[kwlug-disc] Why I switched to Mint

[Ron Singh]

This post of yours should be pinned on Mint's website.
Most of the points you raised are exactly the ones that made me give up on
Ubuntu proper and variously, Fedora and Arch-based distros.

I have a real need to hibernate my work laptops at least once a day and
Ubuntu Mate/Xfce 16.04 made that easy, not so much 18.04 or 20.04.
Mint. being based on Ubuntu carried the same issues with hibernating in
their 19 & 20 editions.

Mint's LMDE on the other hand, being based on Debian proper, well I have my
hibernate and am very happy.
Mint's LMDE5 has been a stellar performer for me on 10yo and 5yo laptops. I
miss being able to do PPAs though.

If hibernation is not a requirement, Mint Cinnamon is awesomely easy to set
up, stable and predictable. It's supported for 5 years. Hard to beat.
They get my money every year. I am unabashedly a Mint fanboy:-)

Thanks,

Ron S.



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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