I've been using Linux Mint fairly successfully for the past 6 months or so and am looking to "level-up" so to speak. Any recommendations for a lighter weight distro? I'm not looking for something as bare bones as Arch but something in between Arch and Mint.
Posted Mar 6, 2016, 2:40 AM UTC
Antergos, which is Arch-made-easy with a graphical installer, as easy as e.g. Ubuntu installer and comes with 6 selectable DEs (in the installer).
This. I use Antergos and I love it.
BunsenLabs is much lighter weight, good for beginners, has a very good, active community which ranges from 1st time installers to super helpful ultrapro users. A Debian stable distro which comes with Openbox wm excellently preconfigured. It is the "community continuation" of an old deprecated distro, Crunchbang, a distro noted for its dark colors and simple chrome, a distro Archers emulated with their own community Archbang. Tends to be lots of crossover.
in between Arch and Mint
use Manjaro Linux (User friendly Arch Linux) https://manjaro.github.io/about/
I decided to go with Manjaro thanks!
Awesome! Looks like we have another one in the Manjaro community!
Nice one, what DE are you using? Im currently trying out the new Deepin DE release 15.12
I decided to go with XFCE. I really liked it in Mint so decided to stick with it.
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Maybe Architect or Antergos.
Arch is only barebones if you keep it that way.
Debian is about the halfway point - can come barebones, but by default ships with a lot of stuff and is extremely stable.
Fedora. My first distro, used it 3 weeks before going to arch. More bleeding edge than mint but sometimes you need to manually compile stuff (Instead of adding a ppa).
If you want to install Arch, skip Arch "distros" and just install using the glorious Architect.
Or just install it the usual way...
The so-called "Arch way" is a complete waste of time if you don't have a specific user-case.
I used Architect, although I later wanted to see if I could and did it the "Arch Way". I actually enjoyed installing Arch, but then I like liver and onions, too. Architect is terrific, an excellent piece of work.
What's wrong with liver and onions ?
Sparkylinux openbox edition ... it's like the old #!, but based on debian testing.
Perhaps Debian would be a good option? You could use the minimal installer to give you a base system and then just add the DE you want. Debian also provides ISOs with various DEs already setup.
Debian netinstall is fine. Anyone in Linux should be able to use that.