With the continued enshittification of Windows 11 and relentless onslaught of privacy-invading additions to commercial operating systems, I have seen more and more people discuss wanting to try out, or outright move, to Linux. The question that generally then follows is, “Which distro should I use?"

The perennial answer to this question has generally been either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. While both of these distributions are indeed relatively beginner-friendly on their face, and the added promise of a focus towards stability reduces the chances that a new user would need to engage with more involved troubleshooting tasks, I find the presented options rather lacking for any context beyond a generic response. My own experiences using both Linux Mint and Ubuntu as desktop systems has been anything but simple or trouble-free, and my experiences helping friends and family with issues when they have tried out either of the two, bolster my unease at blanket recommending their installation to anyone and everyone. The truth of the matter, as I touched on in my typically rambly fashion in ‘I Use Linux, You Don’t Have To’, is that user’s computing needs are anything but uniform, nor are their particular sensibilities regarding UI/UX, desire for system customization, comfortability with technical knowledge, and so on. Ultimately, I think we can do better when it comes to making distro recommendations.

To be clear, I don’t think Mint or Ubuntu are necessarily bad distros. I work with ubuntu on a daily basis in my capacity as a Systems Engineer, and amongst the various common options I have interacted with when it comes to server distros, it has remained my favorite for its relative simplicity, consistency, and stability. Now, obviously, a server installation is not the same as a desktop installation, and I must admit I have not spent nearly as long with Ubuntu installed on one of my machines as I have other options, including Mint. Mint was my first distro install, way back when, and it did serve me well.

Finally, I want to pre-empt the rest of this article by emphasizing that my goal is not to provide some authoritative set of recommendations for which distros should be offered in response to the aforementioned question. Instead, I want to highlight why I think other options might indeed be more favorable entrypoints into the Linux landscape, depending on the particular user. I’d honestly rather avoid writing yet another article to lay amongst the countless in the vein of “Why X Distro is The Best for Beginners” – of which a new entry seems to be written every day.

The Problem With Ubuntu and Mint

When I first got started really using Linux in earnest, I had installed Mint on my machine and, for a time, that worked fairly well. However, it didn’t take long for issues to begin to crop up and, over time, ultimately push me towards other options. In my case in particular, I ran up against two major friction points time and time again:

  1. Hardware Support
  2. Stale Packages

In the hardware support case, I would regularly encounter strange GPU issues, which based on the researching I would then do to try and troubleshoot, only seemed to be present on Mint and other similar ubuntu-based systems. Granted, at the time I was using a 980ti and nvidia has not had a particularly strong history of being ‘friendly’ to the Linux community. I would on occaision run into other hardware problems as well, however, what remains in my mind a decade1 later is a headache of primarily GPU issues. In any case, that these issues were not present on other systems should highlight the existence of some kind of problem.

The second issue was much more pervasive, and served as the strongest point in pushing me to other distributions. The long term stability focus of ubuntu and mint is all well and good in a static space where things are known to work from the outset, but that is not what software looks like these days. From OTA-updated electron applications to iteratively released software packages; missing out on software features, waiting for hardware support, and finding first-hand documentation that references features or paradigms which are not true for your system’s older package are all frustrating experiences. This situation has admittedly improved somewhat since my last foray with ubuntu-based desktop systems (admittedly, Pop_OS! was a much better experience in this regard when I used it), the problem still rears its ugly head, and has been the source of many tech-support text messages from friends and family.

These alone merit contemplation, however, the real problem emerges when certain kinds of user run up against Ubuntu and Mint. In particular, I have found that power-users, especially those who are already familiar with having to make use of Windows' CMD and/or Powershell, consistently suffer problems with these distros that are borne more out of philosophical or paradigm discrepancies than any one specific technical limitation. For instance, consider the following for a moment: one of the most common recommendations for using an ubuntu-based system with the popular window manager i3 is to install a specific distro with i3 already set up. What that fact illuminates is the relative inflexibility of the systems in question. The Window Manager/Desktop Environment choices are not the end of this inflexibility, and it only takes a little digging to find thread upon thread of former windows power-users grinding against the paradigms of Mint and Ubuntu.

The last element I feel is important to highlight in this context is the package management landscape. While apt on its own is fairly straightforward, the broader user experience for my power-user friends on Mint and Ubuntu frequently involves needing to deal not only with apt alone, but also Flatpak and AppImage. Not only that, but within the specific scope of the apt package manager, these users frequently need to install and manage third-party PPAs in order to install the various packages they require just to make use of their systems. For new users, adding all these additional points of friction frequently leads to the conclusion that Linux is, in fact, not the answer to their problems. They don’t distro-hop to find a better fit. We do them a disservice by failing to consider these elements.

You Should Use Arch, By The Way

Far be it for me to embody the memetic image of a linux nerd, but, I truly believe arch to be a better style of distribution to recommend to the users I have highlighted in the previous section. Yes, arch on its own requires a greater degree of direct intervention with the system to get up and running, however, with the existence of projects like EndeavourOS or even just the marginal simplification of the installation process provided by the install script on Arch’s own provided ISO, this barrier-to-entry is markedly less prominent than was once believed.

I don’t recommend arch because that’s what I use, but because it resolves many of the problems highlighted above (as do other distributions one could suggest). The degree of flexibility available to power users, the availability of packages within the main repositories that are, in addition to not requiring third-party repositories, up to date, and the value proposition of the AUR for those packages which aren’t in the main repos all provide a much smoother experience than on Ubuntu or Mint. Couple this with the vast knowledgebase that is the ArchWiki, and you can begin to see why the experience might be significantly better for many ‘power-users’.

Ultimately, my goal is not to sing the praises of arch ad nauseam. My primary goal in writing this is instead to point out that, while there are good reasons to recommend Ubuntu or Mint to a new Linux user, the context of how a user will actually interact with the system should not be ignored as a component of how recommendations are made. This article could be much, much longer – but in the interest of avoiding dumping too much information onto the reader, I have opted to stick to the high-level overview of the problem.

  1. Side note: ouch ↩︎