Nothing, at all.
Some things you can’t do easily in Mint, like create snapshots automatically and boot into them when something breaks.
But it’s all Linux and freely available software under the hood, and the lines between configuration, customization and forking your distro are blurry.ship of theseus
You can’t easilyy switch between different inages like on an atomic fedora system.
Do you have to switch now? No.
Hopefully we get an official XFCE Atomic desktop someday.
Brag about being an Arch user (BTW.)
I mean…
Steam? Maybe? I dunno, I don’t game but the Steam kids seem to prefer Arch. I’m sure they have their reasons.
Practically? Probably nothing terribly significant.
Steam and Lutris work well! I can game on XFCE Mint just fine. I actually have an easier time of it than on a number of distros, thanks to the combination of flatpaks and the Ubuntu base. But, I am not “the kids”.
I’m a complete noob in the games department. Btw, I see that you don’t use Arch.
Man, I got stuff to do. Lol.
I think “they prefer” Arch because a lot of them just bought a Steam Deck and that comes with Arch and it just works.
SteamOS is arch, so some of the derivatives are too.
Steam shouldn’t really care though.
Reasons are usually just newest kernel/mesa/etc. Most of the time the difference is very small, and often inconsequential. However, every now and again there is a major development that might make it worth it (IE: The graphics pipeline that all but made dxvk-async obsolete)
In my experience, not much, but I’m a marginally functional newbie. Mint manages things for you fairly nicely and has been the best, it just works with out messing with much/anything. (At least for my hardware)
I managed to get gnome working smoothly on mint and have been happy with it. I started and returned here since I last ditched windows as a native OS.
The only thing that has made me consider distro hopping from mint is AUR on arch and gnome, though I’ve been successful so far.
Part of trying the distros that are more advanced and give you more explicit control and configuration is the sense of accomplishment and it makes you figure out how and why things work the way they do. It holistically builds your velocity in your understanding of Linux. (Or gnu whatever that nuance is).
If your machine has enough resources it is super easy to host VMs of anything you want to try. You can try them all, and it won’t cost you anything but time!
If you feel like you need/want software from AUR you should check out Distrobox. It can run any distro on top of your installation using Docker under the hood, but it tightly integrates into your system so with little effort you can run AUR programs from your launcher as if they were natively installed on your Mint.
My advice as well!
Nothing, it’s all Linux
With NixOS you can upgrade your entire OS and if you don’t like it roll it back like nothing ever happened. You can also replicate your entire machine by copying your configs over to another computer, running the install, and then copying over any files you have in your home folder and you will have reproduced your desktop.
You can also very easily use a different version of a packaged app by adding an override in your config. This is useful if you want bleeding-edge features or if something is broken. Also every package is also a development environment, so you don’t have to worry about setting up a dev environment to hack on stuff.
Y-you’re not supposed to ask that!
Waste time configuring things and troubleshooting things when your ultra custom system breaks.
I love xfce. But ive tried gnome w tiling shell extension and wow. But i still miss xfce , once they come over to Wayland i think I will go back 🤷
Use Pacman as your package manager, or something. Linux is Linux. If you use a mainstream distro it should be 90% similar to all other distros. You don’t really have to worry about FOMO when it comes to Linux.
Everybody giving a version of this answer makes me feel better about maybe switching to Linux.
Xfce? All keyboard shortcuts involved the Meta key won’t work.
Which keyboard shortcuts do you mean specifically? I think I fixed this exact issue earlier today!
Meta+arrows key to shift windows around
Or is the key call Super? I know for sure it’s the “Windows” key.
Yeah that’s the exact issue I fixed yesterday: the Super (Windows) key is configured to open the whisper (start) menu and this overrides any of the other xfce keyboard shortcuts like moving windows around.
The fix was to go into Settings > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts and change the one that’s set by default to open the whisper menu (
xfce4-popup-whiskermenu) to something else. I found some bug reports saying that the problem is that xfce doesn’t expect shortcuts that are “modifier only” (as in only the Super key), and once I changed that one then the shortcuts to move windows around suddenly started working.No idea why distros ship with this configuration already broken, but hopefully this helps!
Nerd stuff
Serious answer? XFCE doesn’t support multiple monitors with different refresh rates. So that.
Some of the other answers (like Meta (aka Windows Key) not working for shortcuts) can be hacked around, but unless you switch to a DE that supports Wayland, you will never have stable multi refresh rate differences on multiple monitors.
Serious answer? XFCE doesn’t support multiple monitors with different refresh rates. So that.
That’s more of a limiation because of X11. KDE and Gnome do not support different refreshrates on multiple monitors as far as I know. Its the main reason why I never used multiple monitors. But on Wayland, this issue is solved. So if XFCE is ported to Wayland, they should also get this support for free I guess.
I’m not a fan of the xfce UX at all, and multi-monitor support still has a lot of issues (under Debian 12), but I am pretty sure having different refresh rates is possible
xrandr does.
Btw, how do you do that in wayland?
Btw, how do you do that in wayland?
You don’t have to do anything to use multiple monitors with different refresh rates in Wayland, besides plugging them in.
But i want specific framerates.
What does that even mean?
20 fps on my notebook, saves power.
Acces to the AUR I guess? But not much really. If you like what you have just stick with it
Technically he or she has access to the AUR, but through website.^^ On a more serious note, one could install https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox and manager multiple package managers. Because each package manager is in a container, they do not interfere. I never used it, but imagine it like Flatpak, but actually using the package manager from the distribution (including access to AUR). And specific applications and programs can be “exported” to install them like a normal application, so you can access it with a single appname.
Also I use Arch btw
One could compile pacman and all the build tools if they really wanted to.
