this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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I am always confused that such a stale distro is so highly recommended
For people who don't care about being at the cutting edge and just want something that works reliably (which is most users), that's fine. I've used Mint for years and while it's not the fanciest distro I rarely run into problems and almost everything just works.
Hard disagree on that being "most people".
I fully agree that Mint has the right UX for mass adoption, but I also agree with the OP that this comes at the cost of being specced for hardware made ten years ago.
I think it's a useful reference point. If you are on a semi-modern display that does VRR and HDR with a newer Nvidia card, want to do some gaming on it, maybe have a secondary display with a different resolution that requires different scaling.... you know, that type of thing, then what you need is at least the level of compatibility and functionality you get on Mint, but with official support out of the box. And you need it like four or five years ago.
Mint existing shows why Linux isn't a mainstream daily driver.
Ok Wayland shill.
Hah. I guess. I mean, I can tell you that on my last run of "is Linux viable now" I stepped through Mint, was frustrated about how it interacted with my hardware and did end up on a Manjaro KDE install that did pick up most of my newer hardware better.
It still was very far from perfect and definitely way more finicky, so I still would say not a mainstream daily driver (and I'm back to defaulting to Windows anyway). I genuinely don't care how Linux gets there, but it needs to get there to be viable.
I think it's because more cutting-edge options are not anywhere near as easy to set up and use.
Also visit flatpak.org for more information about how stable distros get around the old packages issue.
What would be some examples of less stale distros?
Probably Arch
Pretty much people that don't game with hardware from the previous 5 years or so, which is a ton of people.
My hardware just hit 5 years old and I think mint 22 was the only one with a recent enough kernel not to have breaking bugs for Navi 1 on AMD. It is not easy, straightforward, or often well compatible to upgrade the kernel and mesa on mint.
Plus ppas are terrible. I had more things break due to ppas or bad updatws in 3 years of mint (granted it was 2014-2017) vs 7 years on arch and 6 months on Bazzite.
Other than that it is great, and definitely familiar for beginners! Plus the forum is great!
I’m so confused by this whole thread because I built a brand new computer with cutting edge parts just this year and installed Mint and everything just worked except the GPU, which I had to add a PPA for. Well, that and my HDR monitor isn’t supported, but AFAICT that’s pretty much true across all distorts.
This is me, running #LMDE on an AMD sysyem with an intergrated GPU
I just want FF to fire up, to fcuk about in Dark table, a little work on Inkscape, a VPN that works, QBtorrent and thats about 80% of what I do.
I have a few games on Steam that really stretch me, like Plants v Zombies and they work OOTB so that's about it