I’ve been getting more into self hosting lately, grabbed an optiplex 3050 for everything and I’m running Mint currently. Looking more into things though, I saw Debian come up as a more barebones distro and now I’m wondering if there is a lot of benefit to going more barebones. I’m not having any issues with my current setup but now I can’t stop thinking about it. I am newer to Linux but having to learn new things doesn’t wig me out much if there is a lot more involvement with Debian
Edit: I appreciate the responses. I do see where I could just end up creating problems that don’t exist by experimenting with it more. Debian does sound enticing so it’s definitely something I’ll mess about with virtually for now and see how I like it in comparison. But I definitely have to agree on the “don’t mess with a good thing” if it’s working for me. All your answers have definitely given me something to play with now as well, I want the problems to solve but doing it in a separate environment would suit me better to learn a few things. This community rocks.
Distro-hopping is very fun and educational, but don’t dump a working system for an experiment unless you’re forced to or you’re just a masochist.
Play around with it, try and recreate your current setup within it, and once (if) you’re comfortable enough to do that, then consider replacing your main server with it.
There’s plenty of more wild distros out there too. I love Debian, I use it a lot, but you’ll also learn a ton by trying to wrap your head around Fedora Silverblue, NixOS, Arch or Gentoo. It used to be a rite of passage to build your own LFS (Linux From Scratch) distro, not sure if people even do that anymore, but you’ll probably learn a metric shitton if you try.