Recommend me a linux distro other than Linux Mint

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6pack

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I'm using Linux Mint 21.2 and I'm getting tired of the small software and hardware problems it has.
1. It connects to usb devices properly but does not copy at full speed. In terminal I see it connects to external ssd drive at 10Gbps but copy speed is usb 2 speed of 30MBps. Does not matter if it is one large file or hundreds of small files. Copy speed is max 30-35MBps.
2. Weirdly, when connecting to my Toshiba hdd, it copies at 135MBps to 160Mbps for a few minutes and then drops down to 40MBps.
3. USB C copy speed is just usb 2 speed.
4. The touchpad working is really weird. My touchpad supports tap to click. If its normal browsing the taps work. But if I'm watching YT or Hotstar or videos fullscreen, the taps don't work properly. I have to tap 5-6 times for the tap to be recognised.
5. Nemo file manager is pita. Sometimes it does not even launch and if i try to troubleshoot it, can't figure out. Found this out when the phone connected to Nemo closed its connection and Nemo just hanged. It just wouldn't start up until i disconnected the usb c cable to the phone. No error message or anything. Clicking on file manager icon id nothing. Once i removed the usb c cable, 5-6 Nemo windows opened. :mad: I think Nemo might be the reason for slow file transfer speeds but not entirely sure.
6. Mint has a backup software that makes snapshots of the disk. It wont take snapshot if the disk capacity is below the OS disk capacity no matter what. Suppose OS disk is 1TB and has 800GB free and just 200GB data and you're trying to take a snapshot on a 512 GB disk it wont work. It requires 1TB or more capacity.
7. Lot of other small things i don't remember properly like hard set brightness and sound control steps that only go up/ down in 5 steps or other such things.

So looking for something not Gnome or KDE. I tried Manjaro, Debian, MX, and didnt like any. Feel like going back to windows but i dont like the way that os works. I just cant stand windows now. I did try it when i got my laptop but removed it the next day and installed linux mint because it was harder to use than Mint. I wanted to try arch but not hapy with termnial installation. LM XFCE and Mate are even worse than the Cinnamon edition imo but I did use them for months and didn't like them. Don't want Fedora or Gentoo which build the updates on the pc and take hours to update. So whats left that works properly with hardware and software?
 
Linux Mint forums have similar complaints from different people, hope you checked those.
Linux Mint released latest LMDE which is Debian based on back-end, can you try that ? What about Kali Linux ?
For gui side, try LXQT which is for minimalism. For distro-hoping, Solus, Budgie, Garuda, KaOS, Void, etc. Don't know why, but I like designs of elementaryOS.
Or try latest Fedora spins which may give you a different feel.
btw, which file system you are using, BTRS, EXT4, etc...
Sometimes, Linux is about the sense of exploring new...
 
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Maybe expecting this level of refinement form linux it not the right way to go, some tinkering will be required. Linux mint is probably the most refined one, which offers most out-the-box stability.

Looks like most of your issues are laptop related. If windows is a no go, and linux is not working out, switching to macOS could be the way, of course with a macbook.
 
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+1 for Ubuntu.
PeppermintOS is something you could try. It is barebones though using XFCE and is based on Debian.
But then again some DIY will always be needed to work out the H/W issues with any distro.
 
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Been using Linux for 10+ years (Ubuntu 11, Elementary 0.2 and many others since). Never had a flawless experience with any of the distros, be it proprietary hardware, nvidia optimus (anyone remembers bumblebee?), trackpad wigging out (and disappearing after one kernel update), wireless interfering with each other etc. Off late, the experience has vastly improved, did not have to tinker much with my Ryzen/Nvidia system (Ubuntu budgie), and more recently 13700k/3080ti system, on elementary 0.7.

Just got a new laptop a couple of days back, installed elementary 0.7 on it, most of the things work fine, except it cannot connect to my wifi 6 5ghz network (mt7921 iirc), have to use my 2.4g network (which isn't that bad considering i have an overkill access point that can push 100mb+ on 2.4ghz).

What I'm trying to say here is, the experience is probably never going to be flawless, and it directly correlates with how many vendor specific proprietary drivers your system needs. But, it can be pretty good, all you need is the one distro that works. Give elementary/pop os a try, they're my go to suggestions.
 
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Lots of similar replies so not going to quote everyone here.

yes i did check LM forums and lot of the solutions were people just giving up or it was a different problem than mine.

