These thumbnails are also the reason why people stay away from Linux. How is the little girl relevant to your question?
Laughs in Debian Stable
-
Excitedly get new machine. Install Debian.
-
Not so excitedly search error messages.
-
Dejectedly find need kernel/drivers that’s 18 months later than the Debian versions
-
boot sysrescuecd to find next distro to write to USB drive …
-
kick self for buying shiny, latest hardware without checking for linux support. Again…😡
-
I agree with @[email protected] here. Could you describe what issues are people having? What is their user profile (programmers, writers, …)?
Because Mint is popular among the crowd, and such challenges are also driven by the crowd. Better to see it as some social or meme dynamics, than to explain it with logical reasons. I also see more new users who use arch, because of the “I use arch BTW” meme.
As a Fedora Silverblue user I find it hard to recommend it to new users. It’s not an issue with Fedora, but with the state of Linux desktop in general. At least with Mint/Ubuntu people can rely on social media and the community if they have problems. And Fedora is a more niche thing, and doesn’t have a big crowd.
Moreover, I chose Fedora because of my experience, which allows me to have opinion what is better. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to explain the years of the Linux desktop drama to new users, when they are just doing the first steps or trying to feed their curiosity.
Fedora a niche distro?
It is comparatively to Debian/Ubuntu derivatives. Even Arch and NixOS probably have more users now. Lately I see some popularity of uBlue derivatives among new users, but I don’t know how many people use it, and where the popularity comes from.
Because you’re dealing with lifelong windows users who want a reassuringly familiar looking OS not fucking linux techs
Jesus christ learn to tailor to the user
Fedora does have a Cinnamon spin. The advantage of Mint is that all the Ubuntu tutorials work on it
Edit: plus Fedora’s philosophy about non-free software makes it less than ideal for people who don’t care
Even if Fedora has a spin with the same DE, from my experience, Mint/Ubuntu still has a higher chance just work on a given system.
I love Fedora and use it pretty much exclusively, but the out of the box experience of Mint and Ubuntu is still a bit better for the average user imho.
What problems?
outdated mesa, monitor scaling, cinnamon in general being outdated
What features were lacking from mesa or Cinnamon generally?
I have 4k 1440, 1080 monitor (120hz or higher) on Mint edge, what would I gain from switch to somethibg else?
Cinnamons compositor doesn’t turn off for games (it’s supposed to but has been bugged for years) which costs you fps.
Playing Alan Wake 2 at launch was only possible with the latest Mesa drivers compiled from the AUR due to some graphics features that it required.
I assume compiling Mesa is rather difficult to set up? For reference I’ve not bothered to try and compile Lutris or Wine.
Looks like mid-to-high-level difficulty if you really want to build from source, due to multiple complex interdependent configuration flags that have to match your hardware, and the need to check a kernel option or two. (Based on the Gentoo ebuild for mesa 24.1.2).
With AUR it’s as easy as installing any other package, actually.
You just install the git version from AUR.
Installing Arch appears to be more complex than Mint’s Click Yes x4 GUI. Should I expect almost everything to just work after install?
Not even close, if you actually install barebones arch, then barebones arch is exactly that, barebones. You wont even have a DE.
Endeavour is what you want. It’s just straight up arch, but with all the stuff you’d want to set up anyway done for you.
And if you want an “app-store” style app to browse packages with, and not fiddle with the command line to manage packages, install pamac. It can be expanded with AUR and flatpak support.
It doesn’t just cost FPS. It straight up breaks some games that run fine on other distros.
Does it still have that feature that kills and restarts cinnamon when memory leaks start getting to be too much? I honestly had to laugh at that when that was introduced.
wait is THAT why my mint edge iso randomly fucking sends me back to login screen??
No clue. Haven’t used it in years. I was done when I went looking for a fix for the compositor thing and found a years-old open bug report.
plasma has wayland support, tons of customizability, better multi monitor support, a great suite of applications including a text editor with lsp support and much more, and in general looks nicer. cinnamon is sort of the bare minimum
better multi monitor support
I run a 3x1 setup and KDE didn’t handle it any better than Cinnamon did.
Wayland support is coming to Mint. You can actually use it on 21.3 right now but it is unstable.
Rest of what you said is opinion.
the rest also isn’t just an opinion, cinnamon does not have an equivalent to kdenlive, krita, or kate. even the existing applications are just not on the same level. it’s an acceptable desktop, but plasma and gnome are just better.
