Nothing, at all.
Some things you can't do easily in Mint, like create snapshots automatically and boot into them when something breaks.
But it's all Linux and freely available software under the hood, and the lines between configuration, customization and forking your distro are blurry.
ship of theseus
Nothing, it's all Linux
You can't have your entire system configuration in a repository of plain text files, which has lots of advantages, but it's not worth caring about unless you feel excited to get into it.
Found the other NixOS user. ;)
Why not? Isn’t this the whole concept of Bash Script, Ansible, Terraform, etc…
I mean it can be as simple as a git repo that pulls down an install script then syncs your dot files. What am I missing?
If you’re referencing Nix, you can also have that on Mint.
Yeah, I'm talking about not just Nix, but NixOS. Nix (the package manager) can do a lot, but NixOS + disko + home-manager can literally be all of the configuration for your machine from drive partitioning through to dot files. Throw in nixos-anywhere and impermanence and you can have an insane amount of control over all of your computers.
Ansible, Terraform, Chef, etc. do have some overlap, but the main difference is that those tools iterate through the system modifying it piece by piece and NixOS is declarative.
If something fails in some of my bigger Ansible playbooks, it could mean 30 minutes of just running through all the steps again. I could probably break it into sections, but then I have to worry about making sure they all get run when things get updated. In my NixOS install, it's way faster, I can roll back to a previous state, and troubleshooting is way easier in my opinion.
Ah alright. My point is OP is asking what can be done in other distros that can’t be done in Mint and your answer was have the entire configuration be in plain text. I completely agree that if you want that kind of reproducibility NixOS is the most refined, well established, and best way to handle this. However to answer OP I would say this is possible in Mint but just much more painful.
You can't easilyy switch between different inages like on an atomic fedora system.
Do you have to switch now? No.
Hopefully we get an official XFCE Atomic desktop someday.
You can create a ublue version in a few hours if you're down to it. Creating an inage isn't that difficult 👍🏼
Serious answer? XFCE doesn't support multiple monitors with different refresh rates. So that.
Some of the other answers (like Meta (aka Windows Key) not working for shortcuts) can be hacked around, but unless you switch to a DE that supports Wayland, you will never have stable multi refresh rate differences on multiple monitors.
I'm not a fan of the xfce UX at all, and multi-monitor support still has a lot of issues (under Debian 12), but I am pretty sure having different refresh rates is possible
Serious answer? XFCE doesn’t support multiple monitors with different refresh rates. So that.
That's more of a limiation because of X11. KDE and Gnome do not support different refreshrates on multiple monitors as far as I know. Its the main reason why I never used multiple monitors. But on Wayland, this issue is solved. So if XFCE is ported to Wayland, they should also get this support for free I guess.
XFCE doesn’t support multiple monitors with different refresh rates.
I have an LG TV and an old Asus monitor, i'd wager their refresh rates differ but i can't confirm atm.
Maybe I'm missing something but I am running xfce4 and have per-monitor refresh rate setting.
xrandr does.
Btw, how do you do that in wayland?
Btw, how do you do that in wayland?
You don’t have to do anything to use multiple monitors with different refresh rates in Wayland, besides plugging them in.
But i want specific refresh rates.
What does that even mean?
20 fps on my notebook, saves power.
Acces to the AUR I guess?
But not much really.
If you like what you have just stick with it
Also I use Arch btw
Technically he or she has access to the AUR, but through website.^^ On a more serious note, one could install https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox and manager multiple package managers. Because each package manager is in a container, they do not interfere. I never used it, but imagine it like Flatpak, but actually using the package manager from the distribution (including access to AUR). And specific applications and programs can be "exported" to install them like a normal application, so you can access it with a single appname.
One could compile pacman and all the build tools if they really wanted to.
Use Pacman as your package manager, or something. Linux is Linux. If you use a mainstream distro it should be 90% similar to all other distros. You don't really have to worry about FOMO when it comes to Linux.
