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?
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.
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
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 ago. 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!
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.
https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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!