I am considering moving away from Ubuntu, but I haven’t tried other distributions for years. I started on Linux Mint Cinnamon back in 2012, but switched to Ubuntu when I built my current PC in 2020 because I wanted more up-to-date packages. Now I am faced with needing to replace my SSD which gives me reason enough to install a new distro. I have an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with 32G of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, so I would need something that plays nicely with nvidia. I routinely use libreoffice, digikam, gimp, virtualbox, bambu studio, sublime text, filezilla, thunderbird, minecraft, steam, Open WebUI and Stable Diffusion (Automatic1111). I liked Ubuntu because it was familiar, fairly easy to customize, and everything was kept fairly well up to date. I am not a big fan of snap, and I would prefer a more logical and unified package management system. I was wondering if you all had some recommendations for me. Thanks
Replacing an SSD is pretty simple on Linux; just copy over the data, adjust the partitions, select the new drive in UEFI/BIOS. If you want to try a different distro, any time is good, but a new SSD doesn’t require a reinstall.
My advice from my distro-hopping days is to dual-boot with potential new distros (unless space is at a premium). I just made sure to share important folders like /home/. That way, if I didn’t like my new setup, I could quickly fall-back to the old.