Mastodawn

Linux Mint isn't the answer for Windows refugees anymore

https://literature.cafe/post/28554093

Linux Mint isn't the answer for Windows refugees anymore - literature.cafe

>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?

justdaveisfine Feb 4

Mint is the one I’ve used the longest and for some reason keep coming back to, so its still my jam, even if its a little basic.

Concave1142 Feb 4

If it works and doesn’t cause any friction, I see no reason to not use it.

Mint on my game PC and Debian on my laptop.

Because switching from Windows can be intimidating and Mint is the literal opposite of intimidating. It’s boring, simple, and clean, thus the perfect stepping stone. At least, it was for me and quite a few others I know. I still install Mint first on new hardware

Scrollone Feb 4

I’ve been using Linux for more than 20 years. I’ve started with Ubuntu, then I’ve used Arch for a long time, then back to Kubuntu, then… I’ve recently switched to Mint.

I need to do work and not worry about anything: Mint is super clean, fast, with old school GNOME vibes (GNOME 3 is utter shit).

Would you say Linux Mint is … refreshing?

Warning, this is my opinion:

No, a distro with a modified depricated non-upstream window manager is not a good introduction to Linux.

I am looking at you Cinnamon. Cinnamon is for Linux users who don’t want to use Gnome 3 or KDE Plasma, I think.

I always recommend Fedora to newbs and Debian to newbs with existing Linux knowledge, because all the desktops are as close to upstream as possible. This is why I cannot recommend Ubuntu or any Ubuntu based distro for the desktop. ubuntu-server can ve good enough on servers only.

tehevilone Feb 6

Cinnamon is the reason I don’t recommend Mint to people, but it’s mainly because I don’t like it. The default UI has so much wasted space it’s revolting, they tried to get the windows XP/7 feel with the app launcher and ended up with blocky, boring blank space.

Unless someone is familiar with MacOS and wants to use something similar w/ GNOME, I’ve only been recommending KDE spins or distros with it as default.

Brave Little Hitachi Wand Feb 4

As long as people are moving away from Windows and Mac, who cares? You’re never gonna convince most people that their OS should be interesting and worth talking about. Take the W.

As long as people are moving away from Windows and Mac

If people don’t like it or Linux Mint doesn’t meet their needs, they will go back to Windows or switch to MacOS. The article points out that there may be better stepping stone distros these days

Brave Little Hitachi Wand Feb 5

I guess I had a kneejerk, a lot of times when someone starts up like this it always feels like a veiled “people don’t like my favourite one” type of thing. He’s pretty even handed and nuanced beyond that, credit where credit is due.

XDA, experts on not being the answer for OS refugees anymore.

illusionist Feb 4

It’ all linux. I distro hopped because I heared another distro handles the problem I’m facing much better than the current one.

I haven’t had problems in years - or I simply don’t care anymore. I’ve got my base system and I don’t fuck around anymore. It works like a charm.

@cm0002 this is bullshit. Linux Mint is Linux made simple, and they did a good job at removing Ubuntu jank.

As someone considering Win to Mint, why do people keep saying it’s basic? What would I be missing? I need the computer for playing games, some hobby media work, internet.

Not much. Mint generally works very well. It’s not bleeding-edge fresh and is based on Ubuntu. I don’t think it would cause you to be unable to do any of your use cases any more than any other Linux distro - like the kernel level anti-cheat thing for games, or Adobe Creative Suite products. Doesn’t matter which distro you run, those things ain’t gonna work.

I was the same as many others here, started my journey on Mint. I eventually moved to Fedora because I like KDE and wanted quicker package updates and stuff.

Scrollone Feb 4

Pro-tip: if you need the Adobe suite, give Affinity a try. It works perfectly well on WINE, there’s even a ready-made AppImage on GitHub so you don’t need to configure anything. Just click and run.

It’s not that people generally say “basic” … they say “boring”. It’s designed to just work and be stable with some nice features but it has a slower release speed and the dev, intentionally, keeps things slow so that they can polish up all the features before they go mainstream on it. So it isn’t doing anything revolutionary and it isn’t giving you bleeding edge everything… it’s just nice and stable. It’s become one of top recommended distros for a reason.

