A comm dedicated to the fight for free software with an anti-capitalist perspective.
The struggle for libre computing cannot be disentangled from other forms of socialist reform. One must be willing to reject proprietary software as fiercely as they would reject capitalism. Luckily, we are not alone.
$CURRENT_YEAR, take Linux Mint for a spin. If you're ready to take the plunge, flock to Fedora! If you're a computer hobbyist and love DIY, use Arch, Gentoo, Guix or the many, many offerings out there.I cast aside my earthly data possessions and start again as if I am born anew. I have automated backup scripts for everything i care about and provisioning scripts for a bunch of distros to get me started in most things.
Come join me on Fedora. We love it over here tips me hat
The strigine urge to change Linux distro
You should back up your files when making a major change to your computer, regardless of if it shouldn't cause problems (you should back up your files routinely anyway; hard drives fail).
On your next install, if you put /home in its own partition, that'll make distro hopping easier (you should STILL back up your shit sometimes though). This can sometimes be more jank than a clean install though, because programs put their config files in /home, and oops your new distro has an older version of whateverthefuck that gets confused by the newer config file.
Some things to check out when hopping:
Mint is a fork of Ubuntu which is a fork of Debian. I think it's worth exploring that tree.
Try things with different desktop environments. Mint is Cinnamon, but a lot of people like KDE. There's also Gnome, XFCE, random shit. You can swap these around to some extent, but a distro with KDE is going to have KDE apps pre-installed and give a more consistent KDE experience.
Try a tiling window manager! Some people love those fuckers.
Sick of Debian? Try Fedora or an Arch-based distro like Cachy or Majaro.
Arch btw? Arch boots to a black screen and expects you to install it yourself via terminal and wiki. Hilarious.
Sick of Debian? Try Fedora or an Arch-based distro like Cachy or Majaro.
i would not recommend manjaro, the devs have fucked up way too many times
for a friendly arch i would recommend endeavourOS
Arch btw? Arch boots to a black screen and expects you to install it yourself via terminal and wiki. Hilarious.
the install script is pretty easy now
it's text based and ugly as sin but it will get you a working arch setup without having to punch in commands from the wiki
Yeah, I know nothing about Arch, I just took the top two Arch-based ones off distrowatch.
Listen to the Horse not the Owl on this one, folks.
Generally speaking yes you wipe your partitions and start over and restore selectively from backups. I recommend backing up /home and /etc (and maybe /boot) and test your backups by stimulating a restore (e.g. to a dir at /home/restore, just see if it is the right size and has your files). If you don't have a regular backup system, this is a good opportunity to start using one. I like borg-based tools and filesystems that can do snapshots. Then you just make a backup right before you install the new distro, then restore from backup.
You can also start putting /home on its own partition in case you swap distributions often but I've never found this appealing. It's also not a replacement for proper backups. I do set up /home to be discretely snapshotable, though.
Why are you looking to change from Mint? Mint is pretty nice, though I prefer Debian for that kind of distro. I've been trying out guix and really like it, though it's definitely a power user / dev distro, as you have to configure your system using a dialect of Lisp (a programming language).
Mint is great! I'm just curious mostly.
I might even just like duel boot and decide I want to stick with mint lol
duel
wait a minute... THERE A MULTIPLE WAYS OF SPELLING DUAL?!
WHAT IS ENGLISH?!
I like this one though because challenging someone to a duel is funny
Two operating systems fighting each other to see who gets to run
You've activated my terminal trap card!
Yeah that's basically what it comes down to.
Usually windows wins because Linux is too weak and doesn't dare to wreck other OSs boot images.
sometimes e and a are interchangeable
austrelia
Hehehe
Hahaha
now yuo see 
Nice! You can also try out distributions with just a usb stick, though they will be slower than an SSD.
You basically back up /home and maybe /etc/fstab if you're using the same exact device with multiple drives but don't want to set up your drive partitions again. If your device only has one physical drive, there's no point in keeping /etc/fstab since the new distro installation would just create a new /etc/fstab anyways. Backing up /etc/fstab starts making sense if you have like a PC with 6+ physical drives. You could technically just set up all 6 drives through the installer, but I personally would never do that. Whenever I install an OS, I always physically disconnect every single drive except for the drive that the OS is going to. Otherwise, you run into the risk of installing the OS on the wrong drive, wiping data from that drive in the process.
For safety you should back up your files regardless(home directory or whatever is actually important there), but if you have your home and root on separate partitions (and even better separate hard drives) you shouldn't have to restart from scratch. If you do plan on distro hopping and do not have separate partitions it is worth looking into doing that for your next install(honestly think it is a good thing to do generally but it isn't a big deal). Sometimes configs can be messed up between distro's but it is rarely a problem in my experience
SteamOS does not work right on most hardware last I heard. They have specific stuff in there for the exact devices they do support (which are only two I think, SteamDeck and another one of these handhelds). It doesn't have all drivers for other hardware and there are even tweaks for the AMD chips that are in those things.
Everything particular to you should be in /home/$YourUsername/ so if you back that up you should be able to get up and running again quick
This might show how little I understand about how OS systems work, but wouldn't each distro have a slightly different way they organize storage?
"all your shit is in /home/$YourUsername/" is pretty universal in linuxes.
Good to know!
I am learning! (slowly)
I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how intuitive my experience has been so far. It's still a learning curve, but it's not nearly as convoluted as I thought it would be either.
This is what linux enjoyers are constantly trying to tell people, that it is different but it's actually more straightforward than windows once you get past your existing familiarity.
It's so much better than Windows, I don't see myself going back, even though Windows is what I grew up on.
The only thing that's going to suck is that I'm worried not having experience with Windows 11 is going to embarrass me one day haha.
I'm at the point where if a job requires me to be able to troubleshoot windows then i skip applying for it. I refuse to work with that piece of shit any longer.
Don't let users of inferior OSes embarrass you, embarrass them instead
"You still use that garbage? But doesn't it break every week and spy on you?"
"Updates never Uninstalled my Calculator app" 
Yeah, I find myself confused and infuriated when I have to deal with a modern Windows machine. It takes so long to figure out how to do simple things or change a setting. And then you look it up and all the documentation and forums online are useless.
The pattern I have had is to keep my home directory on a separate hard drive so.I can hop and all my stuff (and configurations!) Stay constant across distros. The config side can cause some grief, depending on what you have set up, but the rest is 100% worth it
Here's a pretty good vid explaining the Linux filesystem if you really wanna dig into it. I think it covers some differences between distros, too IIRC.
I'm somewhat new to Linux, too, but I have a dedicated hard drive partition for my OS. Had to do a reinstall recently (bricked my PC during the Arch NVIDIA debacle), all I did was wipe that partition and literally everything was ready to go on my data partition once I reinstalled. It should make hopping easier.