Linux

Brag about being an Arch user (BTW.)

Nothing, at all.
Some things you can't do easily in Mint, like create snapshots automatically and boot into them when something breaks.
But it's all Linux and freely available software under the hood, and the lines between configuration, customization and forking your distro are blurry.

Nothing, it's all Linux

You can't have your entire system configuration in a repository of plain text files, which has lots of advantages, but it's not worth caring about unless you feel excited to get into it.

Serious answer? XFCE doesn't support multiple monitors with different refresh rates. So that.

Some of the other answers (like Meta (aka Windows Key) not working for shortcuts) can be hacked around, but unless you switch to a DE that supports Wayland, you will never have stable multi refresh rate differences on multiple monitors.

You can't easilyy switch between different inages like on an atomic fedora system.

Do you have to switch now? No.

Acces to the AUR I guess? But not much really. If you like what you have just stick with it

Waste time configuring things and troubleshooting things when your ultra custom system breaks.

Use Pacman as your package manager, or something. Linux is Linux. If you use a mainstream distro it should be 90% similar to all other distros. You don't really have to worry about FOMO when it comes to Linux.

Y-you're not supposed to ask that!

Compared to Arch(-based): Accesing the latest packages. It's not impossible, especially if you go for Debian testing repos, but it's definitely extra work.

Compared to special-purpose distros (i.e. gaming, portable, high security/privacy, pen-testing): Whatever their special purpose is will usually be harder to achieve.

Compared to huge corpo distros (SUSE/Fedora and derivatives): Ease of more intricate setups and maybe some security testing.

Compared to Ubuntu: Paying a corporation to not withhold security patches from you.

Running alternatives to Systemd.

With NixOS you can upgrade your entire OS and if you don't like it roll it back like nothing ever happened. You can also replicate your entire machine by copying your configs over to another computer, running the install, and then copying over any files you have in your home folder and you will have reproduced your desktop.

You can also very easily use a different version of a packaged app by adding an override in your config. This is useful if you want bleeding-edge features or if something is broken. Also every package is also a development environment, so you don't have to worry about setting up a dev environment to hack on stuff.

waydroid (if you don't install a wayland based de)

Technically speaking: nothing really, provided you have time and skills.

Except maybe not having access to NDA-ed binary blobs or something...

In my experience, not much, but I’m a marginally functional newbie. Mint manages things for you fairly nicely and has been the best, it just works with out messing with much/anything. (At least for my hardware)

I managed to get gnome working smoothly on mint and have been happy with it. I started and returned here since I last ditched windows as a native OS.

The only thing that has made me consider distro hopping from mint is AUR on arch and gnome, though I’ve been successful so far.

Part of trying the distros that are more advanced and give you more explicit control and configuration is the sense of accomplishment and it makes you figure out how and why things work the way they do. It holistically builds your velocity in your understanding of Linux. (Or gnu whatever that nuance is).

If your machine has enough resources it is super easy to host VMs of anything you want to try. You can try them all, and it won’t cost you anything but time!

If you are speaking about stock Linux mint Xfce, with the default kernal, mesa version etc., your support for very new hardware - Arrow lake, battlemage and RDNA 4 will be imperfect. In general, very new hardware (launched within the last 6 months) will not be supported properly because the lts kernel being used was written before these products were launched

I mean....

Steam? Maybe? I dunno, I don't game but the Steam kids seem to prefer Arch. I'm sure they have their reasons.

Practically? Probably nothing terribly significant.

I love xfce. But ive tried gnome w tiling shell extension and wow. But i still miss xfce , once they come over to Wayland i think I will go back 🤷

Nerd stuff

Natively install RPM packages? Really, there's not much. Find a setup that you like.

File-by-file integrity check against signed checksums upstream to trivially confirm validity of deployment.

But that's probably not interesting.

If you are using Gnome distros: you can feel exactly what it feels like getting back to working in a restricted, overhyped, overbranded environment like Windows.

If you are using Ubuntu: you can get advertising during your system's software upgrades. No, really.

If you are using Arch: you can post aroudn the internet saying you use Arch btw.

Depending on the distro, you can use some alternative software stacks, but that's mostly the backend (eg.: systemd versus openRC, Apache vs Nginx, X vs Wayland); most "desktop app" level is mostly the same for each desktop environment, is kinda the point.

Xfce? All keyboard shortcuts involved the Meta key won't work.