I use KdenLive on Mint whenever I need to edit a video. I’ve never bothered to look for the other two because I use Darktable and GIMP for my photo editing, but I can check to see if they’re available if you want me to.
Why would I care what software KDE comes with? This is Linux. I can install whatever works best for me. Including the whole of KDE software suite if I so chose. You KDE fans are voracious.
Wayland has objectively better multi monitor support in every case. You were encountering tearing issues before switching, maybe you just didn’t notice.
Well, I got rid of KDE and I’m on Cinnamon right now, so where are these tearing issues? You think I would have noticed after over a year of use.
Are your monitors all the same resolution, refresh rate and size?
Does that include support for variable refresh rate with multiple monitor (Freesync in my case).
Yes
mesa is outdated by default, not supporting rx 7000 cards unless you use the edge iso.
If you have new hardware, why wouldn’t you use the Edge ISO?
why should you have to? it’s a really bad choice by the distro maintainers.
Can you explain? As a Mint user with really old hardware, I appreciate using the LTS kernel. However, I also appreciate them giving users other options.
there is no benefit to old lts kernels on the desktop, kernel releases are always extremely stable
It’s a bad choice to have choice?
MX
deleted by creator
I don’t know the difference between Wayland and X11, all I know is that they’re options, and I’m 30 days into the Arch-derived(is that the right term?) Garuda Linux that defaults Wayland with a 3080 and I haven’t had any problems? Aren’t the Mint problems that it’s a stable distro with outdated stuff?
deleted by creator
Stable has nothing to do with outdated packages.
That’s a personal decision by a distro.
Fedora is a stable distro because generally the packages stay on the same major version throughout the version, however they have a list of exceptions for certain applications that should be updated for security or perhaps they don’t follow a major/minor/bugfix release and it’s bad practice to hack together your own versions.
Fedora rebases it’s packages every 6 months, so it’s never left far behind.
I see! Thank you for the explanation, I’m still very new as this is my first Linux and I did no planning or intentional research before swapping over, I just got mad at Windows and was formatting my main dive 15 minutes later. I avoided Mint specifically because I’d seen lemmy threads saying it was using old packages on purpose for stability reasons, and that for actual gaming I’d want rolling release?
It all depends on what you actually want to do.
I have a computer connected to the TV with Chimera installed because that’s SteamOS 3 with emulators preconfigured and is completely couch + controller friendly.
My laptop has Fedora because it’s up to date, but everything is tested before release, and all upgrade paths are automated unlike Arch which burnt me in the past with breaking changes.
On my Pi’s I have Diet Pi, which is Debian but has images for each of the different ARM boards and has a bunch of scripts for setting up print servers, Home Assistant, etc. I want Debian for it’s slow unchanging nature there.
On my desktop, less so.
But underneath they are all Linux, and they all behave in very similar ways, it’s all about the initial setup.
Arch is actually reasonable as the foundation of an easy to use Linux OS, provided you don’t care about stability. It’s up to date with all the latest stuff, has support for many apps and packages without having to add extra repos, and it has fantastic documentation. All that’s really missing is the GUI installer and stuff to help newbies. Projects like EndeavorOS and Garuda provide that.
If you actually need stability though, which lots of new users would appreciate, use Fedora or a derivative like Nobara or Universal Blue.
I daily drive Nvidia plus Optimus with wayland, but it’s easy enough to switch back to X11 just using a menu on the login screen.
deleted by creator
How are you managing to break Linux OSes so much?
I’ve tried a few distro’s recently. Pop os, mint, and nobara. Mint was pretty bad (i really wanted it not to be), nobara was good but had issues with sleep and after a month my sound quit working. Pop OS has been flawless and I love that I can set the workspaces hot key to the windows key.
Problems? ‘old’? I seem to need a little clarification.
By default Mint ships 3 years old kernel and a lot of hardware don’t work with it. Mint allows installing newer kernel easily but one must know that is the case.
