I have been using Mint for about six months now and while I am not going to start distro hopping, I slowly want to start exploring the rest of Linux.
Originally I was looking at Arch based distros such as Manjaro and EndeavourOS, during which I found out Manjaro is somewhat pointless because you pretty much should not use the AUR on Manjaro or else you will break the system inevitably. EndeavourOS looked solid though.
However, I got a few suggestions regarding OpenSuSE Tumbleweed as a better alternative to Arch based distros and just wanted to know what are the pros and cons of OpenSuSE compared to Arch based distros from your experience?
Underneath they are all just Linux. Identical in most cases. The things you’re referring to they make them feel different are userland features, not OS features. Linux is Linux is Linux.
Just like Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 all feel different but underneath they are all identical Windows.
Windows 7 to Window 11 are not the same. Can you do WSL2 on Windows 7? DirectX 12?
Not all Linux distros are the same either. What kind of tooling does the distro provide to manage the file system ( especially ZFS or Btrfs ). What C library does your system use? Is it immutable or not? How are packages managed and how many of them are there? What hardware does the distro target?
Some distros are easier for users coming from other systems than others. I do not love Mint myself but it is a pretty decent general recommendation for new users.
The distribution has rather significant impacts on the user experience.
All that said, most users would be better off sticking with whatever Linux distribution they are already using and learn it better than to distro-hop. If you do want to poke the tires on other distros, I agree that trying it in a VM is a decent idea. Swapping the SSD would be even better. I am a hardware cheapskate and regularly use machines as old as 2008 but even I think that SSDs are cheap enough these days that having one for “testing” is not a bad idea.
Yes, underneath they are all using a Linux kernel, but the user experience between Gentoo and Mint is radically different. And Fedora is a very different experience from Arch. Or Ubuntu vs Void.
I’ve recommended Zorin to my dad. I would not recommend Slackware to him.
It’s easy to say that Debian-Fedora-Arch are all Linux, but between all of their derivatives and all of the independent distros, there is a vast array of user experiences available.