I’ve been having a big think over Linux distros. See, I’ve been looking back at my still-new Linux experience of nine months, and wondering how my own journey can help other people get started with FOSS operating systems. Whenever the topic of a Windows refugee-friendly OS came up, I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.
I always follow that up with a comment about how you don’t have to stick with Linux Mint if you don’t want to. You can do what I did, which is to dip your toe into the Linux distro water and find something that suits you better. But if I’m setting up Linux Mint as “my first Linux distro,” why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?
I don’t get why everyone and their mother has to shit on Mint. I started my Linux journey on servers, but my first home computing distro was Ubuntu 16. It wasn’t what I needed so I stuck with Windows 10. After migrating my homelab server to Almalinux 9 and realizing how much better life could be if I just purged Microsoft from my household, I installed Linux Mint on my laptop and have used it ever since. If I had any less of a warm welcome into Linux for home computing, I might have just stuck with Windows 10.
I consider myself somewhere between a layperson and a power user. I’m pretty comfortable with BASH since I work with servers a lot, but low-level stuff is still black magic to me. I’m aware that KDE Plasma has a ton of cool bells and whistles (I use Nobara on my gaming rig), but other than KDE connect for sharing clipboard, I don’t really need any of that fancy stuff on my laptop. And I think the typical layperson probably won’t even set them up in the first place.
I think Mint gets shit on because it’s based on Ubuntu (which already gets shit on a lot) and only gets a new release when the Ubuntu LTS does, so it’s kinda out of date.
Rolling release distros get recommended over it a lot because having a newer kernel gets you better gaming performance and a lot of the techy people who’d even care about switching, also like gaming. And nowadays, immutable distros get recommended a lot so you can’t fuck things up with a weird config change. Mint just doesn’t do anything significantly better than any other distro, it’s lukewarm.
I don’t think the desktop environment actually has much to do with why people dislike Mint. It’s just fine IMO. I’ll take it over Ubuntu, but these days I’m on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Rolling release, and comes with snapshots configured straight out of the box so when I fuck something up, it’s fairly quick do undo.
If there’s one thing the majority of people that are still on windows won’t care about is “being as up to date as possible”. Hell, even people on android phones complain about updates, “they changed everything, I have no idea where is what!”
Mint being based on a LTS that lasts a while is a desired feature for a lot of people, the kind that don’t follow tech news and don’t want to bother understanding computers.
The people who don’t want any change aren’t going to move to Linux anyway. I meant more the people who stayed this long for games, but are now giving up.
But also these updates very rarely change the UI significantly in most applications and desktop environments. It’s more bug fixes and performance improvements that you’re missing out on by being on Mint.
I’m on TumbleWeed and I don’t remember the last time the UI for my desktop or any application I use, had a significant change. But I’m always on a new kernel and new graphics drivers, which makes playing newish games using Proton a smoother experience.