I hope I can inspire some people. I got inspired by “Debian-Z” on GitHub.
- Window Manager: i3 (Cinnamon as failsafe)
- Polybar
- Picom (compositor for blur and stuff)
- Terminal: Ghostty
- Music Player: MPD + RMPC
- File Managers: Yazi + Double Commander
- Rofi (Launcher + Bookmark Menu)
- Bookmark backend: Buku + custom bash script


Well, I used mint the longest due to its stability. So I jus t start to experiment with that. If it ain’t broken (yet), don’t fix it.
I keep looking for alternatives tho, maybe I should give Fedora a try in the near future?
Performance wise mint is pretty good, the only issue I currently have is Double Commander. It doesn’t like to be opened in full screen. Otherwise everything else works great. I hope to use Wayland in the future though.
Mint was my gateway distro. Endeavouros was my next jump. I’m now on Arch. I do like that it has forced me to learn a lot about how and why things work. I’m still learning and starting to figure out what I’ve learned incorrectly. At the end of the day I think I got the “I have to change something and distro hop” bug.
I think I would love just about any rolling release. Yay!
I also found I wanted gnome. I’d rather use my keyboard for almost everything.
Cinnamon is a great transition from windows. Linux is great because you can choose from 900 flavors to get exactly what YOU want. *and it’s a curse…
I put the wife on mint first then Debian with gnome on 2 laptops and she seems to be pretty happy with it. (One is dedicated to running a laser cutter and the other her personal laptop) She still had to keep a windows machine, but it’s really only used to run a vinyl cutter.
All that said, I’d suggest trying Endeavour. I’ve got 2 kids using different laptops with intel chips and nvidia graphics. It’s been pretty smooth. They use KDE and barely flinched coming from windows.
Happy travels in your quest and may the learning be fun!
I see :) Fedora is a pretty solid choice. But if you don’t mind a suggestion, I think arch could fit your needs as a tinkerer!
Why not go for the ancestor and try debian itself? (Edit : ancestor of mint. Deb is not the ancestor of Fedora)