Screenshot of my partitions. Partition 1 if EFI, Partition 2 is Mint Boot sector I believe. Partition 3 is everything else.

I’m looking to give OpenSUSE TW and Fedora a try specifically. HD is encrypted from install, and I didn’t know to put /home on its own partition.
Plenty of storage space to play with. How should I approach hopping with the least amount of pain and cleanup when I finally figure out where I want to land?


I really am glad if you want to distro hop, I have done it many times. Play around, really try to see what the developers intended. It is a learning curve.
But speaking from my own experience, I am not too technically gifted and I enjoyed trying new things but I kept coming back to Mint. I feel there is nothing wrong if you come back. It’s like life, don’t be scared of trying new things, try, but nothing wrong if you know what you like and come back to it, even if it is a bit boring.
But experiment, go mad, my point I wanted to make is the worst case is you have a nice distro to fall back to.
Thanks, I appreciate this perspective. For me, it’s really more of a security thing, and with Mint taking longer to get updates, I figured it would be worth looking at a couple other distros to see if there’s trade-offs or not that would make sense to jump for good. I might just try a live USB for a day, see how it goes, and then try for a side-by-side with Mint and a winner with my Home folder in a separate partition anyway.
I know privacy is somewhat adjacent to security, you do not have to follow this guideline, but I thought it is an interesting resource.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/
Yep, part of the reason I’m looking for a switch. You can’t have privacy without security!
Mint does get security backports, mind you. I’ve been using using Linux on and off for almost 30 years now. Mint is awesome. But if you’re feeling the itch, GI for it, there might be something that fits you better out there.