As someone who daily drives Mint, wut.
You think LM being “too old” is a problem for newbies? I’ve been running some distro or other since RedHat 5. I it took me 6 weeks of waiting for Fedora to sort out most of the issues, (and I STILL have some minor ghosting issues and I ain’t no gamer), and 4 tries to get Fedora 40 to successfully take the nVidia drivers for the GTX1650 chipset in my laptop.
You think a new wannbe convert is going to put up with that?
Problems? ‘old’? I seem to need a little clarification.
By default Mint ships 3 years old kernel and a lot of hardware don’t work with it. Mint allows installing newer kernel easily but one must know that is the case.
Mint only works on X11. This is fine to some, but to others it’s a showcase of X shortcomings right away
None of them good for non techy people. I wouldn’t recommend mint. Gnome is the most friendly DE with pleasing defaults. There are many immutable flatpak distros coming with gnome. e.g.: Endless os which is pre installed on some asus laptops instead of Ubuntu for reason.
I feel like people have an interesting view of techy/advanced/etc
My view is that you need to pick something in line with your goals: some people may be techy but just need something to host files and a web browser and don’t care about new packages or whatever, or modern security or anything. I wouldn’t recommend mint or fedora for a gaming PC regardless of techiness, you know?
Our views can be compatible. Endless os is quite limited right now, but if flathub would have xampp, for example, that would be easily the simplest way to run a webserver. However, every techy person prefers docker, me too. It’s just not something that my mother can deal with. In general, linux is lacking these mother compatible apps where we have more advanced solution. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend endless and others in the category if the goal is to run a webserver.
Because people suggest distros based on their preference, not what is best suited in a given situation.
On one hand Mint is limited to X11 for now and surprise surprise “dealing with multiple monitors is horrible on Linux”. On other hand they’re on NVIDIA. This is close to not be the case, but X11 was a hard requirement for decades
I daily drive Optimus plus Wayland. Doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore.
I only just switched to Linux this past week and I use Mint. It was suggested to me by someone here on lemmy. It was easy to set up, customize, and get all my stuff working on it. I have World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Elden Ring and a few other games all working on it. The only issue, and right now it’s a minor one, I’m having is the 535 nividia drivers can cause random stutters/lag every now and then but nothing major.
My point is for people like me who are new to linux and don’t want to get overwhelmed I think Mint is great. I know eventually i’ll change to a different more “advanced” distro, right now I have my eye on CachyOS, but I don’t think I’m there quite yet to confidently install it.
I always suggest Mint Edge edition, that has a newer kernel, not the default Mint. But I still suggest Mint, because simply, it’s more user friendly than any of the other ones. It has gui panels for almost everything.
I agree with @[email protected] here. Could you describe what issues are people having? What is their user profile (programmers, writers, …)?
came here to spread the good word of endeavor os
You are right, I wanted to do some nodejs and realized that the package in the repo was Node version 12.something while latest node is version 20.something.
Also they still ship Python 3.10 which is ancient technology by today’s standard, luckily nothing major is added between 3.10 and 3.12
Their mirrors are worst, ALL OF SELECTABLE OPTIONS FROM MIRROR SELECTOR which shows up at 47 KB/sec which just hurts your area spanning from asshole to large intestines.
I use bridgetide linux mint mirror btw
Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.
On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.
MX
I recommene OpenSUSE Thumbleweed for everyone, but I haven’t used it for long time and I use only Gentoo and OpenWRT on all my devices. And Android on phone, hopefully 10 years later I will replace it with linuxphone.
How does Gentoo compare to OpenSuse Tumbleweed?
Disclamer: last time I used OpenSUSE was very long time ago. Probably somewhere in 2018.
When I switched back to Gentoo, Gentoo had more packages in base repo, was more configurable and easier to fix and felt more convenient to me(especially for development). Also easier on resources in casual use. It was important to me since at the time my system had very small amount of RAM, while I wanted to host minecraft server with many mods and play on it with friends. Installing cross-compilers is very easy with crossdev. And I think there were problems with having multiple versions of gcc installed. The only downside I can think of is slower update process(especially compiling firefox/chromium/libreoffice/rust), but in return you get the system, which if breaks, you know how to fix it.
