I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.

  • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    Every couple of years I think to myself “You know, I can’t actually remember why I don’t like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I’ve got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they’ve had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?”

    And then I download Ubuntu.

    And then I remember.

    • UprisingVoltage@feddit.it
      0·
      11 months ago

      Recommending ubuntu to newbies is the product of either incompetence or malice when Mint, zorin and nobara exist

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        0·
        11 months ago

        Mint relies on often outdated versions of Ubuntu, always LTS. Many modern features will break there. Debian Stable is not better and will get veeery outdated soon. Debians stable release simply is currently pretty new, but that is due to its feature freeze, with GNOME 43 (now 2 versions outdated btw) etc. being “pretty new”. In 2 years you will have basically no new development, which is happening.

        Nobara is extremely flawed, its Fedora 39 release was like a month too late. It does extreme and manual changes. I would highly recommend Bazzite from ublue instead, it is made for Gaming and has all the enhanced Graphics and Gaming things just as Nobara, but up to date, immutable, self updating etc.

        I havent tried Zorin but their modded GNOME sounds like a good idea, Wayland support and very stable Desktop, unlike Mint which will take at least a year to have a stable Wayland release. There are already apps like Waydroid that only support Wayland, and that has to be the future, as X11 is very bad with multiple Monitors, it lacks any security and is simply not maintained for years.

        So no, Nobara and Mint are not recommended really, Zorin maybe.

        I would recommend ublue.it images for the matching hardware (main, nvidia, asus, framework, ally etc). They are close to upstream, immutable, autoupdating, solid (every local bug should be reproducible) and you can simply install every app from Flatpak. If an app is not there, you dont have to switch Distros, as Distrobox is already installed. They even have Fleek, which allows Nix easily, and you can also use homebrew, which combines the MacOS and the Linux community!

        It may be unconventional for some, but it really isnt. Its not sudo apt install but now try upgrading Debian, its a total mess. It is such a better model for people that dont want weird breakages they cant reproduce. I broke literally every other Distro as a beginner, Fedora Kinoite (although if you can stand GNOME, use Silverblue) is currently the best.

        I also think NixOS is pretty good for beginners. Dont know if Flatpak is preinstalled, but the setup should be like 3 commands. It does not break and has no package conflicts, and installs are also just nix-env --install APPNAME. Its defaults are good and you can choose any DE you want, and it will come complete and ready to use with some clicks. Swap with Hibernation just works, things like that. Its package repo is bigger than Debians, so you can just install every package you need from one source.