[kwlug-disc] Why I switched to Mint

[Jason Eckert]

> One thing I realized: all distros suck, none of them meet my standards
for an ethical, user-centred, modern, full featured, and reliable desktop.
Thanks for this - I now have my next t-shirt order: the words "All Distros
Suck", with an annoyed Tux underneath.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 7:51 AM Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:

> The problems with OpenSUSE/Plasma mounted until I gave up and installed
> Mint/Cinnamon. Much better.
>
> As an "automatic transmission" distro, oriented to ordinary desktop users,
> where everything just works, Mint/Cinnamon is way better than Fedora/Gnome
> and OpenSUSE/Tumbleweed/Plasma, for the things I've tried to do.
>
> In Mint, and only in Mint, all of the features/setup/customization I
> wanted were either built in or trivial to configure, without the need to
> search google and follow recipes from documentation or blog posts.
> "Trivial" also means I didn't get bogged down diagnosing errors and
> figuring out why the recipes didn't work. Related to this, on your first
> boot, the Mint Welcome app runs, and it's a wizard that guides you through
> all of the most common customization requirements. Brilliant. The level of
> polish and reliability is just higher in Mint. (OpenSUSE was the worst
> overall, with Fedora in between.)
>
> This comes at the price of up-to-date software. Mint is based on Ubuntu
> LTS. The default Mint kernel is currently 5.04 (2019), and the "Edge"
> version (Cinnamon only) has 5.13 (June 2021), 5.15 after installing
> updates. By contrast, my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install had kernel 5.18. This
> could be an issue if you are installing on new hardware that needs the
> latest kernel.
>
> Although one of my goals in distro hopping was to have up-to-date
> software, it turns out that I strongly dislike fixing my system when things
> break after an update. I spent too much time doing that in Fedora, and
> OpenSUSE/Tumbleweed was going to be worse (I abandoned SUSE as unusable
> before experiencing these problems though). So Mint it is.
>
> One thing I realized: all distros suck, none of them meet my standards for
> an ethical, user-centred, modern, full featured, and reliable desktop. So I
> started thinking: if I want to contribute to the distro and help make it
> better, which organization do I want to support? Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE
> have desktop distros, but it's a hobby for them, since they don't make
> their money from the desktop. If I just consider distros where quality of
> life for desktop users is the primary focus of the organization, then Mint
> has the biggest user base and their distro so far comes closest in meeting
> my specific requirements. So I'll contribute to Mint.
>
> --- Detailed Requirements ---
>
> Traditional Desktop: I switch between Linux and MacOS systems, and
> sometimes use Windows. So I want a "traditional" desktop with a strip along
> the bottom of the screen for starting programs, managing windows, etc.
> Cinnamon is fine. Plasma is fine. Gnome 3 is not acceptable. I tried
> installing a "Dock" plugin on Fedora, it was hell to install, worked sort
> of okay, but stopped working the next Fedora release.
>
> Screen magnifier: I want a MacOS style full screen magnifier. Hold down a
> modifier key and vertical scroll on the mouse or trackpad to zoom in and
> out. It's a feature of the window manager. Cinnamon has this, you just have
> to enable it. Gnome doesn't have this, and the keyboard based magnifier is
> barely usable. I made posted two Fedora bug reports about the magnifier, it
> got incrementally better over 2 Fedora releases. Plasma didn't have this in
> OpenSUSE. Plasma did have a keyboard based magnifier that is more usable
> than Gnome's.
>
> Proprietary codecs, so that web sites render and I can play music/video.
> In Mint, the installer asks if you want this stuff. It's trivial. In
> Fedora, it's 2 recipes from the docs, about 5 CLI commands. Not too bad.
> The OpenSUSE procedure (from a blog post) was considerably more complex,
> and I never tried it.
>
> Ungoogled Chromium. None of the distros had Chrome or Chromium
> preinstalled (I consider these malware), so I didn't have to uninstall
> them. On Mint, I installed Ungoogled Chromium from flathub using the
> Software Manager, and it works. Trivial. In Fedora, I did this (install
> from flathub), but it never worked correctly. Each time I ran it, it popped
> up 3 dialog boxes that I had to dismiss. In OpenSUSE, the recipe for
> installing a flathub GUI looked pretty complicated, and I never got around
> to it.
>
> Zoom conferencing app: On Mint, I just installed it from the Zoom website
> (they explicitly support Mint). Download the deb, click "open" in the
> browser, a window pops up, click Install. Trivial. In Fedora, I had no
> trouble installing it, but it didn't work correctly until I switched from
> Wayland to X11, which was a pain. Then the next time I upgraded Fedora,
> Zoom stopped working. I was able to fix the problem after googling. But I
> really don't need this level of aggravation. With OpenSUSE, I started
> installing Zoom 1/2 hour before a Zoom call. Big mistake. I downloaded the
> RPM, clicked on in the browser, a window appears, I click Install. A
> tooltip temporarily appears saying "Installation failed", then the window
> updates its status to "Installed". No way to find out what the error was.
> (In Mint, you click "Details" to see the error message.) SUSEs software
> installation GUI is just lazy bullshit. After googling and running some CLI
> commands, I was able to diagnose the problem, but ran out of time to fix it
> before the Zoom call started. (This is when I rage installed Mint, BTW.)
>
> Fearless upgrades with system snapshots and rollback. OpenSUSE does this
> best, with snapper, which is preinstalled and preconfigured. Mint has
> timeshift preinstalled (Mint is now the maintainer of timeshift). It's not
> preconfigured, but the Welcome app guides you through the configuration,
> post installation. Timeshift is not as elegant as snapper, but it's
> probably good enough. Fedora has timeshift and snapper in their repos, but
> they are complex to install and configure. Timeshift broke in Fedora 35 so
> you have to install from the github repo for now. The procedure for
> installing snapper has also changed significantly across recent Fedora
> releases. If your snapshot and rollback software breaks when you upgrade
> Fedora, then you do not have "fearless upgrades". This feature needs to be
> built in and supported by the distro. Yes, you can use BTRFS commands to
> take snapshots before upgrades, but you still need to ensure that your
> filesystem is partitioned correctly, so that /home and /var are not
> included in system snapshots (for example). So this is an expert level
> approach, and I just want a simple "undo" command.
>
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