I think your heart’s in the right place here, but it comes across as an over-generalization to say that no one in the Linux community will try to convert you. Whether they have any valid points or will be successful in doing so is a very different matter. I’d argue that much of the FSF’s official website is dedicated to exactly this, and even they can often come across as endorsing the attitude of moral superiority that Linux users are often mocked for IMO. (I’m a Linux user, but I believe this is a serious issue in our community that we need to take seriously.)

Given that every time they add a road, more cars travel them, I’m starting to think we haven’t reached enough road density yet. I think we should add more.

I think your heart’s in the right place here, and I don’t mean to insult you or start a flamewar here - but, didn’t urban planners discover induced demand 100 years ago? It’s the nature of the beast that, whenever more roads are built instead of more alternative transportation infrastructure, more people will choose to drive on those roads. Of course, these new cars aren’t coming out of nowhere - but if you’re looking for a house or a job, you’re likely to pick one at least somewhat based on the commute. New residents and people looking for new jobs will look for ones they can drive to, which means more houses and jobs on the highways, which means more cars on said highways, which means more highways, ad infinitum.

Failing the highways (as is often true in places like Europe or Japan), people will instead plan their commute based on where they can go with the transportation options available to them - and you can transport more people per hour on a railway than on a highway by orders of magnitude, so while the number of people being transported is going to be the same, the space and infrastructure cost required to transport them is lower with most alternative methods (though I can’t say if bike lanes or other specific infrastructure options besides rail are among these). The American rail infrastructure sucks right now, but we spend a LOT of money on highways, and if a significant fraction of that were allocated to railways, it seems very feasible that they could become practical for interurban use again, as they were in days gone by.

Hey, sorry for not seeing this! I decided to try UBlue Aurora because I love KDE and wanted to try something with it for work. I didn’t get Bazzite for obvious reasons (no intention to game), but I picked something else in the same family because I was considering trying Bazzite for my main computer at the time. However, I don’t think I’ll be trying to fix what’s not broken - Mint (Cinnamon) has been growing on me quite a lot since I posted this!

If there were a KDE implementation of Linux Mint available, I would probably jump on it for all my machines (finally, an excuse to use Warpinator!) but I know there’s no officially endorsed one right now, and am not aware of any analogous distros… unless you count Kubuntu, I guess, but then I’d be missing a lot of those Mint features I’ve grown to love! Cheers to anyone else who’s hopped from Mint because of this thread, though. :)

It definitely helps that I’m on very compatible hardware (all AMD) :-) But I was also lucky not to have any of the installation hiccups many seem to, just make bootable drive with Rufus/Balena, launch from in BIOS, profit - maybe some people have a green thumb for their distros of choice, who’s to say?

The only two draws that are really pulling me away from Mint are my taste for a rolling release model and my preference to learn the terminal if it’s there. I’m no power user just yet, but I’m determined to learn to use the tools available to me in the Terminal for if/when my GUI tool inevitably breaks. Having a fallback is always nice… but dual booting into EndeavourOS or Manjaro is a good motivator to get acquainted with the terminal, and quick, which is a level of effort I’m not at all opposed to and for knowledge I see as very helpful; knowledge I feel I’d take much longer to get in a distro that’s well-cloaked in GUI like Mint. Taking this advice in stride, though; I’ll certainly be hanging onto the foothold I have in Mint until I get confident with Arch-based and can personally assess my options with my own experience in both, whenever that (hopefully!) happens. :-)

I’ve taken a good look at Endeavour, and it might be a winner for me! Admittedly, the terminal focus might be a bit much for me to start out, but it seems a lot more approachable than bare Arch, and I got comfortable with pacman and the other basics in an evening of messing with it in a a VM (with the Arch and EOS docs both being very helpful!) It just might be the push I need to let go of my reliance on GUI left over from Windows :-)

Great points, all in this thread! Yes, I’m aware of GNOME extensions, and I’m considering sticking with Mint more seriously now, given the response. I think the broader point here is very sage advice, and most users at this point in their Linux journeys, including me, need to hear that. I do intend to try out other distros in a VirtualBox VM for at least a week or so before nuking my current Mint install - however long it takes for me to be sure it’s a better fit than Mint, which I imagine that many candidates won’t be. For instance, I’ve decided from a quick try at Arch in a VM that it’s still a good ways over my head - and may never be right for me, which is fine. I can say I’ve tried it now, and trying different things is good. Such is the nature of the beast! :-)

I’m not expecting a huge difference between my Mint Cinnamon and something like Manjaro KDE Plasma (the most interesting option to me right now.) I’m a tinkerer at heart, though, and while I’m not experienced enough with Linux yet to appreciate the differences for what they are, I do fancy myself the kind of person to care about those things… as soon as I figure them out, that is. :-)

While I understand now that I’m unlikely to see much of a UX change by hopping distro - thanks all! - I’m now mostly interested in an Arch-derived distro like Manjaro because I feel like its rolling release model is better suited to my personal tastes than Mint and the Ubuntu umbrella’s stable releases, good as Mint has been to me. It’s largely a preference thing for me, though, and I’ll be investigating further before deciding whether it’s what I want.

Most of my library is on Steam, so I’m not too worried about whether my games will run. It mostly means I’m more interested in rolling distros like Arch for their latest support, I guess. :-)

That’s along the lines I was thinking, too! Using terminal regularly on Arch isn’t a deal breaker for me, I’d like to hone my Linux-fu anyways :-) Definitely a leading option for me, and I’ll probably be trying it out to see if I’m smarter at Terminal than I think I am.