installed.
People talk about arch and Debian as the best because they have the least customizations, allowing you to install and customize as you wish.
Linux users are mostly tinkerers, they like their customizations their way. I’m in that boat. The less I have to remove to get my customization working, the better. Just give me a black screen and a white blinking cursor, I know how to do the rest from there.
If you look up “how to make a bookmark” for example, you might find the tutorial for the right browser you’re using, or you might find one for chrome/firefox/edge, or you might find a tutorial on a real bookmark.
Narrowing your search to the specific program you’re using will get you better results. “how to adjust mouse sensitivity in Linux” will not get you good results. Look up “… In Linux mint” or in your chosen desktop environment. You’ll get much better results.
I Alias “sudo !!” with “plz”
I’ve always been able to read that my kernel is included in an update.
Are you updating throught he command line or some visual front?
And 1200 packages? I run arch (btw) and only get ~250 a week.
I don’t like other distros that include lots of programs out of the box. I might need an office program, a music player, etc. But I want to choose it all myself.
I like KDE, but I also like some gnome applications, and it’s difficult to find a distro that only installs one or the other.
I find it easier to start from scratch: Give me a basic desktop environment, a terminal, and I know how to take it from there.
The rolling packages are a nice touch. As a linux gamer, any bit of free performance I can get from simply installing an update is appreciated.
Learning the specific program you’re looking to troubleshoot will help a ton.
Searching “how to make a bookmark” might show you how to make a bookmark on your browser of choice, but it might also show you how to make a bookmark on a browser you’re not using, or you might even get a tutorial on how to make a real bookmark.
Searching “how to adjust mouse sensitivity in Linux” won’t get you very far. It would be best to search for the desktop environment you’re using.
PopOS uses the gnome desktop environment. A desktop environment is in charge of most settings you’ll want to modify initially. Toolbar, resolution, shortcuts, etc.
Searching for things along those lines, ending the search term with “in gnome” or “in PopOS” will direct you to better results.
Websites can be vague, or outdated. Is there any error from running the command?