Let’s start simple: You should consider hoping from Linux Mint to LMDE if you haven’t already.
As a user, you have no obligation to participate in the politics between the Ubuntu and the Mint Development team, but if you’ve followed the controversy and agree that Ubuntu is being a bully, this would be a small yet material way to show support.
what am I missing?
Every Linux distribution has a purpose - a reason its author thought it was worth the effort of creating it. Some are grand, others are silly, etc. When you explore distros, you’re telling the community which ideas resonate with you. Popular ideas will replicate, unpopular ideas will be abandoned.
Also, switching distributions makes it harder for business to ‘capture’ the Linux demographic. The mere act of switching occasionally means that tools to import/export/manage your data stay relevant. This literally fights enshitification.
Finally, and this is a matter of personal taste, but I like trying different versions of Linux for the same reason I try different flavors of ice cream: It’s fun; and even if now and then I get a bad flavor, I feel enriched by the experience.
They are intro distros, sure, but don’t ever think that you have to move to anything else if you don’t want to. Mint is probably the best Linux distro there is if your goal is ease of use, support, and “it just works”. I’d say that’s more than enough for what people want in an OS. I recommend it to anyone looking to hop into Linux, be it temporarily or permanently. People jump into other distros for specific use cases or because they feel like fucking around with something…but that’s absolutely not required or necessary to be a Linux user or advocate.
Idk anything about those softwares, but I would bet if you set up the hide.me client in a container you could add it to the same network in compose then configure all the other containers to use it as their gateway… I’m probably missing some details and you may need to rebuild all of your containers, or maybe just change the network settings in your compose yaml?
Endeavor OS. Its an excellent arch based system and people REALLY over emphasize how tricky arch is. Its not difficult, its not just for power users, and the rolling release means you have access to updates faster than other distros…this is particularly nice for gaming as you’ll also get updates to graphics drivers sooner.
Linux mint is amazing. I’ve used Linux for many years and it’s still nice. I do wish Linux mint had a more free software install option but that’s a minor complaint.
I don’t hate Ubuntu, and it was my distribution from nearly 20 years. Meaning since it was first released until recently. I loved it for a long time because it was based on dpkg which was much better than rpm at the time AND it was way more user friendly than the others. Even as a software developer I like my distribution to move out of the way to let me focus on using it, not babysitting it.
But I moved away because of Snaps. Currently on Fedora and it’s pretty good. I know it’s possible to get rid of Snaps or use a derivative but I prefer to stay close to stock for whatever distribution I use.
If Ubuntu works for you and you don’t mind snaps, then just use that!
I was surviving with Ubuntu, I had my complaints but I figured ‘that’s just how it is’ on Linux, that it was the same everywhere. I didn’t even realise what I was missing until I switched.
I got a hardware upgrade at one point, so in order to get those new drivers ASAP I tried an Arch-based distro, with plans to switch back once drivers became available. I never moved back.
The two big reasons I stayed was ironically enough the lack of good Ubuntu documentation, and the PPA system. Ubuntu is used a lot, but there’s not really formal documentation anywhere, only random tutorials online (most likely out of date and never updated) and people on forums talking about their problems. By contrast the Arch wiki is the gold standard of Linux documentation, there’s just no comparison. Even on Ubuntu I found myself using it as a reference from time to time.
Regarding PPAs, the official Ubuntu package list is strangely small so if you’re like me and find yourself needing other software, even mainstream software like Docker, you’ll be faffing about with PPAs. So if you want to install Docker, instead of typing sudo apt install dockerYou instead have to type:
These are the official install instructions, by the way. This is intended behaviour. The end user shouldn’t have to deal with all this. This feels right out of the 90’s to me.
Instead of PPAs, Arch has the Arch User Repository (AUR). Holy moly is the AUR way nicer to work with. Granted, we’re not quite comparing apples to apples here since the AUR (typically) builds packages from source, but bear with me. You install an AUR package manager like yay (which comes preinstalled on my flavour of Arch, EndeavourOS). yay can manage both your system and AUR packages. Installing a package (either official or AUR) looks like yay packageNameHere. That’s it. A full system upgrade like sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade is a single command: yay -Syu, a bit cryptic but much shorter. The AUR is fantastic not just for the ease of use, but for sheer breadth of packages. If you find some random project on github there’s probably an AUR package for it too. Because it builds from source an AUR package is essentially just a fancy build script based on the project’s own build instructions, so they’re super easy to make, which means there’s a lot of them.
You might argue ‘but building from source might fail! Packages are more reliable!’, which is somewhat true. Sometimes AUR builds can fail (very rarely in my experience), but so can PPAs. Because PPAs are often made to share one random package they can become out of date easily if their maintainer forgets or simply stops updating it. By contrast AUR packages can be marked out of date by users to notify the maintainer, and/or the maintainer role can be moved to someone else if they go silent. If a PPA goes silent there’s nothing you can do. Also, since an AUR package is just a fancy build script you can edit the build script yourself and get it working until the package gets an update, too. PPAs by comparison are just a black box - it’s broken until it gets updated.
Moral of the story? Don’t be afraid to just give something a go. Mint will always be waiting for you if you don’t like it.
unrelated but does Ableton work with Linux yet? I did a quick search and someone says it works “flawlessly” but the comments indicate this is not true.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.