A few months ago I finished building my system and commented that I'd installed Mint and had been enjoying it for a week. Some guy felt that he needed to suggest a different distro to me (and actually got some upvotes from people agreeing with it).
I had JUST switched from Windows to Linux and had only been running for a week! CAN I RUN WITH ONE DISTRO FOR ONE FUCKING WEEK WITHOUT HOPPING ALL OVER THE DISTRO-SPHERE?! Holy shit. Just let me enjoy my system for 7 days without telling me I should change again.
I switched to linux 3 years ago. And started and stayed with pop_os. Why? Because Anthony at the time from Linus tech tips recommend it to me. Am I gonna switch? No. I use Nvidia btw.
NGL sometimes you can only find the software you want as a snap, it sucks, but it's the price you pay for not using Windows or Mac. At the end of the day, it's Windows 11, OSX or Ubuntu for most folks outside of Lemmy. I really want to swap to Mint w Debian, but they don't have support for MATE out of the box. Maybe in a year or two. Hoping 24.04 LTS works well.
Debian has had MATE since forever. It's as simple as typing
sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment
Honestly you don't even need Ubuntu if you absolutely need snaps. You can install snapd on a lot of apt distros, or you can spin an Ubuntu container in Distrobox in a few seconds.
I gave up on tumbleweed recently. I bought Suse at Best Buy back in the day, and have always had it on a second PC around the house. I love the chameleon, but a few different showstoppers led me to remove it from my laptop. I miss it, but the last snapshot booted so slowly, and I couldn't get past it. I'm sure I'll put it back on there, but I like being able to diagnose it and I just couldn't this time.
Good to know! Any recommendations of where I could post? I'm trying to update an old 2013 Mac so it can play robox and minecraft. I have a portable HDD to work with as well. And Mac is pretty damn foreign to me and it's so old. But damn for 10 years old it's fantastic and most of the specs were better than modern macs (dedicated graphics card for one)
But it sucks in ways you can always find a solution for. You're never like "oh so these two packages have incompatible dependencies and I can't have both"
I don't want you to download Manjaro, but I had one partition as root and another as home and Manjaro just asked me to install itself in root, to replace my previous borked Ubuntu installation and use old home without data loss, instead of making me set everything myself again, like Ubuntu does.
No chance of overwriting your bootloader when you distrohop using LiveUSBs and LiveCDs.
But srsly, Trisquel GNU/Linux is a distro that provides Ubuntu with all the non-free and contrib removed.
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre is Arch with all the nonfree packages removed.
Worth a look if you support software freedom and transparency.