Everybody giving a version of this answer makes me feel better about maybe switching to Linux.
Waste time configuring things and troubleshooting things when your ultra custom system breaks.
Y-you're not supposed to ask that!
Not sure what you mean by this?
Running alternatives to Systemd.
Slackware!
Gentoo!
Compared to Arch(-based): Accesing the latest packages. It's not impossible, especially if you go for Debian testing repos, but it's definitely extra work.
Compared to special-purpose distros (i.e. gaming, portable, high security/privacy, pen-testing): Whatever their special purpose is will usually be harder to achieve.
Compared to huge corpo distros (SUSE/Fedora and derivatives): Ease of more intricate setups and maybe some security testing.
Compared to Ubuntu: Paying a corporation to not withhold security patches from you.
waydroid (if you don't install a wayland based de)
Technically speaking: nothing really, provided you have time and skills.
Except maybe not having access to NDA-ed binary blobs or something...
In my experience, not much, but I’m a marginally functional newbie. Mint manages things for you fairly nicely and has been the best, it just works with out messing with much/anything. (At least for my hardware)
I managed to get gnome working smoothly on mint and have been happy with it. I started and returned here since I last ditched windows as a native OS.
The only thing that has made me consider distro hopping from mint is AUR on arch and gnome, though I’ve been successful so far.
Part of trying the distros that are more advanced and give you more explicit control and configuration is the sense of accomplishment and it makes you figure out how and why things work the way they do. It holistically builds your velocity in your understanding of Linux. (Or gnu whatever that nuance is).
If your machine has enough resources it is super easy to host VMs of anything you want to try. You can try them all, and it won’t cost you anything but time!
If you feel like you need/want software from AUR you should check out Distrobox. It can run any distro on top of your installation using Docker under the hood, but it tightly integrates into your system so with little effort you can run AUR programs from your launcher as if they were natively installed on your Mint.
My advice as well!
Thanks, I’ll dig into that one sometime!
If you are speaking about stock Linux mint Xfce, with the default kernal, mesa version etc., your support for very new hardware - Arrow lake, battlemage and RDNA 4 will be imperfect. In general, very new hardware (launched within the last 6 months) will not be supported properly because the lts kernel being used was written before these products were launched
Arrow Lake
Why would anyone curse themselves with that though?
The ultra 7 is actually a good all rounder. Decent performance (well balanced between gaming and production workloads), good efficiency and good pricing with respect to the AMD options. AMD is of course better for pure productivity (9950x), pure gaming (7800x3d and the upcoming 9800x3d) and is better at the low end (7600, 7600x)
Nerd stuff
I love xfce. But ive tried gnome w tiling shell extension and wow. But i still miss xfce , once they come over to Wayland i think I will go back 🤷
I mean....
Steam? Maybe? I dunno, I don't game but the Steam kids seem to prefer Arch. I'm sure they have their reasons.
Steam and Lutris work well!
I can game on XFCE Mint just fine. I actually have an easier time of it than on a number of distros, thanks to the combination of flatpaks and the Ubuntu base.
But, I am not "the kids".
SteamOS is arch, so some of the derivatives are too.
Steam shouldn't really care though.
I think “they prefer” Arch because a lot of them just bought a Steam Deck and that comes with Arch and it just works.
Reasons are usually just newest kernel/mesa/etc. Most of the time the difference is very small, and often inconsequential. However, every now and again there is a major development that might make it worth it (IE: The graphics pipeline that all but made dxvk-async obsolete)
I'm a complete noob in the games department. Btw, I see that you don't use Arch.
Man, I got stuff to do. Lol.
Natively install RPM packages? Really, there's not much. Find a setup that you like.
File-by-file integrity check against signed checksums upstream to trivially confirm validity of deployment.
But that's probably not interesting.
I had trouble using Flatseal to adjust permissions for Flatpak applications in Linux Mint. But that was a few months ago and may have been fixed. Other than that I never really had trouble with stuff being broken or unavailable in Mint.