Main problem with LMDE or Debian is no sudo. I have used sudo for years and in Debian i thinks it su or something else to get to root. Plus if i have to learn or troubleshoot something, most of the tutorials or commands assume you're using Ubuntu and there's always sudo. I know it looks trivial but its become a habit now.

Ubuntu is forcing snaps and i don't like it. I know disk space is cheap but i don't like how there's 10-15 snap packages and 3 versions of each app installed and every snap is installed as a volume. sorry, ubuntu is not for me. plus it uses gnome. i hate gnome. too minimal and we have to install extensions which could become a problem later if something changed.

Kali Linux - nah, it not for daily use.
I did try Solus budgie years back but it was like a snail. Garuda, Void etc don't seem much different from others. No real selling point in them.

Mac (no, never - not user friendly to me and i dont have extra money to spend on a mac) plus i dont like the monotone striped b&w ui.

I'm using ext4 on most of my systems - went the extra mile and formatted every drive to ext4. Only some old ones are NTFS. I couldn't go back to windows even if i want because every drive i have is ext4 now. I know there's ext4 driver but i'd rather use linux.

I've heard about endeavouros some months back, watched some yt videos and i forgot the reason why i didnt even try it. I did try to download it but the download wouldnt even start. so gave up on it. maybe i dropped it because it uses btrfs.

Edit: reading my reply i feel like i'm so negative :(
I'm not overly negative or trying to be negative, but just pointing out the experience i've had with the various distos i used over the years. I have used most of them for 1-2 months daily and settled on LM because it gave me the least headaches. Somewhere down the line maybe i increased my expectations from linux a lot because the OS never crashed on me or destroyed data or forcibly pushed updates etc.
Don't feel bad if i said no to your suggestion, even i'm feeling bad here for saying no to all these suggestions. everyone is trying to help and i'm saying no no here. :(
 
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6pack said:
Main problem with LMDE or Debian is no sudo. I have used sudo for years and in Debian i thinks it su or something else to get to root. Plus if i have to learn or troubleshoot something, most of the tutorials or commands assume you're using Ubuntu and there's always sudo. I know it looks trivial but its become a habit now.
Click to expand...
In debian default install, user account is not automatically added to the sudoers group. Add your user account to that, and you can use sudo (without going full su) on your user account.
 
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I am using Zorin OS (Ubuntu based).
I had some minor issues with proprietary hardware - APC backup, Brother printer, but this should be expected from any open source distro
 
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Not sure what you were expecting over here but any discussion about distros results in everyone recommending everything that you can find on distrowatch.

Linux being Linux, what works for one will necessarily not work flawlessly for someone else with different hardware. Just try out and see if anything works better though LM always had the most compatibility and stability, Debian aside.
 
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LMDE 6 seems to have sudo, if am not mistaken ?
Agree on ubuntu snap fiasco.
Kali Linux is now even recommended by msft, you know :)
Void is actually a bit different, don't have systemd, etc. etc. Garuda optimized for KDE visuals, so interesting.
Manjoro apparently supports latest h/w drivers, should test Arch linux which you may slowly get acquainted to.
Or if adventurous enough Gentoo, I tried it once, it weared me down. But will try again if I get time.
Budgie, Solus, etc. have revived now, so worth a try.
Pop!_OS is supported by System76, very active these days.

Linux for me is hobbyist on desktop, for ever. Always distracted by X vs wayland, forced systemd, pulseaudio hickups, graphic driver issues, etc. etc. Sometimes conspiracy theorist in me make me think, that these divisions are intentionally inspired by it's distractors and people within fall for it, especially systemd.
It is a specialized purpose server os dedicated for that purpose with people with enough know in my books.
 
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Distros generally are about how things are packaged together and what software is available/updated. You can have same kernel/packages in different distros. No need to hop around for that too much.
Example - Arch has a fast rolling release, and you get latest packages quicker. But downside is that some might be less stable ( not common, but happens ) and there is more involvement when updating packages. I used to use it for many many years, then eventually got tired of update process and now use Kubuntu LTS.

For troubleshooting, it might be better to go one by one and check what root cause for each problem is rather than changing distro.
You can try to install latest stable kernel to begin with and then go from there. I don't think changing distros will magically fix anything unless there is some accidental support/fix for something that you lacked earlier.

No idea about your issues. But sometimes ( rarely these days ..), we have to compromise. If touchpad drivers are not working well and there is no fix, use mouse etc.
About DE - generally many are available within same distro. I don't like gnome either so i use KDE with ubuntu and do not have gnome installed at all.
Kubuntu is easy way to do that, but you can install both and play with them. No need to change distro just to change DE.

