Extremely bored of Linux Mint, Ubuntu, what should I use

[ensar-kilinc123]

So I've using Ubuntu and Linux Mint for a month now and I'm extremely bored of the two.
Al tho I've had a lot of good experiences with Linux Mint the only problem was that I couldn't create a persistent Linux Mint USB drive so I kept going back and forth between these two. I really love the Software Manager on Linux Mint as it's much more stable and just overall better. And the help IRC for Mint is amazing. But I'm just bored of these two and I want to learn and get more into Linux as these two have been very simple and boring. But I don't want a distro that is very hard for begginers to use such as Arch.
I want a distro that has good 3rd party support and a popular one so I can get help from their forums.
I've been looking into fedora and openSUSE and there's many articles that say openSUSE is very good and that sort.
So what should I do? Please don't tell me to try out an Ubuntu based distro.
And I don't want it to be too hard either as I'm still a noob and haven't fully got the hang of the terminal yet.

[QIII]

You do realize that under the hood Linux Mint and Ubuntu are Linux and all the Linuxy stuff is there for you to putter around with, right?

You won't see a whole lot different from the driver's seat in any other distro. Oh, I suppose the difference between apt and yum might be interesting for a bit. But there is nothing keeping you from trying another distro, so pick one. Fedora has a good support community.

Lift the hood on Ubuntu and Mint if you're bored.

[Erik1984]

If you choose easy distros you will always be bored (if you think using a Linux distro should be exciting) I haven't used it myself but maybe something like Gentoo is more exciting? I prefer boring distros like *buntu so I don't have to worry to much about sudden breakages (besides hardware).

[d-cosner]

Lately I have been switching between Ubuntu 14.04 and Mint 17.2 and have been satisfied. My latest computer just happens to run better with Ubuntu than Mint but both are very good in my opinion. When I get bored I start tweaking things to see how much performance I can get out of both distros. I also installed PCLinuxOS MiniMe recently on a computer to be able to kind of do my own thing and it's a lot of fun too.

[QIII]

This might be fun: An Ubuntu minimal install.

Don't install anything the easy way. Download the source code, make any adjustments you want, and compile them to roll your own.

That's pretty much what we all used to do 20 years ago or so -- only without much online support. That's how Arch users do it now -- but with a lot of online support.

Arch users will sniff at Ubuntu saying "It's too easy." Well, don't start out with all the bells and whistles that make it easy. Do it just like Arch users do.

[ensar-kilinc123]

I have fedora downloaded and I have a persistent Ubuntu usb, and a few blank dvd's lying around. Lemme give it a shot

[Lars Noodén]

Or rather than trying a whole other distro, you could try different Desktop Environments and, if you want to get fancy, even different Window Managers.

[ensar-kilinc123]

So far I have tried Gnome on Fedora Live Workstation 22?, Cinnamon on Linux Mint 15 about a year ago and 17.2, MATE on Ubuntu MATE 15.04 and Linux Mint MATE 17.2, LXDE on Lubuntu 14.04, Unity on 14.04. Absolutely hated MATE and LXDE, loved Gnome and Cinnamon, and Unity has it's moments. I haven't tried out KDE and XDE as neither suits me. I want something different than windows with the exception of Cinnamon.

[ensar-kilinc123]

And I'm thinking about using some non-lts versions like Ubuntu 15.04 to see what's new

[monkeybrain20122]

So you are trying all these on live usbs? Maybe you should start with a real install into hard drive. Also Ubuntu can be hard or easy, you can always do things the hard way, the tools are all there. I try to use my computer to do things, not to fudge with the OS too much so I use Ubuntu as my main OS. Most things just work though sometimes may need a bit of tweaking (Have Fedora on the other partition, meantime gpu driver seems to be broken and dnf is spewing some errors. Will try to compile mesa there to see if it fixes the problem when I get around to )

You can get more excitements with Debian unstable, it takes a lot longer than Ubuntu to set up and you may have to go through the fun to locate "non free" iSO so your wifi e.g would work. The highlight of excitement is that everytime before you do a routine update you should first check Debian weather, only proceed if it is sunny.

Other recommendations would be Arch (hard to set up but once set up is pretty "boring") Arch has one of the best documentations. If I have time I would try LFS (Linux from stretch) I imagine it is very tedious to set up but very well documented.

P.S. I wouldn't spend too much time on different DEs, it is only appearance after all. Pick one or two and stick with it and spend your time on more interesting stuffs, my two cents.