People who understand Linux Mint and other complex distros at a deep level:
god mode
As a windows user I didn’t like Mint
I tried out Kubuntu and it was really nice.
A windows like linux isn’t really attractive to a windows user, they just want an intuitive but also customizable system. Chances are Windows users trying linux still have their old windows system, anyways. Why would they want a windows and also a fake windows?
There are a lot of reasons people might want to switch to Linux from Windows, but I don’t think it’s usually the GUI that’s the main problem on the Windows side. I think it’s pretty reasonable to want the GUI to work in the way you’re used to but still want an OS that doesn’t shove ads at you, install AI without your permission, bug you about Teams and OneDrive, reboot every time it needs to update anything, etc.
Plasma kept crashing my system after waking it up from suspend. I tried fresh installs twice, with different revisions of graphics drivers. Plus, I had to install a bunch of crap from github just for my games to work properly. Lighting issues, texture issues. The mouse wouldn’t stay captured to one monitor in Fallout 4. Mint with Cinnamon just worked out of the box for me.
+1 Kubuntu.
KDE Plasma and Debian is where it’s at.
Comfortable, familiar OS GUI, working drivers out of the box, and a non crashing kernel with updates once a month.
And also steam works.
Steam and gaming working is a big thing.
Like 96.6% of the operating system.
KDE Plasma and Debian is where it’s at.
Yep, in fact sadly I move away from Ubuntu after years of using because of the slow yet seemingly inexorable trend toward bloatware. Going back to the “basics” with Debian, and keeping KDE, made the transition very easy. As you also highlight, Steam works perfectly. Anyway, time to go back to Elden Ring ;)
I love Mint for this reason.
When my OS works well enough that I don’t even have to think about it day to day, it’s doing its job.
the thing I think a lot of “linux dorks” (and I use that term lovingly) forget about is that most people want to work on their computer, not work on their computer. The OS, for most people, should be the software equivalent of a motherboard – an invisible plinth upon which the actual things you care about sit. With a motherboard, that’s your GPU, CPU, RAM, etc. and with the OS, that’s the applications you run.
there’s nothing wrong with making fiddling with your computer a hobby, and I’ve been known to dabble myself over the years, but for me and most other normal people, that ends up being too much work for too little reward in the end. Mint getting to the point where you can daily drive it and not have to worry about it even if you’re a complete brainlet when it comes to Linux is a massive W.
As someone who used Linux Mint for a while and will always keep it in my heart as my stable transition from windows, Pop OS is just about as easy with a much nicer out-of-the-box UI (especially love the native dock). So for anyone like me, try it out.
I use Arch BTW.
Today the liquidctl integration of cooler control died, making all my fans go into a safe profile which makes a lot more noise than normal. Imagine having to listen to that for an hour trying to get it working again. I did get it working luckily, somehow the coolercontrol-liqctld python module didn’t register properly. Once I got the module registered everything was working, for now…
Not gonna lie, I’m glad I’ve moved from Arch to Tumbleweed. Media codecs are handled worse somehow, but I haven’t had to deal with crap like this ever since…
You have to add the source with the non free codec packages:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Installing_codecs_from_Packman_repositories
I tried that already, didn’t really help. That repo is currently deactivated on my machine, I think I had some (more) annoying problem with it (don’t remember all the details), but after spending quite a few hours on this problem, I essentially gave up trying to fix it. Right now, video playback works well enough that I don’t want to deal with it anymore.
And, honestly, I haven’t had a Linux installation where everything related to multimedia and graphics drivers just worked flawlessly. Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and Suse all had different issues. Switching from Nvidia to AMD didn’t help, either. Sometimes the flaws were minor and easy to ignore, but it has never ever worked as well as it does on Windows.
No, but depending on what’s wrong that might not be the best thing to do. If the new version is broken, rolling back to a previous working version might fix it. But when the update broke something, it might not fix it and could even make it worse. I’d rather figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, it’s a good skill to have. And if the new version does turn out to be broken, it’s good to have dug into it so you can make a proper bug report.
yea this is probably the most annoying issue i’ve had on Arch. every time there’s a new version of Python, you’ll need to reinstall some python packages, usually the AUR stuff.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Python#Module_not_found_after_Python_version_update
laughs maniacally in Slackware
Oh god. I started with Slackware in 1998 and used it on the desktop until around 2008, then on the server until 2017 or so.
In later years, the last panel definitely felt like Slackware. I was afraid to upgrade for fear of breaking things. Installing new software was tough because it was like, well, I need this dependency for that package, but what about this one? Will I break package A if I install the dependencies for package B? Only one way to find out!
Slackware is probably much easier to handle now, with the proliferation of docker and the like, where the software includes the libraries it needs and doesn’t rely on the system libraries. Just run everything in a container.
