Yer a lizard, Harry.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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I noticed that little quote there btw.
All roads lead to Debian. Except for Gentoo and Slackware. Those are deadends.
A few times per year I distrohop, but there's always small glitches in every distro I try, except for Debian. At least on my laptop, Debian just works.
Sure, arch has a steep learning curve, but in the long run easier to use than others since it has better documentation.
Since you're already doing a fresh install, might as well create the root partition as a BTRFS with opensuse-style subvolumes for easy snapshotting and rollback. And since you're so close might as well also add LUKS1 encryption across the partition, since TPM is untrustworthy for REAL security. You're going to be using a grub config with rd.luks params and a protected keyfile so you don't have to decrypt the partition twice per boot like some scrub, of course.
Of course, technically there is nothing wrong just a plain arch install as long you've devised a proper opsec strategy, alongside daily, weekly and monthly full-disk offsite encrypted backups!
And yes indeed, Arch linux is the distro that was ordained to me!
Arch forces you to learn about Linux internals and components. Most people don’t need to know these things to work productively with their computers. Arch is more of an „build your own OS“ toolkit than a well defined base operating system. Two Arch installs can be more wildly different to use than Fedora and Ubuntu. That’s why you need the mountains of documentation. Arch wiki is great, but it’s not perfect or correct. Lots of outdated info lingers there as well.
BTRFS with subvolumes is they way to go, I agree. Mint sadly still defaults to EXT4 with only an encrypted /home. I installed Mint recently and a modern partition setup like you describe was difficult to get working. I don’t even remember, what I ended up with.
security
The AUR is a security nightmare.
easy snapshotting and rollback
That‘s an area Mint is pretty weak in.
OpenSuSE
Makes fantastic distros, that more people should use.
Don’t worry. You can just as easily wreck your Mint install as any other distro, as soon as you start to poke around.
And, importantly: the same applies to Windows. How many updates has Windows had that broke something essential with no user intervention?
Fact of the matter is any OS can break if you purposefully try to poke around without knowing what you're doing.
What distros that are more "resilient" to breaking do is either prevent you from easily/accidentally poking around, prevent you from applying updates willy-nilly, or set up easy rollbacks in case something breaks (or a combination of these).
Imo, if you're not a tinkerer and you have a distro with backups properly setup, you're very likely gonna be fine no matter what distro you choose.
Though Mint is still awesome and if you don't have any problems with it just keep using it.
As a someone who wanted to play around with mint after already using arch for a longer while to check out "distrohopping": easier*
(went right back to my comfort space of arch real quick, don't really get distrohopping yet, how do I actually do that properly?)
I’m pretty sure the rest of them felt that way on day 1 / year 1 too.
As an Arch user: welcome! It'll be a little work, but you're gonna be a-okay.
Been using Pop_OS! For almost 4 years now. Now I have SteamOS on my deck, headless Linbuntu on my mini PC, and MacOS on my work machine. Still love coming back to pop, especially with the new Cosmic DE.