Installing Linux #Mint #LMDE. Looks sleek, although too simple for me used to KDE, but that's fine, since I'm not their target audience.
The first thing I notice is that, since they don't seem to do point releases, I have to update 117 packages OOtB. That's 728MiB that are not included in the 3GiB image. Maybe not the best for people with bad connections.
1/
Comes with #FlatPak by default, which I hope is better than `snap`. But I already notice that for instance krita is going to be installed from there, when a Debian derivative should be able to install it from packages. Did I gain anything here?
It seems to have a lot of user friendly help, but I found a couple of things weird. Mint proposes both a forum and a Matrix based chat. But there doesn't seem to be any international support there.
2/
But the forums do have a French channel, so that's good.
It's getting late, I'll continue tomorrow.
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RE: https://en.osm.town/@mdione/116144659844252409
It also has #LibreWolf from #Flatpack, even when even Debian has a semi official way to install it; see below.
I also wonder if the user needs to know the source of the package. Would it be important to know later?
4/
I installed #KDE on it. Besides some weird messages form `ibus` it went all fine. But the 18GiB disk is full now. TBF I no longer know how much my system uses. I used to have a separate 15GiB partition, but only because upgrades meant reinstalling, mostly.
Ever since I switched to #Debian around ~2000, I no longer needed the separation. At some point I just stopped creating separate partitions; I only have root and swap, which exactly what more user friendly distros like #Mint do.
5/
@mdione The Flatpak is much newer and packaged by the developers of Krita. It's also the exact same package, no matter which distribution you run.
So, thanks to Flatpak, you get a much broader app selection, since even small and niche apps can easily be packaged for a wide range of distros, whereas they would usually not be packaged by individual distros due to a lack of market demand and lack of package maintainers.
@fosstastic yes, I understand that. I'm just saying that to me, a "classical" distro guy, I would rather use the "native" version than the flatpack. Or at least provide the option, since the packaged one should be smaller due to lack of flatpack versions of the backing libraries.
But I agree that thee extended distribution methods provide more options to users, which it's what matters.
Marcos Dione
FOSStastic