I too think Cinnamon is a pretty great Experience. I am using KDE and heard from many people that it feels better, its more unified and has way more features.
Wayland is important for security, and Mint will need a long time to adopt that. There are already apps only running on Wayland for reasons.
KDE is a bit unstable as its a huge project. I hope that will get better in Plasma 6.
I sure wish to have something like KDE more stable. But once you are used to it, its just better. Things that are not there yet on Mint are on KDE since years.
Its a bit of a mess as its so old. Extensions need to be cleaned up. But like, Dolphin extensions are so great, I dont know an equivalent on Cinnamon.
Also the distro model is the standard one. A Fedora Atomic Cinnamon variant, with modern presets and everything working, would be a great thing to install anywhere. Automatic atomic updates, easy version upgrades, transparent system changes and resets being just one command away.
U-Blue in general is a nice collection of images because not only are there various unofficial options, but a lot of things like RPMFusion, etc. are preconfigured in their versions of the main editions (SilverBlue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx).
Or you can just rebase regular SilverBlue (or one of the three other official variants) to one of those images if you’re running it already. Can roll back if you don’t like it.
I doubt there’ll be an official edition until Cinnamon has full Wayland support since Fedora is going all in on that now.
Creating, collecting and sharing CSAM is in the law already. There are orgs and agencies for tracking and prosecuting these violations.
It’s like fighting against 3d printers because you can make yourself a diy gun, a thing that have never being possible before because we got all pipes banned from hardware stores. The means to produce fictional CSAM always existed and would exist, the problem is with people who use a LMM, a camera, a fanfic to create and share that content. Or a Lemmy community that was a problem in recent months.
It’s better to ensure the existing means of fighting such content are effective and society is educated about this danger, know how to avoid and report it.
While lolicon is absolutely disgusting, its not actually csam. Legislation won’t work either and is honestly a waste of time. Any effort spent protecting digital children should instead be spent protecting real ones.
I never used a spin-off of a unique distribution of GNU/Linux on my own computer, except the dark Ubuntu times. It seemed right at the time.
Now, I don’t see why I should recommend a distro that tries to be easier on new users when the original has sane defaults and is closer to upstream regarding all the tools and software bundled with it.
Here are my recommendations for new users in that order (regardless of their computer knowledge): Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, LFS. Friends can help with the installation and should consider easy maintainability when dealing with users who just want to use it.
I haven’t used Mint in years, but back in the day downstream distros from Debian often worked better for desktop users than Debian itself.
This is because of Debian’s ‘stability’ philosophy. This meant that bugs could stick around for years in Debian stable after being fixed upstream.
Of course, with each new stable release, there should be fewer bugs so this problem should become less over time.
I’ve considered switching from Manjaro to Debian on my laptop, but then I think about how great the AUR is. That’s pretty much the main appeal for Manjaro over Debian, for me.
Before switching to LMDE, I did try just using Debian with Cinnamon, thinking it would be pretty much the same experience. I did not really enjoy the experience. There were too many niceties missing that I had taken for granted with Mint. I wasn’t interested in spending my time hunting down all the tweaks and packages to make those changes.
Second one, which I’d rephrase as ubuntu sticking with apt/dpkg as its package manager. Which is really nice if you like ubuntu as a distro already.
Though I don’t really get why there has to be a distro to be beaten. And having flavors is always good. I, for example, don’t like distros changing too much upstream SW, so the more vanilla the better. I don’t like either the periodic releases, and to be rolling release rocks. I don’t like systemd, whereas most distros now a days are systemd dependent. I also dislike network manager and similar and require a distro that keeps support for the basic dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant… All that to say, that no distro fits all needs, so several options are good, no need to have one beating the rest, :)
I switched when one guy unilaterally decided Ubuntu would completely flip its user interface, for no goddamn reason, the night before a long-term-support feature freeze.
Mint is for people who just want stuff to work and not fiddle about too much. It does that very well. Anyone who simply wants an alternative to Windows that is easy to get into and use will be perfectly happy with it. If you want to customise everything to a t, Mint isn’t for you
EndeavourOS is the most simple to work with distro I’ve had. Ubuntu-based and Fedora all were trouble. OpenSUSE was fine but I prefer terminal centric (not saying you cannot use terminal on it). EndeavourOS is amazing. I just yay to update and all works.
Arch is bleeding edge and frequently has minor bugs as a result. This is probably fine for power users and people who want to learn Linux but I wouldn’t give an Arch distro to someone who isn’t techy. They also likely won’t appreciate the frequent updates to applications that they depend on to actually do work.
