I’ve been dailying the same Mint install since I gave up on Windows a few years ago. When I was choosing a distro, a lot of people were saying that I should start with Mint and “move on to something else” once I got comfortable with the OS.
I’m comfortable now, but I don’t really see any reason to move on. What would the benefits be of jumping to something else? Mint has great documentation and an active community that has answers to any questions I’ve ever had, and I’m reluctant to ditch that. On the other hand, when I scroll through forums, Distro Hopping seems to be such a big part of the “Linux experience.”
What am I missing?
Yeah but don’t Debian and Ubuntu (for example) use the same package manager?
Yes but they use different repositories with different maintainers. Think of a package manager like steam, epic, etc, except instead of games it’s everything. Some package managers get different applications, some have different versions of the same applications. In the case of Debian/Ubuntu it’s more like steam in China vs steam in the rest of the world. Same steam, different games, different maintainers of who decides what games get to go in which steam.
Oh, so if you install software with apt, you might get a different version based on the different maintainer/distribution?
I always figured you’d just get the latest version of the software.
Are there instances of software packages available for one distro but not another?
Generally end-user applications like Firefox would be the latest/same version, but system libraries might be a few versions different. Generally security patches are written for a few major versions of libraries/daemons at the same time. So features might be different but it’s all the same security for the most part.
That’s the major draw between one distro to another, they will have different philosophies on what to include, and what major version to use. Debian for example is much more reluctant to upgrade something unless there’s a large demand for a new feature. The theory is it is more stable and consistent to use that way.
Ubuntu on the other hand features much more modern versions of libraries because they want to be more hip and modern, expecting users to learn new things more often because they think the new features are worth it and they want to support all the things.
You can use the “testing” release of Debian if you want newer stuff. It’s still more stable than rolling distros. Packages have to be in the “unstable” release for 10 days with no major bugs to get promoted to testing.