The main hiccups I see with it is that they are lagging behind on Wayland support… which is slowly becoming the defacto standard for desktop display tech. If you aren’t really up on the x11 vs wayland debate… this likely isn’t even an issue for you. Suffice to say they’ve tried to hang back on x11 for a while, which is the older but much more thoroughly tested way of doing the user space display. Secondly would be… because it’s a slow burn on updates, you might not get the latest greatest updates for the kernel with the display drivers. So for gaming that could make things a little more finicky. People do use it for gaming… so don’t think it can’t be also used for that, just might run into hiccups.

Good thing is you can test it out, and if it doesn’t work out, try something else.

Dude, “boring” is what I want from an OS. No surprises. No sudden changes. I’m 40.

Exactly. Like I said… it’s a top recommendation for a reason. There’s still tons of bleeding edge stuff to play with… but Mint has really nailed down “here… this will install painlessly, and your laptop is going to work fine”.

Then I especially recommend Linux Mint LMDE edition. It’s built on Debian, which is known for its stability, instead of on the flashier Debian-derived Ubuntu.

www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Download LMDE 7 - Linux Mint

Linux Mint is an elegant, easy to use, up to date and comfortable desktop operating system.

d0ntpan1c Feb 4

I’m looking forward to the day LMDE just becomes the only Mint flavor and they ditch the Ubuntu middleman entirely. They haven’t said thats their goal with LMDE, but given the trend of other distros swapping to Debian from Ubuntu (VanillaOS as another example), it wouldn’t surprise me.

Thanks!

owenfromcanada Feb 4

You’re not missing anything. Mint is perfectly good for the vast majority of users.

Linux distros are a bit like vehicles. For most people, a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla will do everything they need. But if you go onto forums of car-enthusiasts, you can probably find thousands of voices that say those vehicles have such low horsepower, or they’re not perfectly streamlined, or arguing about the buttons on the seat belts. Things that the average user doesn’t care much about.

I started 20 years ago with Slackware, tried out FreeBSD, and a number of others. I switched to Mint as a daily driver years agoc These days I found what I like (CachyOS), but I’m fairly knowledgable and quite comfortable on the command line, which is definitely not the case for most newer folks.

Mint is a great distro. When I put it on my wife’s laptop, literally everything worked right away. Have fun!

Mint is fine, there’s nothing to worry. Complaining about linux distros is just a long tradition in the community, you will get used to it

WorkingPie Feb 4

By basic they mean boring. Its programs tend to be slightly older but more stable with new releases coming during patches and major version changes. However, that also prevents programs being broken by someone pushing an update that isn’t done cooking.

I use mine for gaming, programming, art, basic internet usage and have had zero issues so far. The software center, used for getting new programs, is extremely easy to use and snappy. The default programs are all tried and tested, and the cinnamon desktop is very windows like.

I will say I have been using linux for a few years now and only have amd hardware when it comes to my cpu/gpu. Not sure if Nvidia plays quite as well with it but mint is a great place to start for most folks. If not the best part of linux is that you have plenty of other easy options you can try and nearly all totally free!

I have moved two computers from Windows into Mint this year. One worked without any issues. One had a strange WiFi problem with a super old wifi chip but I bought an adaptor for less than $20 that fixed it. Both computers connect to my printer better than with Windows. Which was a present surprise.

I switched to mint for a few months to have the same thing I recommended my friend, I decided to switch again to something i consider bdtter for me.

There’s nothing wrong with mint, at most you’re missing a thing or two that are part of other base distros that you can add on your own, it’s preference, that’s all

Technically there can be some performance gains on a different distro but then you have to do tinkering and stuff. If I had to keep maining mint I wouldn’t mind at all (and some things are way easier and painless).

One thing: browsers have had some issues in every distro I tried other than cachyos, nothing major but a bit of frame drops here and there

circuitfarmer Feb 4

I strongly dislike how the zone is getting flooded with “now it’s not X, but Y” in terms of distro recommendations.

Not knowing what a distro is and where to start is one of the main issues with people who may want to switch to Linux but don’t know how to do it. If Mint getting called out as a good place to start allows them to switch, then they should install Mint. If Ubuntu is all they have heard of, and it makes them try the switch, then they should install Ubuntu. Tbh, the only really dangerous approach is starting with something like Arch which, despite fantastic documentation, is probably more likely to turn new users away.

Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Someone who starts from either Mint or Ubuntu or whatever can distro hop later. Let’s not muddy the waters even more for our would-be Windows refugees.

