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Not shown: The top 0.05% - "Use whichever distro you're satisfied with. The different distributions exist to offer choice, not to compete."
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Seriously... At SCaLE this year I saw people from various distro booths taking breaks and visiting other distro booths. Each time they looked genuinely interested and excited about what the other distro was doing.
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Seriously: this non-competitive behavior in the FOSS community is soo fucking refreshing!
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Almost like humans find cooperation is healthier than competition on the whole...
FOSS til i die, please.
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βDonβt compete! β competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!β -Pjotr Kropotkin
My God I love Lemmy. Finding a Kropotkin quote in the wild? Outside of an anarchists sub? Without specifically searching for it?
It makes me feel less alone. Thank you.
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I kinda feel like there's very little overlap between distro fans and distro developers. Probably because distro devs tend to know all the dirty secrets of their distro.
You go on Reddit or wherever and it's all "distro X is evil, use distro Y instead," "No, Y is terrible! Use Z!" And then you sit at a table with a SuSE developer, a Fedora developer and an Ubuntu developer and the conversation is all "so how are you guys dealing with this issue?" "Oh, I think we came up with a great solution, I'll share the patch set with you!" "Wonderful, thanks! By the way I opened up a merge request on your stuff because we figured out how to fix that namespaces issue."
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Capitalism thrives on exclusivity, teaching people that others doing the same thing is competition and not friendship.
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Read this and your brain might get a new wrinkle: it's possible to appreciate multiple distributions for their own merits.
That's more fasterβ’
Copy-pasting the image will upload it to the lemmy instance, taking up storage space. You should instead embed externally hosted images using the following markdown expression:
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Yes, this way you reduce the load on your instance, but I often see image hosting deleting images and I get scared when I see an imgur link because it often blocks image viewing for me
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https://i.imgur.com/suaSSMr_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=grand
This is what happens when I copypaste the same image
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Furthermore I cant even expand your thumbnail.
That said my phone has been glitching like crazy so idk
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Well, I'm still in the noob stage and i intend to stay there. My OS is just a means to an end and Mint is perfect for that.
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Saaaame. Been using Mint almost exclusively for 5-10 yrs and i still feel like im playing in the wading pool of what u can do with it. I learn more as I need to, and generally enjoy that process. I always feel super satisfied with myself when i use the terminal, even if its sudo apt-get install Firefox.
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Whenever I need to do something, I'll figure it out. Sometimes it's a pain, like getting VNC to work. But then I'll write down the most important bits and duly forget the rest. I just want this stuff to work.
I see more posts complaining about annoying arch users than I actually see annoying arch users
That being said, hell yeah mint
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Pacstall is AUR for Ubuntu (so UUR?) based distributions. It is certainly less complete than AUR, but still it might be useful depending on your needs.
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I'd rather trust an Ubuntu community repo than the snap store. At least, for pacstall, the community is able to review the package.
Since the snap store is the default store on Ubuntu , there is more chance that he will be targeted by malicious software than a community repo than has to be manually installed.
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At that point, what are you using Mint for? The Cinammon DE?
IMHO, KDE feels much more modern, while Cinammon kind of feels like it's stuck in 2003. It reminds me of the stock gray boxy Windows 9x/NT/2000 interface.
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I love cinnamon it's the main reason I use mint I tried debian with mint but the theming was ugly but the cinnamon on mint mmm beautiful I find it very comfortable and familiar like all the good parts of windows 7 just with a tad bit more modern design
I stuck an Arc theme on it and that modernized it a lot.
To me, Cinnamon sits somewhere between the extremes of Gnome and KDE.
Gnome is an Android launcher with a concussion. Every major update is a list of things it can't do anymore. Hopefully by Gnome 52 the system won't even POST let alone boot. Every utility is a blank window with an empty menu up in the top bar that does as little of its job as it can, apparently in service to some "blank is beautiful" aesthetic.
KDE feels like the control panel of a nuclear power plant, LOADS of crap everywhere. Widgets and wodgets and panels and sidebars where does it end? Every utility is an incorrectly sized window completely crammed full of drop downs, radio buttons and text fields with several tabs and sub-menus with lots of options, because what if esoteric use case?
Cinnamon is a middle ground in between; they have a "most users, most of the time" approach so that UIs are understandable and digestible, and usually let you do what you want to do, without being uselessly blank or obsessively crowded.
Cinnamon doesn't need therapy, Gnome and KDE do.