Mint only works on X11. This is fine to some, but to others it’s a showcase of X shortcomings right away
I have no idea what this challenge is (I automatically assume it’s some cringe when I read “challenge” also that pic is… what?), but you don’t run Mint/Debian/Ubuntu if you have super-fresh hardware, like AMD 7000-series or Intel 14th gen and so on. in that case you have to go with Fedora or one of its derivatives (Nobara, Bazzite, etc.), because they have the newest kernels that allow this hardware to run OOB.
if you have a bit older hardware (like 2-3 years old), Mint or Debian is your best bet; Ubuntu if you have to, and only as a stepping stone. it’s a solid base and if you use flatpak for everything (Firefox, Chrome, Lutris, Steam, etc.) you won’t have issues with old packages and you’ll get the best of both worlds - stability and supported hardware.
I think it started with Linus and Luke of Linus Tech Tips doing a 30 day linux challenge to see what it’s like daily driving linix. Jeff of Craft Computing did one recently as well.
Linus uninstalled his desktop after ignoring the warning that said °hey, this will uninstall your desktop.°
Which is his fault, but also this would never happen on Windows. The power and lack of hand-holding of Linux is a great advantage for power users, but with great power comes great responsibility, and many people don’t need the responsibility.
For sure, which is why I only use Mint anyway. I need my hand held. But Linus was doing power-user things without power-user reading. You can’t really claim the car is no good when you opened the hood and started swapping hoses without checking to see what goes where.
Yeah, I feel like Linux needs the equivalent of Administrator accounts on Windows. Root is the equivalent of the System account on Windows, something even power users might never encounter, because it’s a level of power you shouldn’t ever need.
We need users to have permission to install software and do other administrative tasks, without having permission to do very destructive actions like uninstalling core system packages. Aunt Flo should be able to install Mahjong from her distros package manager GUI, without needing dangerous root access.
Well, no, not exactly. Most accounts on desktop linux distros are admin accounts. The way I would define that is whether or not the user has sudo permissions, either by being in the sudo group or sudoers file. Some distros do ask if you want the user to be admin. And that’s pretty analagous to being admin on windows and getting a UAC prompt for an elevated process.
Yeah, but there is no separation between being able to do day to day administrative actions like installing software, and being able to do destructive actions no one should need to do unless in exceptional circumstances.
@Magnolia_
Cause Mint is an easy to use community distro.It’s because Mint used to be Ubuntu without the fuss. Now Ubuntu is Ubuntu without the fuss and mint is Ubuntu with broken packages.
The funny part is that Mint was always just Ubuntu with broken packages.
Edit: I think I hurt some feelings
Now Ubuntu is Ubuntu without the fuss
Ubuntu is a trojan horse for Snap.
Mint is what Ubuntu should of been. Ubuntu is kind of a dumpster fire that everyone abandoned.
I agree that Linux Mint is closer to what the vocal Linux desktop community would like to see, but Ubuntu is anything but abandoned. Where I work, both my coworkers (excluding myself) and customers are either using RHEL or Ubuntu. That’s it. Sure, everyone on Lemmy and Reddit swears against Ubuntu and has no need for plain-RHEL, but a lot more of the non-vocal Linux community is using Ubuntu. I prefer Pop!_OS, but that’s besides the point.
Source: Ubuntu is anywhere between 4th and 6th place on these charts:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=popularity
What packages are broken? I haven’t run into any.
P.S. I think Snaps are now the fuss, so I still think Mint is Ubuntu with the fuss.
Trying different distributions is a must on using Linux, I still remember my first one, Mandrake, and is not a happy memory. Now Arch is my master, to get here It was not an easy or direct ride, I tried several ones through the years until I find the light ;)
I always suggest Mint Edge edition, that has a newer kernel, not the default Mint. But I still suggest Mint, because simply, it’s more user friendly than any of the other ones. It has gui panels for almost everything.
None of them good for non techy people. I wouldn’t recommend mint. Gnome is the most friendly DE with pleasing defaults. There are many immutable flatpak distros coming with gnome. e.g.: Endless os which is pre installed on some asus laptops instead of Ubuntu for reason.
I feel like people have an interesting view of techy/advanced/etc
My view is that you need to pick something in line with your goals: some people may be techy but just need something to host files and a web browser and don’t care about new packages or whatever, or modern security or anything. I wouldn’t recommend mint or fedora for a gaming PC regardless of techiness, you know?
Our views can be compatible. Endless os is quite limited right now, but if flathub would have xampp, for example, that would be easily the simplest way to run a webserver. However, every techy person prefers docker, me too. It’s just not something that my mother can deal with. In general, linux is lacking these mother compatible apps where we have more advanced solution. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend endless and others in the category if the goal is to run a webserver.