I guess if you use very new hardware you might prefer a newer kernel than the one Mint uses. Or if you want the latest versions of packages, a rolling distro might suit you better. Or you might prefer a different filesystem. But if none of this bothers you, there's no need to switch. Mint generally works well.
I've never had an issue with Flatseal in mint. Out of curiosity, what was your issue?
Honestly I can't remember the details. It was a few months ago and it may have been just a temporary thing or a quirk of my installation. I think it had to do with some component relating to DBus not being present that I couldn't figure out how to fix.
Xfce? All keyboard shortcuts involved the Meta key won't work.
Which keyboard shortcuts do you mean specifically? I think I fixed this exact issue earlier today!
Meta+arrows key to shift windows around
Or is the key call Super? I know for sure it's the "Windows" key.
Yeah that's the exact issue I fixed yesterday: the Super (Windows) key is configured to open the whisper (start) menu and this overrides any of the other xfce keyboard shortcuts like moving windows around.
The fix was to go into Settings > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts and change the one that's set by default to open the whisper menu (xfce4-popup-whiskermenu) to something else. I found some bug reports saying that the problem is that xfce doesn't expect shortcuts that are "modifier only" (as in only the Super key), and once I changed that one then the shortcuts to move windows around suddenly started working.
No idea why distros ship with this configuration already broken, but hopefully this helps!
They work just fine.
The only thing that does not work is just binding meta only akin to win key to open the start menu for example.
If you are using Gnome distros: you can feel exactly what it feels like getting back to working in a restricted, overhyped, overbranded environment like Windows.
If you are using Ubuntu: you can get advertising during your system's software upgrades. No, really.
If you are using Arch: you can post aroudn the internet saying you use Arch btw.
Depending on the distro, you can use some alternative software stacks, but that's mostly the backend (eg.: systemd versus openRC, Apache vs Nginx, X vs Wayland); most "desktop app" level is mostly the same for each desktop environment, is kinda the point.
Brag about being an Arch user (BTW.)
Nothing, at all.
Some things you can't do easily in Mint, like create snapshots automatically and boot into them when something breaks.
But it's all Linux and freely available software under the hood, and the lines between configuration, customization and forking your distro are blurry.
ship of theseus
Nothing, it's all Linux
You can't have your entire system configuration in a repository of plain text files, which has lots of advantages, but it's not worth caring about unless you feel excited to get into it.
Found the other NixOS user. ;)
Why not? Isn’t this the whole concept of Bash Script, Ansible, Terraform, etc… I mean it can be as simple as a git repo that pulls down an install script then syncs your dot files. What am I missing? If you’re referencing Nix, you can also have that on Mint.
Yeah, I'm talking about not just Nix, but NixOS. Nix (the package manager) can do a lot, but NixOS + disko + home-manager can literally be all of the configuration for your machine from drive partitioning through to dot files. Throw in nixos-anywhere and impermanence and you can have an insane amount of control over all of your computers.
Ansible, Terraform, Chef, etc. do have some overlap, but the main difference is that those tools iterate through the system modifying it piece by piece and NixOS is declarative.
If something fails in some of my bigger Ansible playbooks, it could mean 30 minutes of just running through all the steps again. I could probably break it into sections, but then I have to worry about making sure they all get run when things get updated. In my NixOS install, it's way faster, I can roll back to a previous state, and troubleshooting is way easier in my opinion.
Ah alright. My point is OP is asking what can be done in other distros that can’t be done in Mint and your answer was have the entire configuration be in plain text. I completely agree that if you want that kind of reproducibility NixOS is the most refined, well established, and best way to handle this. However to answer OP I would say this is possible in Mint but just much more painful.
You can't easilyy switch between different inages like on an atomic fedora system.
Do you have to switch now? No.
Hopefully we get an official XFCE Atomic desktop someday.
