Hello,
first I installed Gentoo with glibc and it worked fine, I got sway up and running but after some time I got bored and wanted something new. so I decided to go with Arch with rEFInd bootloader but I couldn’t make it work. Arch dropped me into a rescue shell. so I went back to Gentoo but this time with musl and this time I tried Hyprland on Gentoo. there were 133 packages to install for Hyprland, so I went for installing those packages but the build failed probably because using musl. now I thought I just pick that’s easy to setup and I went with Debian and it got installed successfully. so yeah, right now I am using Debian after the back and forth between Arch and Gentoo.
sadly I pissed of some Gentoo devs on IRC #gentoo :(
maybe it was my fault I shouldn’t have distrohopped when Gentoo was installed succesfully and working fine.
I love Mint! It’s not for those who like to tinker and break and fix thinks, because it just works out of the box. External audio, Intel CPU, Nvidia card were no problems in my setup. Calling Mint a beginners distro is like a car mechanic calling a sleek, fun car that’s going smoothly a beginners car. I’m not part of some elitist cult, my OS isn’t my personality, I’m not a masochist and I don’t crave innovation just for the sake of it. I tried a couple other distros but none felt as polished and accessible as Mint.
Be sure to use workspaces (strg+alt+arrows), I ignored them for too long because Windows doesn’t have them.
Trust me, the closer you get to the linux community, the more you’ll realize that the “elitists” are just a small and abrasive minority.
They’re not even enthusiasts; just trolls trying to send others down bad paths.
Free software is for everyone. Not just nerds who know how to tinker.
It’s known as a beginner-friendly distro, exactly for the reasons you say. There is nothing wrong with using something like that as an intermediate or advanced user if that is what you prefer. You don’t have to go “Well, I have been using Linux for four years now, guess I am an intermediate user so now I have to switch to Arch”
I’ve noticed a pattern in distrohopping among my linux using friends. Many started with ubuntu back in the day, then switched to a less preconfigured distro like arch, gentoo, etc. You learn a lot being forced to tinker and fix things. But after that, many seem to have landed on distros of the debian or fedora kind, because they want to get actual work done and you can make any distro do almost anything anyway.