Limerance Feb 4

Install the distro your Linux using friends use.

Install the distro with the coolest default wallpapers.

harmbugler Feb 4

Hannah Montana Linux is it then.

Default? I think the first thing I did once I settled down with my current setup was find a background of my own liking, not something curated. And it's all mine; no one else has it.

For those that care, all zero of you, it's a bunch of frames from a cool star field animation, timed to rotate to the next every few seconds or so. Because I could not find anything that would simply play a video as a background, I made something that worked. If that's not Linux level, I don't know what is.

UniversalBasicJustice Feb 5

I care about star field animations friend. Good work on making it work!

JayGray91🐉🍕Feb 5

Nyarch Linux it is then for me

Ubuntu circa 2008 it is, then.

Thank you! I switched to Linux last year after a few years of flirting with the idea. My main work computer is a 2011 iMac and I got really tired of not being able to run some things and the whole planned obsolescence aspect despite the hardware being perfectly serviceable. So, I went and, I kid you not, borrowed Linux For Dummies from the local library. Prior to this I had no idea what a shell was or even a “distro”. And, honestly, the For Dummies book over complicated Linux a bit. It front-loaded everything and made it way more intimidating than it needed to be (and I’ve been using computers since DOS days and built a PC back in 2000). Which I feel like a lot of Linux guys do as well.

Realized that Linux was lots of things and felt a pull toward Ubuntu, I installed it on the iMac and was instantly in love. After a few months, though, Canonical started pulling some nonsense and making changes to my system with updates like they were Apple. So I hopped over to Mint as I kept reading about how great it was and how “it just works” (a sentiment that brought me to Apple back in 2005). Now I stick Mint on everything. I kind of want to distro hop for the fun of it, but I’ve tested a few on distrosea and haven’t really found anything that draws me away from Mint. Yeah, I’m a bit of a normie. But normies deserve better OSes too!

circuitfarmer Feb 5

Totally. Linux is (in part) about choice. If you like Mint, use Mint.

I’ve been a Linux user for 5+ years and played with a bunch of different distros. I have Arch (btw) on a laptop that I don’t have to depend on. But my gaming rig is still running Pop. Why? Because I like it and it’s stable. A bonus that it’s now bundled with Cosmic, because I like Cosmic too.

But at the end of the day, it’s true that you can kind of do anything with any distro. The package manager is one obvious difference. I do like Pacman (from Arch) more than apt on Debian derivatives, but like, it’s just a package manager. Not worth changing a comfortable system over.

Don’t listen to people who say you can’t run a “beginner distro” until the end of time. If you like it, you like it.

If the majority of Linux users had your mentality, we would have passed “the year of Linux” a decade ago.

@circuitfarmer @cm0002 Amen

owenfromcanada Feb 4

why not just skip the middleman

Because many people take for granted their advanced understanding of Unix systems that allows them to get into the “meat”.

If you’re the type of person that is excited by a terminal display and prepared to read a whole pile of documentation, then sure–go straight to Arch, or Alpine if you’re insane. But most people want something that’s familiar, easy to set up, and will never force you to open a terminal. That’s Mint (plus a number of other beginner-friendly distros). And most average people are perfectly happy to stay there. And that’s perfectly fine.

“Linux Mint isn’t the answer for Linux newbies switching from windows to Linux” – someone that’s obviously done distro hopping. They then go on to cite “professional work”… something that generally benefits from boring, stable, reliable OS… and “customization”… which is a great place to start breaking things.

And their alternatives? Kubuntu, fedora, and opensuse. What? *buntu used to be a safe bet … but they can’t keep things even running these days. Fedora… a perfect newbie choice. No hand holding, half your features won’t work as expected for a windows user because it focuses everything on foss only, out of the box. … and opensuse. I wouldn’t ever call opensuse “newbie friendly”… and they use their own packaging so all the common stuff you would want to look up for help won’t be a simple one click fix since most guides and apps recommend apt, rpm, or pac.

I always hate it when people seem to try making the decisions for others based on what they use.

It was bad enough when Ubuntu was losing faith with people because of its poor decision making, now we got you here saying Linux Mint is not the answer?

Confusing people on an already confusing mess on which distro to choose when leaving windows is not how you win favorability with linux. Mint is the choice because it is not pitching freshly disgruntled Windows users into steep learning curves from the get-go. If you push them into something like Arch, you're going to have people both pissed at Arch and at you for making their experience miserable.