You can create a ublue version in a few hours if you're down to it. Creating an inage isn't that difficult 👍🏼
Serious answer? XFCE doesn't support multiple monitors with different refresh rates. So that.
Some of the other answers (like Meta (aka Windows Key) not working for shortcuts) can be hacked around, but unless you switch to a DE that supports Wayland, you will never have stable multi refresh rate differences on multiple monitors.
I'm not a fan of the xfce UX at all, and multi-monitor support still has a lot of issues (under Debian 12), but I am pretty sure having different refresh rates is possible
That's more of a limiation because of X11. KDE and Gnome do not support different refreshrates on multiple monitors as far as I know. Its the main reason why I never used multiple monitors. But on Wayland, this issue is solved. So if XFCE is ported to Wayland, they should also get this support for free I guess.
I have an LG TV and an old Asus monitor, i'd wager their refresh rates differ but i can't confirm atm.
Maybe I'm missing something but I am running xfce4 and have per-monitor refresh rate setting.
xrandr does.
Btw, how do you do that in wayland?
You don’t have to do anything to use multiple monitors with different refresh rates in Wayland, besides plugging them in.
But i want specific refresh rates.
What does that even mean?
20 fps on my notebook, saves power.
Acces to the AUR I guess? But not much really. If you like what you have just stick with it
Also I use Arch btw
Technically he or she has access to the AUR, but through website.^^ On a more serious note, one could install https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox and manager multiple package managers. Because each package manager is in a container, they do not interfere. I never used it, but imagine it like Flatpak, but actually using the package manager from the distribution (including access to AUR). And specific applications and programs can be "exported" to install them like a normal application, so you can access it with a single appname.
One could compile pacman and all the build tools if they really wanted to.
Use Pacman as your package manager, or something. Linux is Linux. If you use a mainstream distro it should be 90% similar to all other distros. You don't really have to worry about FOMO when it comes to Linux.
Everybody giving a version of this answer makes me feel better about maybe switching to Linux.
Waste time configuring things and troubleshooting things when your ultra custom system breaks.
Y-you're not supposed to ask that!
Not sure what you mean by this?
Running alternatives to Systemd.
Slackware!
Gentoo!
Compared to Arch(-based): Accesing the latest packages. It's not impossible, especially if you go for Debian testing repos, but it's definitely extra work.
Compared to special-purpose distros (i.e. gaming, portable, high security/privacy, pen-testing): Whatever their special purpose is will usually be harder to achieve.
Compared to huge corpo distros (SUSE/Fedora and derivatives): Ease of more intricate setups and maybe some security testing.
Compared to Ubuntu: Paying a corporation to not withhold security patches from you.
waydroid (if you don't install a wayland based de)
Technically speaking: nothing really, provided you have time and skills.
Except maybe not having access to NDA-ed binary blobs or something...
In my experience, not much, but I’m a marginally functional newbie. Mint manages things for you fairly nicely and has been the best, it just works with out messing with much/anything. (At least for my hardware)
I managed to get gnome working smoothly on mint and have been happy with it. I started and returned here since I last ditched windows as a native OS.
The only thing that has made me consider distro hopping from mint is AUR on arch and gnome, though I’ve been successful so far.
Part of trying the distros that are more advanced and give you more explicit control and configuration is the sense of accomplishment and it makes you figure out how and why things work the way they do. It holistically builds your velocity in your understanding of Linux. (Or gnu whatever that nuance is).
If your machine has enough resources it is super easy to host VMs of anything you want to try. You can try them all, and it won’t cost you anything but time!
If you feel like you need/want software from AUR you should check out Distrobox. It can run any distro on top of your installation using Docker under the hood, but it tightly integrates into your system so with little effort you can run AUR programs from your launcher as if they were natively installed on your Mint.
My advice as well!
Thanks, I’ll dig into that one sometime!