It may have its reasons for existence, but i don't like snap either. But maybe just let it go and tolerate it. For now, only firefox i think comes oob ( atleast in 22.04 Kubuntu which i use), it does allow installing 3rd party software without dependency issues and apparently faster updates for things like firefox. And there will be 3rd party ppas probably if you really dont want to use snap.

2 -> Likely hardisk has some kind of small fast area for quick burst of speed initially and once that fills, you get native speeds. Nothing wrong here, unless native speed is low.
5 -> I dont remember having issues with nemo, but again there are many file managers that one can use. I use dolphin that comes with KDE and am happy with it. You can experiment with them. No need to change distro for something like this. Even thunar ( xfce ) is decent and i used it for some time many years ago. Each may have its own limitations although dolphin seems rather good to me.
6 -> If you don't like some software, look for alternatives. There are generally many for each use case and atleast one might be fit for you. For ex, I used to play with so many mp3 players, ultimately just ended up using simple audacious and that's enough for me. For backup, i just use rsync.

Also, wikis can have lots of info for different things. Arch linux wiki is very nice and most things from it can apply to ubuntu as well as the underlying packages are same ( if not distro specific ) .
 
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6pack said:
I'm using Linux Mint 21.2 and I'm getting tired of the small software and hardware problems it has.
1. It connects to usb devices properly but does not copy at full speed. In terminal I see it connects to external ssd drive at 10Gbps but copy speed is usb 2 speed of 30MBps. Does not matter if it is one large file or hundreds of small files. Copy speed is max 30-35MBps.
2. Weirdly, when connecting to my Toshiba hdd, it copies at 135MBps to 160Mbps for a few minutes and then drops down to 40MBps.
3. USB C copy speed is just usb 2 speed.
4. The touchpad working is really weird. My touchpad supports tap to click. If its normal browsing the taps work. But if I'm watching YT or Hotstar or videos fullscreen, the taps don't work properly. I have to tap 5-6 times for the tap to be recognised.
5. Nemo file manager is pita. Sometimes it does not even launch and if i try to troubleshoot it, can't figure out. Found this out when the phone connected to Nemo closed its connection and Nemo just hanged. It just wouldn't start up until i disconnected the usb c cable to the phone. No error message or anything. Clicking on file manager icon id nothing. Once i removed the usb c cable, 5-6 Nemo windows opened. :mad: I think Nemo might be the reason for slow file transfer speeds but not entirely sure.
6. Mint has a backup software that makes snapshots of the disk. It wont take snapshot if the disk capacity is below the OS disk capacity no matter what. Suppose OS disk is 1TB and has 800GB free and just 200GB data and you're trying to take a snapshot on a 512 GB disk it wont work. It requires 1TB or more capacity.
7. Lot of other small things i don't remember properly like hard set brightness and sound control steps that only go up/ down in 5 steps or other such things.

So looking for something not Gnome or KDE. I tried Manjaro, Debian, MX, and didnt like any. Feel like going back to windows but i dont like the way that os works. I just cant stand windows now. I did try it when i got my laptop but removed it the next day and installed linux mint because it was harder to use than Mint. I wanted to try arch but not hapy with termnial installation. LM XFCE and Mate are even worse than the Cinnamon edition imo but I did use them for months and didn't like them. Don't want Fedora or Gentoo which build the updates on the pc and take hours to update. So whats left that works properly with hardware and software?
Click to expand...
About USB devices, a huge majority of devices do not run at the "advertised" speed when sustained over time, and it will be a shock to me if any device runs at the maximum speed of the USB standard supported, in a sustained fashion. Have you tried another OS to check if those devices run at a much higher speed and your OS is indeed the problem ? I often find Linux supports higher transfer rates with most of my USB devices than Windows, but I don't have scientific data for that.

Nemo : there are too many file managers to even count. Just install 100 of them and try :). Distro has very little to do with them. And almost nothing beats command line for managing files.

Snapshots : I have used that snapshot software of Mint, it seems very filesystem dependent. Which filesystem do you have on the drive where you are trying this ? If BTRFS or ZFS, it makes sense otherwise I would recommend you use some other backup mechanism. Whether Mint or some other distro.

Not Gnome or KDE : While on paper many of the other DEs are good, I tried a lots of them, most of them lack certain features. Gnome and KDE get the maximum support from developers / corporates, and it shows. I used them when I did most of the work on command line - then it doesn't matter. If you can do all the usage / configuration / settings on command line, definitely try one of the dozens of DEs / window managers. Again, not distro dependent.