(I used Arch for almost five years and think it’s one of the best distros)
It’s simple and solid enough to give to people who don’t know what they’re doing, and its Debian/Ubuntu base makes it flexible enough to not slow down power users who want to start modifying it. Other distros that might fit this bill keep shooting themselves in the foot and going off in weird directions, while Linux Mint has been a reputable no-BS distro for a very long time. It’s a workhorse distro without any gimmicks and that’s the point.
Mint was my “gateway distro” to get away from windows as a daily driver. It still is my daily driver and it’s given me enough guardrails to not screw it up too badly and learn.
I’m looking to go further up stream towards Debian. I’ve looked at arch and “arch that’s not allowed to be called arch because it has a gui installer”, but I’m not ready/able/“risk-tolerant-enough” to keep that stable as my daily driver. Fedora dormant seem quite right for me.
I really like mint, it meets my needs, has treated me well.
I looked at Manjaro VERY briefly, and I played with Endeavor a bit. I installed several distros as VMs just to poke around. I found Debian familiar which is likely the main reason I find myself leaning that way.
I use Mint, PopOS, or Arch/EndeavourOS more or less interchangeably. I’ve sincerely never had any issues with Arch’s stability. The term “stable” when describing a distro refers more to the package versions than system stability or overall reliability. Things aren’t necessarily broken cause they’re more up to date. Back in 2020, my laptop didn’t play well with Ubuntu 20.04 because of some power management issue caused by a kernel bug. My only real option was getting off of LTS and switching to 20.10 which had a newer fixed kernel version. So in effect, the Ubuntu LTS was less “stable” for me because of them keeping the kernel version stable.
YMMV, obviously, but most of what I’m doing when doing a fresh install is installing the packages I need, and configuring them. I can do this pretty much regardless of the distro. Most of the difference is if those packages are available in the first place, and how I’ll have to install them if they aren’t in the base repositories. Configs/dotfiles are usually pretty portable. The rest is just well… Linux as usual.
From experience, ignore your instincts and give pure Arch a try. It’s a lot more stable than you’d think, and their wiki has very thorough instructions for everything.
It’s a bit of a trial by fire on your terminal knowledge, but you’ll learn a ton in the process. Worst case, you get fed up trying and just go to Fedora or something after.
i dont have the energy or patience to go to a wiki for my OS, i just want it to work and not be proprietary. besides setting up wine staging and pipewire it’s generally been smooth sailing
I’m with you here, sometimes I’m really lazy and don’t want to mess with it. Other times I’m hell-bent on doing something I know how to do in a GUI through terminal.
Mint has let me keep my system OS rock solid, and I’m not afraid to try about anything in the vm. Reinstall when time permits or just roll back to a snapshot.
I’ve got time shift installed, but I use my computer for work, so there’s some draw to stability and having everything just work.
I’m sure it’d be fine, I’m probably not willing to put in the right amount of effort. I think a big fear for me is I use the computer for work, and while I have others, I prefer this one. I may not have the 15-30min to research and resolve something I did to myself.
I also try not to be the person who asks for help on the same question for the 17th time.
So far I’ve always been able to find answers in documentation or communities. Turns out I’m not so unique. ;).
I would echo that but suggest going to EndevourOS. EOS is a lot easier to install for normal people. What you get is insanely close to pure Arch.
I agree that running Arch is easier than people think. It is very stable. Also, because everything you could want is in the repositories ( and up-to-date ) it does not become a spaghetti like mess over time. No more third-party repos. No more PPAs.
Thanks for this recommendation as it’s potentially a logical step. I’ve thought about this but not researched it enough, yet. I don’t understand enough about the differences yet. Hypothetically, do I need or want Mint on Debian, or do I just want to get the real deal? Not posing the question to you, just what I’ve yet to research further. Mint is currently working fine for me, so there’s no rush.
Going straight to Debian isn’t hard. LMDE might have newer packages, IDK. I used Debian 12 for a bit and still use it on my server. Mint offers a great stock experience but Debian has a hard to explain vanilla coolness if you will. I would also recommend considering OpenSUSE if you haven’t looked at it.
It just works. Whenever anyone I know tells me they are going to install ubuntu or try out linux for the first time - I just tell them to install linux mint and they’ve had no complaints so far.