If you are speaking about stock Linux mint Xfce, with the default kernal, mesa version etc., your support for very new hardware - Arrow lake, battlemage and RDNA 4 will be imperfect. In general, very new hardware (launched within the last 6 months) will not be supported properly because the lts kernel being used was written before these products were launched
Why would anyone curse themselves with that though?
The ultra 7 is actually a good all rounder. Decent performance (well balanced between gaming and production workloads), good efficiency and good pricing with respect to the AMD options. AMD is of course better for pure productivity (9950x), pure gaming (7800x3d and the upcoming 9800x3d) and is better at the low end (7600, 7600x)
Nerd stuff
I love xfce. But ive tried gnome w tiling shell extension and wow. But i still miss xfce , once they come over to Wayland i think I will go back 🤷
I mean....
Steam? Maybe? I dunno, I don't game but the Steam kids seem to prefer Arch. I'm sure they have their reasons.
Practically? Probably nothing terribly significant.
Steam and Lutris work well! I can game on XFCE Mint just fine. I actually have an easier time of it than on a number of distros, thanks to the combination of flatpaks and the Ubuntu base. But, I am not "the kids".
SteamOS is arch, so some of the derivatives are too.
Steam shouldn't really care though.
I think “they prefer” Arch because a lot of them just bought a Steam Deck and that comes with Arch and it just works.
Reasons are usually just newest kernel/mesa/etc. Most of the time the difference is very small, and often inconsequential. However, every now and again there is a major development that might make it worth it (IE: The graphics pipeline that all but made dxvk-async obsolete)
I'm a complete noob in the games department. Btw, I see that you don't use Arch.
Man, I got stuff to do. Lol.
Natively install RPM packages? Really, there's not much. Find a setup that you like.
File-by-file integrity check against signed checksums upstream to trivially confirm validity of deployment.
But that's probably not interesting.
I had trouble using Flatseal to adjust permissions for Flatpak applications in Linux Mint. But that was a few months ago and may have been fixed. Other than that I never really had trouble with stuff being broken or unavailable in Mint.
I guess if you use very new hardware you might prefer a newer kernel than the one Mint uses. Or if you want the latest versions of packages, a rolling distro might suit you better. Or you might prefer a different filesystem. But if none of this bothers you, there's no need to switch. Mint generally works well.
I've never had an issue with Flatseal in mint. Out of curiosity, what was your issue?
Honestly I can't remember the details. It was a few months ago and it may have been just a temporary thing or a quirk of my installation. I think it had to do with some component relating to DBus not being present that I couldn't figure out how to fix.
Xfce? All keyboard shortcuts involved the Meta key won't work.
Which keyboard shortcuts do you mean specifically? I think I fixed this exact issue earlier today!
Meta+arrows key to shift windows around
Or is the key call Super? I know for sure it's the "Windows" key.
Yeah that's the exact issue I fixed yesterday: the Super (Windows) key is configured to open the whisper (start) menu and this overrides any of the other xfce keyboard shortcuts like moving windows around.
The fix was to go into Settings > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts and change the one that's set by default to open the whisper menu (
xfce4-popup-whiskermenu) to something else. I found some bug reports saying that the problem is that xfce doesn't expect shortcuts that are "modifier only" (as in only the Super key), and once I changed that one then the shortcuts to move windows around suddenly started working.No idea why distros ship with this configuration already broken, but hopefully this helps!
They work just fine.
The only thing that does not work is just binding meta only akin to win key to open the start menu for example.
If you are using Gnome distros: you can feel exactly what it feels like getting back to working in a restricted, overhyped, overbranded environment like Windows.
If you are using Ubuntu: you can get advertising during your system's software upgrades. No, really.
If you are using Arch: you can post aroudn the internet saying you use Arch btw.
Depending on the distro, you can use some alternative software stacks, but that's mostly the backend (eg.: systemd versus openRC, Apache vs Nginx, X vs Wayland); most "desktop app" level is mostly the same for each desktop environment, is kinda the point.
Nothing