Would I recommend Gentoo to everyone who wants to install Linux on their own regular x86 computers and be what people call a regular user and doesn’t want to understand how system works? Rather no.
Would I recommend Gentoo for someone who wants to install Linux for their granny and already knows Linux or even has Gentoo? Rather yes, stereotypical granny doesn’t care about distro, she only needs browser and working sound.
Would I recommend Gentoo for any kind of developers(except webdevs, they are separate species)? Absolutely.
For gamers? It is one of reasons I choose Gentoo.
For tinkerers? You know the answer.
For wierd ARM/MIPS/RISC-V/ELBRUS computer? Very yes.
As a heavy gamer, never say those words 😂 and as IT student, this is really interesting. How well do containers, virtual machines, and flatpaks work? I was thinking about learning self hosting, emacs, and xmonad on a pi4.
As a heavy gamer, never say those words 😂
Well, recommendation isn’t based only on being gamer. But I noticed heavy gamers tend to more proactive in learning how their system works and tweak their system to their needs. I got one converted into Arch user. It’s like heavy gamers have attention and initiative.
and as IT student, this is really interesting.
It was interesting even to some school students. I think I first Installed Gentoo somewhere in 6th grade.
How well do containers
Should be fine. Long time ago I tried to use lxc. It worked.
virtual machines
KVM works really well, I didn’t try Xen.
and flatpaks work?
Didn’t need, didn’t try. There is nothing, preventing them from working.
I was thinking about learning self hosting, emacs, and xmonad on a pi4.
I am running Gentoo 24/7 on noname chinese TV box on Allwinner A10 with 1GB of RAM. I wrote device tree myself and compiled mainline u-boot. Most of packages I precompile on my desktop with crossdev, that has exactly same make.conf. Same for Rock64 SBC, but it’s sitting powered off. Also I did small modifications to devicetree for it as well. I can answer some qutsions.
TV box runs tor node 24/7 and private search of fimfarchive.
Thank you for your insight.
Ah, OpenSuse. The distro with the package management that spams your drive full of unnecessary optional dependencies.
Would always recommend EndeavourOS.
Sadly true. When I installed texlive-base it tried to install like 300 recommended packages, I almost accepted D:
I’d still recommend it, I don’t know if you can change the default for recommended packages because aside from that, I actually love it.
Yesss! My first five minutes with OpenSuse.
I mean, you can change that behaviour somehow. But there are so many other small things like the constant vendor changes. Zypper is just so quirky. It’s a cool distro and to have a rolling release option like tumbleweed is always a big plus in my opinion, but I just wouldn’t recommend it to people who are not really eager to play around with their distro.
What I find weird about Tumbleweed is, that updating is not integrated into YaST or another UI. You have to use the commandline to keep your system up to date. That makes it exactly as inconvenient as Arch for newcomers, but Arch has a whole philosophy behind this while SuSE is typically very GUI oriented. It’s weird.
Tried it once and literally could not get nvidia drivers to install. Went straight back to endeavouros and continued to enjoy
Maybe you should have clicked on ‘nvidia repository’ in Yast. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Except that didn’t work
Because Mint is popular among the crowd, and such challenges are also driven by the crowd. Better to see it as some social or meme dynamics, than to explain it with logical reasons. I also see more new users who use arch, because of the “I use arch BTW” meme.
As a Fedora Silverblue user I find it hard to recommend it to new users. It’s not an issue with Fedora, but with the state of Linux desktop in general. At least with Mint/Ubuntu people can rely on social media and the community if they have problems. And Fedora is a more niche thing, and doesn’t have a big crowd.
Moreover, I chose Fedora because of my experience, which allows me to have opinion what is better. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to explain the years of the Linux desktop drama to new users, when they are just doing the first steps or trying to feed their curiosity.
Fedora a niche distro?
It is comparatively to Debian/Ubuntu derivatives. Even Arch and NixOS probably have more users now. Lately I see some popularity of uBlue derivatives among new users, but I don’t know how many people use it, and where the popularity comes from.
