I installed Linux Mint for the first time on my personal Laptop just a few months ago, and it ran so well that I didn't want to mess with it to try out different distros.
But today, my company's IT department announced that they have some spare old Laptops to give away (technically because they didn't meet the specs for Windows 11, didn't stop the IT department from giving them out with Windows 11 pre installed though)
So now I got a few devices to play around with!! They're a Precision 7530 and a Latitude 7390 2-in-1!
I already got ZorinOS running on the little guy because apparently Zorin is nice for Touchscreen support. For the big guy I was initially thinking that I could try Bazzite, but the installer was like "Intel UHD Graphics aren't really recommended" so I might try something else first. Any recommendations? I mainly just want to try as many different flavors of Linux as I can haha
NixOS (and GuixSD) is a whole operating system. But base guix and Nix is a package manager that you can install into any existing distro and use for as many or as few packages as you want.
So you can give it a shot in roughly no time, is what I'm saying.
The main difference between the full system ones and the package manager ones is obviously that it manages system level packages and the kernel, but also that they have configuration systems setup to run daemons and manage system config. But other than that it's just the same paradigm as the package manager version.