[kwlug-disc] Why I switched to Mint

[CrankyOldBugger]

Can you get them in my size?

On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 5:56 PM Jason Eckert <jason.eckert at gmail.com> wrote:

> > 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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