Finally gave in and tried Mint recently when my Ubuntu was crapping out on me. It turned out to be a BIOS issue that I subsequently fixed, but I'm glad I did it, because it is the very first time for me when a linux install went smoothly and got me doing what I wanted without making me tear out my hair for hours at a time.

It actually felt better than a Windows install because on top of being smooth, it didn't bombard me with dark pattern data mining AI-riddled trash.

I can't ditch Windows entirely because of a handful of things that cannot run without it, but for the first time Linux has become a daily driver for me.

So yeah, I would stick with Mint. Turns out the hype was real.

Plenty of reasons to stick with mint, the most important being that you said you're happy with it.

and I am pretty happy with it.

No reason to switch from the sound of it

The only reason to switch distros is because you're unhappy with some aspect of your current distro (doesn't sound like it) or you want to try something on a different distro (also doesn't sound like it). So in short no, you shouldn't switch unless you have a reason for it.

You really only ever switch distros if you're having issues with it or if you wanna tinker with another one. Given your post, you don't seem to fit either of these categories, so stick with mint and have fun being a sane person.

If you're happy with it, it should be fine. Mint's a good distro.

No reason to switch if everything works as expected.

Mint makes troubleshooting issues -- when they do rarely arise -- so simple because Mint's so common, so I personally plan to stick with it pretty much indefinitely. Maybe once I finally work up the courage to nuke my Windows partition I'll repurpose it as a "distro experimentation" partition. I've kinda been procrastinating cleaning that mess out for ages. For now? I'm happy.

What are the specs of your new computer? Mint can struggle with brand-new hardware (e.g. new GPUs from AMD/Intel). Or did you purchase a new PC that officially supports Linux (Mint)?

It's fun to discover new distros, but in the long run it is more important to keep my workstation working.

I keep an old laptop around for trying other distros.

if you're running on base lmint (not de), you may try updating your kernel to latest one (whatever ubuntu's currently being supported) by using ubuntu mainline kernel heres the guide

make sure you have backed up, enabled timeshift or whatever because this may break your system.

Mint is the distro for people like you and me. Minimal hassle, just works. No need to muck around with it.

I tend to keep my laptops on mint or ubuntu. PC's you use as a daily driver, should be easy to manage. When you boot, they just work.

Build a homelab, if you want to break stuff.

A homelab can be as small, as a vm in virtualbox. No need for extra hardware when starting off...

I've been using Mint pretty successfully on my new build i did in January

You'll just waste a lot of time trying to tweak the new OS to be just a little more like Mint and eventually give up in frustration and go back to Mint.

Source: happened to me.

If you can I'd stick with Mint. I updated my hardware recently and need kernel 6.14 or newer. I've not been happy with Arch and miss Mint.

I'm thinking of giving NixOS a try as it also supports 6.14.

No, if you like mint and cinnamon then why change?

The only reason to change would be if you want a different desktop environment. You could do that with mint or go with a distro that mains a different DE.

Mint is popular and reliable, so only change if you fancy trying something new and are willing to reinstall if its not to your liking.

I used to be on Mint and left it when I decided to move to KDE. It worked fine in mint but I had lots of app duplication in the menus. I also wanted more cutting edge versions.of software so wanted a different district for that. So I switched to OpenSuSE Tumbleweed (a rolling release distro).

If you do want to tinker and try out other distros then you could also play with distros in virtual machines (KVM or Virtualbox) or if you have a desktop get a second harddrive and install a different distro on it. Its easy to dualboot Linux distros (and safest to have separate hard drives so you don't make mistakes when partitioning).

Yes. Unless you have any problems, stick with it. It's easy to use, it's stable, it's pretty well supported, it's common enough that there's a lot of advice available. You already know it and don't appear to have any issues or complaints with it.

There's no harm in trying some other distros on a live USB if you're feeling curious, but there's no reason to change for the sake of it. In case you weren't aware, a live USB runs completely off the USB stick - so you can test it on an existing machine, and it won't alter any installed files.

There's a chance that with a very new machine with very new components that Mint may have a compatibility problem (by default it uses slightly older, more tested kernels or software versions) - you can normally fix this by manually installing newer versions, or using the "Linux Mint Edge" version (which uses newer kernels by default) - or by trying a different distro which uses newer kernels/packages by default.

Sometimes people get this funny thing in their head that Mint/Ubuntu/PopOS etc are "beginner distros" and after you've used them for a few years, you need to "upgrade" to a more complicated one - but no, for the majority of purposes, you can carry on using the one you like, until they stop making it, or you stop liking it.

I'm currently using Mint, and doing regular backups with Timeshift. I see two possible reasons to switch in the future: if there's ever an update that breaks my system and I don't manage to recover a backup, or newer releases become incompatible with my hardware. So far none of this has happened so I don't see a reason to change.

Depending on the GPU, you may need to install a PPA and install a newer kernel to get access to more modern GPU drivers to play games, but only if it's very new hardware.

Well I love Mint, but nothing is stopping you from experimenting with other distros, now and then I try a couple new distros to see if there is anything that fits me better, but I personally keep coming back to mint. Nothing wrong with sticking with something that works, mint is really intuitive in my opinion, why it just works for me

I've never used Mint. I just think the Cinnamon desktop is really ugly. If you feel like playing with something new, I've been very happy with Bazzite, and it comes with all sorts of nice optimizations out of the box.