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Yeah I agree with the sentiment, use whatever is good for you, but I feel like most advanced linux users are not using Mint. They typically come to the realization that everything is either Debian, Arch, or build it yourself so they use one of those.
I'm running Debian 12 for while now and it works great. Gossip says you need to get everything from flatpak because the packages are so outdated, but that's bullshit.
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Use Linux professionally. Worked with RHEL for years. Current gig uses Debian servers. Daily driver is a system 76 machine with the pop OS that came on it. Debian derivatives make great daily drivers for those of us that just need a browser, terminal, working wifi, and the ability to build and run containers.
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- Don't forget, that the Mint developers and developers of other "user-friendly distros" do very hard work, so you can enjoy less-hassle distro.
- But it is very boring for "Never Settle" philosophy to use such distros.
- Don't forget, that some people enjoy tinkering thing around them. Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora etc are simply not interesting for them. They choose the hardest possible way and enjoy it.
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My first "daily driver" distro was Arch, and i love every minute of it.
It's a tinkerer's dream
The true Linux users are the ones that realize that all Linux is the same. The only differences is package management, Desktop Environment, and customization by the Distro creator.
You can literally just install Debian stable with Cinnamon DE and get basically Linux Mint on Debian. Bonus points for adding backports so you get a slightly more updated kernel.
I know this is a joke, but you should use whatever distro you want to use....because at the end of the day it's all Linux.
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The only way to win the argument is to come up with an association that has nothing to do with computers at all.
I use Linux Mint because I like Mint Ice Cream
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Well it quite literally says it in its name that it is fucking mint, why wouldn't you run it
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I don't have any need for arch, fedora is fine as it is. Might try arch if I have more reliable internet someday, my main concern is my system going brrrr one evening when I need to do some important legal work.
Different distros are better at different things. Need a stable distro for your grandma? Use Debian or Mint. Need latest software? Use Arch or Gentoo. (And people do need latest software sometimes. For playing games, or in my case, for doing research. The F is FOSS stands for Free after all.) Similarly, there are server distros like AlmaLinux tuned for high reliability. I think it's counterproductive to argue about the "best" distro.
I guess the meme technically doesn't say that Mint is the best, but it kinda gives off that feeling by ridiculing Arch users.
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I use Fedora more (at work) but I love the concept and execution of Mint. Iβll definitely use it on future personal machines.
Iβm not an expert on distros, but it seems to me like the best drop-in replacement for Windows. Itβs familiar for windows users, but it feels much better to use. That combination is great for getting normal people to consider using it.
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I would hapilly use linux mint if only it didn't use apt, honestly don't like it as a package manager.
Ghere is also the fact that mint will have older versions of packages, for example neovim which I need to be latest version always.
That's why I loved arch and gentoo before, for their package managers and roling distro nature.
Now I'm on nixos unstable and it's currently my favourite unbreakable distro, and the nix package manager is really good and making my own pqckages is really easy.
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What do you not like about apt? Genuinely curious, never used anything besides apt/apt-get and aptitude. Am I missing out?
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If you never do more than update, upgrade, install and remove, then just skip every post recommending different distros for their package manager. For you (as for most users), it will not make the slightest difference if you are using apt, packman, whatever else. If there's something you want your package manager to do but it can't, you'll know. And if it comes to that, you can start diving into the different managers and which one is best suited for the specific thing you want to do.
But it has to be mentioned that aptitude does not have super cow powers of course.
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You don't miss out on anything if it does what you need.
For me apt is just slow and clunky, don't like the way some of the commands are and they are long, I prefer the way that pacman and portage do it where I can make commands be sinple and only be couple characters instead of whole words.
I liked pacman because it was fast, and it was really easy to block a package from upgrading and downgrading packages is really easy.
I liked portage because it worked with program's sources so I was able to just remove part's of program's and their dependencies I didn't need.
I like nix now because of the way it manages dependencies, and for the fact that packaing programs in it is really easy to do.
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That first sentence is what I love about Linux bros. For all the supposed gatekeeping and pretentiousness that goes on in these circles, i find this to be much more representative of my experience. As i said elsewhere in the thread, im really not very well versed in all that Linux is/can be. And yet, somehow someway, ive never really felt put down for it when seeking help.
Before this comment, i honestly didnt know there could be such preferences to ur package managers.
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For me, it's quite the opposite. I love that apt commands are so close to natural language.
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Nala is a great apt frontend. It supports parallel downloads of packages and speeds up the whole process up a lot.
Not sure which commands irk you as too long. Nala makes a good overview of changes like which package is bumped to what version and where it stands now. So I basically only use
nala upgrade
and take it from there. Updates the sources, lists the diff for upgradable packages and ask me to go forward or abort.
