So this weekend I took the plunge and rooted my phone, and installed a custom ROM (Cyanogenmod 11) over the stock Samsung flavoured Android. It's way better, and I'm finally on 4.4.4 KitKat, where I was stuck on 4.2.1 JellyBean with the official updates, and I'm saving space and memory by not having all the bloatware manufacturers bundle in.

After some discussion in TK, it seems like it might be worth having a thread to discuss this sort of thing, because it it a bit daunting if you haven't done it before.

I'm using a Galaxy S3 Mini, which apparently isn't officially supported by Cyanogen, but I found an unofficial one here http://novafusion.pl/downloads/

I used Kingo Root to root the phone, and I tried both CWM and TWRP for custom recovery, both work well, both for backup and recovery of your existing software, and for installing the new software, but TWRP seems nicer, and has a touch interface.

I backed up all my apps and data using Titanium Backup beforehand, but when I started up, Google asked if I wanted to recover my apps, and it downloaded all my apps for me, so I didn't even bother with recovering them.