(Even though I only use mint as a fallback distro, I really appreciate it being there)
I have not used pop recently. To be fair both are kind of similar, at least base wise. So one cannot go wrong with any of the two. I like the traditional layout of cinnamon better than Gnome (out of the box) so I’ll pick Mint.
I do kinda wonder how many modern SW fans remember the hilarious Naked Gun movies. I guess this might look pretty ridiculous if not.
I hope we're not to that point yet. The spoof genre reached its apotheosis in that period from '74 to '94, with Python doing Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Mel Brooks going from Blazing Saddles to Robin Hood Men in Tights, and the ZAZ run from Airplane! to The Naked Gun and Hot Shots movies. For ZAZ, Top Secret! is even better than Airplane! or TNG, IMHO.
Their successors forgot that however thin, the underlying movie has to be watchable, or you lose something. Maybe it's just generational (always have to allow for that at my age), but I kind of think that Scary Movie et al is stuff that is not nearly as timeless.
Their successors forgot that however thin, the underlying movie has to be watchable, or you lose something. Maybe it’s just generational (always have to allow for that at my age), but I kind of think that Scary Movie et al is stuff that is not nearly as timeless.
That reminds me of one of the major keys to the success of the ZAZ movies, which was to hire a cast known for their serious, dramatic roles, a type which Nielsen epitomized. At no point could the actors indicate that the situations going on around them were funny, otherwise the illusion might be punctured.
Perhaps some of the later imitation films, like Scary Movie et al, kind of drifted away from that premise, I don’t know.
Speaking of Blazing Saddles, I recall reading that the musicians and orchestra were told that they were producing music for a classic-style western, and when they ultimately learned that the movie was an intentional farce, they were not amused.
The ZAZ movies had a very specific style that relied on that. Every single character was the "straight man" and the bonkers shit was the universe. Mel Brooks was much more side-eye and poking at the fourth wall. In either case, I wanted Nick Rivers and Lone Starr and Sheriff Bart to succeed though. It wasn't complete anarchy or loosely connected sketches, and the juxtaposition of the absurd being hung on a pretty generic narrative structure makes it funnier, I think.
Laate reply, but very interesting comments that do make a lot of sense to me, particularly about the different mechanisms used in the ZAZ and Mel Brooks’ movies.
Judging from more recent movies clearly built on the models above, I feel like in general, modern directors & producers try to broadcast more to the audience as to how and when to react. That is-- in this post-MTV age, it seems like they’re more scared of potential dead air time, and want to avoid indulging too much in the deadpan, pregnant moments common in ZAZ films. Ones that made them so delicious, of course, tending to appeal to the thoughtful person.
By comparison, King of the Hill is maybe a rare case of a cartoon comedy that wasn’t entirely concerned with whether the audience understood the full humor of the situations. Just popped in to my head anyway, so I thought I’d mention it.
There is a pre built distribution, you need to configure binary cache to get it. Refer to the “Substitute for nonguix” section: gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
Guile and Guix is way better documented than Nix. The language have more features, so you don’t have to use a hack to load packages, can actually know what is accepted in a function instead of blindly copying what others do, and it comes with a formatter.
I think the language is harder but more powerful than Nix’s.
Imo a better manual and examples would help a lot.
I’d say one of the biggest issues is the one with proprietary drivers - you can’t really find examples and guides on how to get drivers working because it’s kept hush-hush, and to install them yourself requires knowledge on how to set things up, knowledge which beginner users don’t have ofc.
I’m a big fan of Guix and Guile but atm I couldn’t switch over due to this.
XMPP is much more popular for private messaging, so you don’t have many large public group chats like on Discord (and lesser extend Matrix). It can do it, but clients are not really optimized for that to be honest.
As for the specific questions on e2ee: OMEMO as it is currently implemented in most clients is very similar to Signal in security, but like Signal it does not encrypt metadata. There is an updated OMEMO standard that does encrypt metadata as well, but it hasn’t been adopted by any popular XMPP clients yet. However both versions are significantly more secure than Matrix’s MegOLM, which has chosen to sacrifice a lot of security for user convenience IMHO.
XMPP is actively developed, but it doesn’t have much funding for the open-source efforts, so it lacks PR and some things don’t develop as quickly as what you might be used from VC funded for-profit companies like Element/matrix.
I like the Movim webclient, but most current users seem to prefer the native clients for XMPP.
XMPP uses way less resources because it was designed to scale to billions of users for chat, instead of being some over-engineered failed experiment to use a DACS for chat, which really isn’t a good idea and never was.
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