Overall, I am addicted to Fedora (and its predecessors) for over 20 years. It is not perfect, but whenever I try to switch to some other distro, there are some weird issues that bring me back to Fedora. Given how bleeding edge it is, it is remarkably well polished. It definitely doesn't build updates on the PC, if you meant that with your statement. Most issues are not distro related. Arch has many downstream distros, so you don't need to do the command line installation to get the Arch experience. One good thing about Arch based distros is the documentation - archiwiki - which I use even to fix problems with other distros !
 
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elementary OS fanboy here.

Do try the latest 7.1 recently released which comes with ubuntu 22.04 LTS hardware enablement stack kernel 6.2 instead of the older 5.x so you might have a better experience depending on your hardware configuration.

Visit elementary.io to download but where it encourages you to pay what you can, you can simply select the custom amount option and enter zero to download for free.

I also happily run KDE neon distro and opensuse tumbleweed with gnome but you're not looking at this I guess.

elementary OS isn't perfect but it's definitely worth a try to decide for yourself if you want to stick with it.
 
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Unfortunately, the Desktop Experience™ on Linux is always gonna result in issues one way or the other. I'm biased towards Fedora but that's only because I'm used to RHEL like distros. It makes sense to me because of stuff that's exclusive (you can still install them on other distros but they are not present by default) to RHEL like systems - like SELinux. So that if I learn something new on Fedora, that would apply to RHEL as well.

You can always install a tiling window manager and a compositor like compton (i heard it's picom now?). Or switch to wayland and try out something like sway.

I've used a lot of distros in the past and here are some reasons why I don't use anything other than Fedora/CoreOS/RHEL/Alma on my homelab or personal laptops

Debian Stable - Old packages. Good for a VPS though. I believe my website (nanibot.net) is on Debian.
Ubuntu - Their decision to hang onto Snap. DNF/YUM > APT
Ubuntu/Debian Derivatives - Never tried
OpenSUSE - Good distro but AppArmor by default (I know you can switch to SELinux but...)
Gentoo - I have fond memories of using Gentoo back in college when I used to compile stuff which would take hours only to realize I've missed an USE flag and then start all over again. I've heard war stories about old Gentoo nerds who used to start from stage1. Unfortunately I've never had the pleasure of doing that.
Arch - Too bleeding edge for my liking. Best wiki though, I remember the Arch wiki being super helpful when I used to mess around with distros like Gentoo
Slackware - I mean...
 
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-NaniBot- said:
Unfortunately, the Desktop Experience™ on Linux is always gonna result in issues one way or the other. I'm biased towards Fedora but that's only because I'm used to RHEL like distros. It makes sense to me because of stuff that's exclusive (you can still install them on other distros but they are not present by default) to RHEL like systems - like SELinux. So that if I learn something new on Fedora, that would apply to RHEL as well.

You can always install a tiling window manager and a compositor like compton (i heard it's picom now?). Or switch to wayland and try out something like sway.

I've used a lot of distros in the past and here are some reasons why I don't use anything other than Fedora/CoreOS/RHEL/Alma on my homelab or personal laptops

Debian Stable - Old packages. Good for a VPS though. I believe my website (nanibot.net) is on Debian.
Ubuntu - Their decision to hang onto Snap. DNF/YUM > APT
Ubuntu/Debian Derivatives - Never tried
OpenSUSE - Good distro but AppArmor by default (I know you can switch to SELinux but...)
Gentoo - I have fond memories of using Gentoo back in college when I used to compile stuff which would take hours only to realize I've missed an USE flag and then start all over again. I've heard war stories about old Gentoo nerds who used to start from stage1. Unfortunately I've never had the pleasure of doing that.
Arch - Too bleeding edge for my liking. Best wiki though, I remember the Arch wiki being super helpful when I used to mess around with distros like Gentoo
Slackware - I mean...
Click to expand...
Thoughts on alma vs rocky?
Also from where and for how much did you get your epyc+mobo combo?
 
jayanttyagi said:
Thoughts on alma vs rocky?
Also from where and for how much did you get your epyc+mobo combo?
Click to expand...
Don't know about alma vs rocky, i just picked almalinux because it's not for profit or something like that?

Epyc Mobo I had to get from china via eBay. Processors were sourced locally from Bangalore. Will message you the details.
 
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