I am five seconds away from deciding to hop onto another distro because I am tired of the constant frustrations I am going through just to get anything done. I just want to search and get documents done on my laptop, but the freezing, lagging and bugs I’ve been seeing, is getting on my nerves.
For example these are the issues I’ve been running into lately,
- Libreoffice documents freezing while saving
- Flash drive not being read by the laptop, even though it’s plugged in and it shows that a flash drive is into the laptop
- Sometimes the laptop stays on the PopOS screen for a longer time than usual while powering down the laptop.
- (I’m not sure if this is a browser issue or a OS issue for this one) I’m constantly hopping from one browser to the next to get anything done or researched. Sometimes I have to turn off all of my extensions just for the browser to read on what I’m trying to search up.
- Some of my updates are refusing to go through and update within the system.
- I cant open certain emails. Like at all, it doesn’t matter what browser I use, it just reads that something is wrong and I don’t know on how to fix it (this was never an issue until updates started coming along)
For anyone asking about the specs: here it is from Best Buy. I purchased the laptop in March 2026.


What are your qualms with mint my I ask? It seems to have natively accepted any hardware I’ve thrown it on. Intel/AMD, NVIDIA/Radeon nothing has come back with driver issues.
The only issue I think I’ve had with 1 machine i believe is a dependency issue I haven’t looked into yet, because python3 wasnt being updated from the standard apt update/upgrade.
Mint back in the day had a valid reason for being. It made installing proprietary codecs and drivers easy. It was based on Ubuntu but handled the stuff that Ubuntu just refused to.
Now days Ubuntu handles proprietary codecs and drivers very well. There is no “point” to using Mint now. You get a downstream smaller community and lose the support that that larger upstream distro has.
Mint isn’t bad per say, but in 2026 I don’t see why you would choose it instead of the thing it’s based on.
I mostly get concerned when I see new to Linux users choose smaller less well supported distros instead if mainstream ones. Less so with mint but very much so with Zorin.
Because there is still the mindset unfortunately that Linux can be slighly intimidating if your not a programmer. We’re picking the smaller distros cause they’re supposed to be more user based friendly, but apparently thats not the case.
Ah I see. Yeah I used to stick to Debian/Ubuntu for most everything, I tried pop OS but it didn’t run well on the laptop I was using. Mint seems to do alright whether something has barley any resources or does have a plethora.
I’ll have to install Ubuntu on something again sometime and see what it’s been up too.
I’d recomed giving Fedora a shot. Fedora + Niri / Noctalia is my daily driver now. But Fedora KDE is great on its own.