As Ubuntu users, we often stick to the same distro out of habit. But is it worth trying alternatives for better performance, stability, or ease of use? What about lightweight distros or ones with different desktop environments? What would be your top pick and why?
Should alternative Linux distributions be tried instead of Ubuntu?
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As someone who’s a bit of a noob when it comes to learning (shoutout to AbuelitoTech), I even had to Google what "sudo" meant when installing Arch 😅 Now, when someone mentions desktop environments, all I think is "GNOME, KDE, or whatever those are." Maybe I should give XFCE a try—at least my system won’t crash every time I touch the mouse! 🐢
I was just like you a few years ago with Ubuntu—I used it for about 4 years, first with Unity and then GNOME. But I started noticing that my laptop with modest specs (8GB RAM, 250GB SSD) was getting slower and slower, especially when running Docker with multiple containers. I tried tweaking things, but that annoying "lag" just wouldn’t go away.
Then one day a colleague recommended trying Pop!_OS from System76. I installed it on a partition, and honestly, the difference was noticeable from the first boot—window handling and animations were smoother. But the biggest surprise came when I enabled HiDPI mode with automatic tiling (qTile). Since then, I haven’t gone back to Ubuntu unless it’s for something specific, and even at work, I use Pop! in a VM for some projects. That said, if you’re not into heavily customized distros, something like Linux Mint with Cinnamon gives you that Ubuntu familiarity but much lighter.