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Just the pure act of installing a package is longer than with pacman for example.
And the way that apt has seperated regular package and -dev packages irks me a lot when I need a library for something I need to make sure to install a =dev package compared to most other package manager where libraries are installed with the lackage itself.
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Nah, apt is great. I use Arch, but the package manager does not make a difference for me. I think I'd prefer apt for the user friendly terms to use it: apt search, apt install, apt remove, apt purge. Much nicer than the pacman equivalents I haven't even bother to learn.
I don't like apt too as much. But, interface-wise, you can make it way better with Nala, which is a frontend for it.
NixOS is too complicated and demanding for most users, who aren't programmers or hobbyists, imo.
I prefer Fedora Atomic. It has the same pros (unbreakable, highly configurable with universal-blue.org, etc.) but feels way more user friendly.
I use it with Distrobox on top, so I can use my package manager/ distro of choice (turned out to be Arch btw) on a extremely reliable system.
For your case, you can replicate Mint by just installing the Cinnamon image from uBlue and applying some minimal tweaks.
Then you get the user friendliness from Mint with the flexibility and unbreakability from NixOS. Do you like the idea? Just in case you get annoyed by NixOS in the future π
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Seems like a fine idea, but nixos is just exactly what I want from a distro it turns out and nix is just the package manager I wanted but never knew I did.
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I don't think OSTree systems can quite reach the flexibility of NixOS. For instance with NixOS (with direnv and nix-shells) you can essentially swap out your running system based on the different directories you enter and I think that's still just scraping the top of the iceberg. From my experience with OSTree (which is admittedly somewhat limited) I don't think you can reach that level of flexibility.
It's still really cool, I don't mean to shit on that, I'm just saying NixOS and OSTree have different pros and cons and use cases.
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I like the idea of the fedora immutable distros, but the reliance on flatpak makes me a bit nervous (guess Iβm just old-fashioned)β¦ I think some kind of solution that puts a stable system like Debian or immutable fedora with a package manager like Nix might be very good (I know the U-Blue guys have been playing with homebrew?)
You can still install Nix (package manager) on Atomic, on uBlue, it even comes pre-installed afaik.
And also, there's Distrobox, which is totally enough if you prefer package managers over Flatpaks.
I personally like the "reliance" on Flatpaks. I think it reduces the fragmentation and makes it easier for devs, but that's just my opinion. Do as you prefer.
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Actually, I just tried both homebrew and Nix with a Debian 12 installation and Iβm not impressed. Homebrew only ships CLI apps, and GUI applications installed with Nix famously donβt show up in application launchersβ¦ it seems like you donβt really get the features of Nix unless you use NixOS.
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If for some unspecified reason you truly and absolutely need the latest version of something, nothing's stopping you from pulling the repo and building it yourself.
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That's fine when you need only one or two things, but when you wan't your whole system to be up to date as much as possible it becomes tedious.
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For me it's the fact that I almost always need a feature from a program that's in a recent release that is never in debian/ubuntu until a couple years later.
Fairly long-term Mint veteran here: usually if I need software that's more up to date than what's in the standard repo, Flatpak will do.
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I really like the idea of Nix, but having to have GitHub account to publish a package is a big no for me, even if I have one.
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I'm in the same boat as you, but haven't tried making my own packages. Is there a guide somewhere I can follow?
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I mostly just searched nixos how to package pyrhon/go/rust/ program or nixos how to package sddm theme/gtk/...
The best resource honestly are the randon blogposts since the wiki itself is really bad.
I also recommend the channel vimjoyer.
I also recommend to get into the habit of searching for options on https://search.nixos.org/options and for packages on https://search.nixos.org/packages which are great resources to know what you can set or install and already packages.
You can also check my nixos config on examples for how to package sddm theme and shell scripts.
I also have a couple programs on my selfhosted gitea that use flakes for packaging which you can checkout also.
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I used archinstall to setup my laptop with Gnome and only use pamac-nosnap for package management (flatpak is fine, but fuck snaps).
I made the most noob Arch install ever and I love it.
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Noobs don't know to avoid snaps... But that setup wpuld be good to recommend if a noob really needs to use arch, btw.
Two choices in the end game.
Ready to go out of the box? Mint.
Bare install where you pick your programs? Debian.
And then there's the secondary question for some of us... the machine you game on?
Ready to go? Fedora, Pop, or several other choices.
Bare install where you pick your programs? Arch.