mint city lights

Blog About Links Contact mint?

• 05 Jan, 2026 *

Last time I said I was going to write about the apps/workflows I’ve settled into in my few weeks full-time with Linux, but then, because apparently nothing is more fun to me than wiping my OS and starting all over again on a fresh slate, I found myself on a full-on distro-hopping tour for a few days over the year-end break. So for posterity, here are my quick notes on everything that I tried, in the order that I tried them.

• Ubuntu 25.10: by and large, it Just Works out of the box. It’s a very solid base. I did find that Gnome Tweaks and extensions were pretty much mandatory for me to get certain parts of the interface the way I like them, but otherwise, nothing to complain about. By virtue of its ubiquity, every piece of software out there that is packaged for Linux will have a Ubuntu-compatible version, and the vast majority of Linux tutorials are Ubuntu-oriented, so it’s super easy to get started with.
• Pop!_OS 24.04: It looks very striking and runs smoothly. However, immediately I faced Bluetooth issues with connecting my Apple Trackpad and Logitech keyboard. Audio was also dodgy. I plugged in my headphones and they simply did not work (they were not detected, no audio played through them). So I swiftly gave up on this distro. It is early days yet so maybe it needs more time.
• elementaryOS 8.1: This is the most beautiful of all the distros I tested. It also comes with some neat features that I didn’t find anywhere else, like a baked-in option to auto clean your Downloads and Screenshots folders. However, I encountered visual bugs with window and font rendering as well as audio issues with screensharing. I was also very annoyed by the lack of a system tray and the parking of background apps on the dock with no way to remove them (that I could find). Overall, elementary has a distinct lack of customisation options, which is either a feature or a bug depending on how you see it.
• Linux Mint 22.2 Zara: Very, very good. I initially passed over trying this because visually I didn’t find it appealing, but once I gave it a shot, I found everything Just Worked while needing less tweaking than Ubuntu. Mint is also extremely stable. Of anything I tried, I experienced the fewest crashes/issues on it by far. Its Ubuntu base also means access to the same software repositories and same tutorials, which is a great help. The only thing even approaching negativity that I have to say about Mint is that they are slower with updates because their philosophy is very much move slow, don’t break things. You sacrifice bleeding-edge advances to your software and OS, but in exchange, you get rock-solid stability.
• Solus Budgie and KDE 4.8 Opportunity: I was intrigued by Solus’s project to build their own thing from scratch. I liked the idea of supporting an independent developer. Both the Budgie and KDE versions worked very well for me. However, the limitation of Solus having its own esoteric package manager was too much for me to overcome. I felt like I was needlessly crippling myself.
• Zorin OS 18: So very nearly perfect. Beautiful. Functional. But for one major problem… fonts in Electron apps were unreadably blurry. This appears to be an issue with Wayland and fractional scaling. I toiled way too long trying to find a fix to no avail, so it was a dealbreaker for me. Obsidian is one of my most essential apps and it is unusable if the fonts are blurry.
• Fedora KDE Plasma 43: I enjoyed using it. TBH I like KDE more than GNOME. I find it more amenable to customisation and also more performant. My biggest issue with Fedora was that for some reason, I encountered more instability and constant crash messages with it than anything else I tried. I also found software availability a bit lacking with the dnf package manager, vs apt on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros. And my Bluetooth keyboard didn’t connect out of the box with the GUI, I had to go to the terminal to make it work. This was an issue on every single KDE Plasma DE that I tried, so there’s some problem there (GNOME was fine).
• Kubuntu 25.10: Very good. Since I liked KDE but I found Fedora crashy and I missed apt, I decided to give the KDE spin of Ubuntu a try. Two thumbs up for ease and pleasure of use. I found Kubuntu to be notably speedy—not just in interface response time but also file transfers and downloads—and I particularly liked that the installer gave me the option of a minimal install, so I could get the OS without any extra stuff I don’t need it.

the eventual winner

Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Kubuntu were the only distros that stuck around on my hard drive for more than a few hours, but Ubuntu earned that distinction just for being the default first one I tried, whereas Mint and Kubuntu I kept using cos I liked them. In the end, Mint was the one I returned to. It really came down to the slimmest of deciding factors: everything Just Worked on Mint just a smidge more than on Kubuntu (for e.g. Plasma 6.5 has auto light/dark theme switching, but it doesn’t respect your choice of icons, which drove me crazy, and also adding online accounts to hook your calendar into the system is inexplicably troublesome in KDE). Discord screensharing was also more stable on Mint than on Kubuntu (this is important to me as I stream/watch a lot of butai on Discord, but if you don’t have this niche use case you can ignore this factor).

I’m very restless and itchy-fingered when it comes to my digital stuff, which is why I went distro-hopping in the first place; Mint is stable and boring. But at the end of the day, you want something that very reliably works and won’t break, so here I am now, hopefully settled in for good.

#linux #tech