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.

An expert opinion, fantastic. 🍿

JayGray91🐉🍕Feb 5

I think it’s a valid opinion. Getting a journeying newbie’s perspective is as important as what a 20 year vet might say IMO

Both groups aren’t immune to getting lost in the sauce.

It’s a journeying newbie, as you said. One person, who happens to have a large audience through their writing. That’s not a good reason to discourage people from using the most popular distro out there…

FEDORA

Isn’t he actually talking about the DE and not that much about the distro?

JayGray91🐉🍕Feb 5

It’s a realization that will be made eventually.

I watched a few “jumping to Linux” videos from IIRC, Switch and Click, and the host eventually realized she could have tried different DEs instead of distro jumping instead.

is Mint still using old kernels? That could hurt hardware compatibility especially with newer hardware

Depends on your definition of "old", I guess. 6.8 is considered "current", 6.14 and 6.17 are available on the list. So far, hardware support on 6.8 has covered everything I've thrown at it.

if you wanna put Linux on a brand new Christmas gift laptop, I think 6.14 could definitely be too old

in some cases even 6.17 might be too old

If the Mint installer uses 6.8, can you even install it on brand new hardware? missing a laptop’s wifi drivers would be a huge pain cause then you can’t update it without a usb->ethernet adapter

that would be enough frustration for most users to turn back to Windows

I'm running 6.8 kernel on current Mint for a new PC I built last year. I remember that being a big deal that they were using more recent kernels to improve hardware support. So far it's supported everything I've thrown at it without any effort on my part.

That’s awesome! Mint definitely sounds great if it supports your hardware without issue. I think it’s less of a concern with custom builds, and more of an issue with OEM prebuilts and laptops especially

You can install actually something called Mainline kernels. Which is a simple GUI app. That works also very well under Mint. Allowing you to install even newer kernels.

that sounds cool

although I guess that won’t help you if the Mint installer can’t boot on your computer, or if your wifi driver isn’t available and then you can’t download newer kernels

master_of_unlocking Feb 4

I use Fedora myself but for people new to Linux I still usually recommend Ubuntu. I know it’s likely to stick around because of the company backing and if an application is built for Linux it’s pretty much guaranteed to work on Ubuntu. I’m sure Mint is great too but for a beginner I want the distro to be as well supported as possible.

Once they get the hang of open source and develop a healthy hate of Snap I drag them down into my Fedora cave though.

@cm0002 I really disagree with this. As someone who is fairly new to Linux, Mint was very easy to move over to and offered a very familiar atmosphere coming from Windows. Mint is the entry level to learning more and switching to a better distro.

Lvxferre [he/him]Feb 5

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.

Both are bad reasons to pick a distro to recommend. Better reasons would be

You got some experience with that distro and you’re willing to help the newbie in question, with issues that they might have.

The distro offers sane out-of-the-box defaults and pre-installed GUI software.

The distro is reliable, and won’t give the newbie headaches later on.

why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?

Because a middleman distro is practically unavoidable.

You don’t know the best distro for someone else; and if the person is a newbie, odds are they don’t know it for themself either. So the odds the person will eventually ditch that distro you recommended and stick with something else are fairly large.

Cinnamon vs. KDE Plasma

I have both installed although I practically only use Cinnamon (due to personal tastes; I do think Plasma is great). It’s by no ways as finicky as the author claims it to be.

Plasma is more customisable than Cinnamon indeed, but remember what I said about you not knowing the best distro for someone else? Well, you don’t know the best DE either. You should rec something simple that’ll offer them an easy start, already expecting them to ditch it later on.

So, why don’t I just recommend Linux Mint with KDE Plasma? Well, the cool thing about abandoning Cinnamon and embracing KDE Plasma is that it unlocks a ton of distros we can pick from.

That’s circular reasoning: you should ditch Mint because of Cinnamon, and you should ditch Cinnamon because it allows you to ditch Mint.

Bazzite, Novara, CachyOS

Or you can install all those gaming features in any other distro of your choice.

the16bitgamer Feb 5

I will move to KDE when they add cross app online account support. Specifically being able to sign into my Google Calendar and getting my appointments and scheduling thing from my PC without using a browser.

Until then gnome/Cinnamon is my de

unknowing8343 Feb 5

But wait, you can link your Google account since like… Forever now.