Someone even wrote a version of dc (the arbitrary precision RPN desktop calculator) with it. They were clearly insane of course, but it proves that sed is more than just find and replace.
Honourable mention to awk's sub() and gsub() that, at least for basic find/replace, do the same thing. awk is often surprisingly quick.
When I convicted my dad to switch to Linux it’s what I’ve given him, and he’s been very happy with it, so I guess it’s just that it isn’t a pain for a noob and it works a lot like windows
I haven’t used mint in a while but did for a few years. The out of the box experience (at that time) was better.
Article from 2011:
Linux Mint 11 is a very respectable and speedy distribution and is comparatively very media friendly and easy to use out of the box for newcomers. These qualities likely have contributed to the operating system’s place on the Top 5 Linux Distribution list.
Take a hugely popular distro which alienates some some users with some issues or unappealing GUI choices, Mint comes along and polishes it further and you end up with a distro that is just perfect for that niche.
I think quite a few Ubuntu users migrated to KUbuntu or Mint when Canonical made Unity the default (in Ubuntu 11.04).
I remember trying Ubuntu Unity, back when I was wondering if I could be a good idea to switch Linux. But I had no patience at the time for the buttons on the opposite side of the window. I can't stop thinking that if it wasn't for that, things could have been quite different.
The best thing about Mint used to be not spending time adding nonfree software and media codecs. I don’t know whether it is still has that advantage over ubuntu.
My anecdote, granted I’m no Linux master: I recently went into a distro rigamarole, installed openSUSE, Manjaro, etc, before arriving to Mint, because I could not find one that handled my CPU and graphics and drivers setup without significant effort.
Then I installed Mint (avoiding Ubuntu and its Canonicalness), and setup was very simple and everything worked out of the box. I could run Steam with external GPU without going through many workarounds or setup using nvidia prime and launchers and so forth
Stylistically I also like cinnamon, but Mint mainly was just so low hassle and simple I have to give it props for that
It’s just the easiest distro to get into coming from windows/mac. It’s more lenient about the third party/closed source software that people might be familiar with, lots of GUI tools including the Software Center that makes it easy to install things, and plenty of flavors to suit whatever feels most natural to you. It’s got a nice GUI installer and live version that is sure to make people feel more comfortable about installing an OS if they’ve never done it before, and it’s not at all fussy about the hardware it runs on. It’s also rock solid as far as I’ve experienced. And, of course, it has the benefit of accessing the huge amount of software that supports debian. Also, owing to its popularity, the community is very active and welcoming to newbies.
When I was first getting into Linux, I was definitely more experimental and tried out Fedora just to get as far from Windows as I could. Now I’m not so adventurous and just want something that provides as similar a workflow as possible to the workflow I have to use at work with windows. So it goes that, when setting up a new laptop where I want an OS that just works, I reach for Linux Mint.
Software install tool on Mint is so much faster and more intuitive than the abomination I’m using on Nobara. I appreciate their efforts to make a gaming distro and I recommend it but if you want polish and more GUI tools, Mint works.
Long time Mint user here. Switched to them ages ago because they didn’t try to “revolutionize” the desktop in the whole Gnome 3/Ubuntu Unity era, and the OS was close enough to Ubuntu that instructions and software for Ubuntu would run on it. Since then, it’s only been getting better, and they haven’t been accumulating drama (Snap, telemetry, whatever Redhat is doing, etc.). like the more popular distros have been.
I’d recommend it to new people because it Just Works, has flatpack support, is similar enough to Windows and the many Ubuntu-specific instructions in the wild apply to it.
Agreed. I was recently prepping a laptop to give to my mom, and planned to put Ubuntu on it since, y'know, it's "linux for human beings". I hadn't used Ubuntu Desktop in years, and was blown away by how unintuitive everything felt in the GUI. nothing behaved how I expected (this isn't to say it is inherently bad; this is just my experience).
Tried Linux Mint XFCE instead and was instantly relieved that it was a similar user experience to Windows (since that's typically going to make things easier for beginners).
It's also my go-to distro if I have a machine lying around that's in-between tasks and just needs a general-purpose OS for the moment.
Distrowatch's source for popularity is how often the different distros are clicked on on their own homepage... which has the toplist featured prominantly on the start page.
So their ranking completely and utterly worthless, as it's prone to manipulation and once you basically pushed your distro to the high spots it's guaranteed to stay there as a rarely used but highly rated distro is of course attracting more clicks from people wanting to know what it's actually about... see: MX Linux being on their #1 spot forever.
Its insanely popular on distrowatch. I also don’t know why
Distrowatch counts clicks on Distrowatch. People using methods like setting the distro page as new tab page or perhaps even use scripts to boost awareness of obscure distributions is a regular occurrence. Nobody can seriously tell me that PCLinuxOS having been on the top of the DW charts for a long time (it’s still ahead of Kubuntu, Genoo, and RHEL) is because of how freaking popular that thing is. I’m also very doubtful of the current popularity of MX Linux over there. No way on earth is that seriously 2.5 times more popular than Ubuntu.
Yeah I’m with you. In my case I can’t get around the cinamon gui which … reminds me of Windows 98, sorry :(
(yes, I know, calm down, I know I can install whichever interface I want but from my experience it just causes problems and at that point I might aswell just switch the distro)
It has all the goodness of Ubuntu without the noise. A common sense UI with solid default options and great customizability.
I have tried a lot of different distros and Mint is the one I keep coming back to. I run it on my daily driver laptop, my gaming rig and my media center in the living room with MythTV. Could not be happier.
I think they should improve their website download page, and have an easier installer before I can recommend it as a first distro to someone. But that’s just my opinion. Some people even get Arch as their first distro, so…
I’m brand new to linux and was just trying to install something on a partition and I couldn’t figure out how to do it with either fedora or mint, they kept giving me errors and asking about mount points and stuff I didn’t understand. Then I tried EndeavourOS and the install was so painless, it just asked for the partition and did the rest for me. It also worked with my wifi card out of the box as an added bonus. By far the easiest experience so far. The little bit of googling I had to do to figure out how to use pacman and yay was not a big deal compared to actually getting started with Linux.
This might not count as Arch, but that’s my experience at least.
Yeah, every experience is valid! I was just stating my opinion about the general state of Linux installers, but the experience varies alot from person to person. Glad you made it to Linux tho 😄
Haha, yeah, that’s the beauty of how easy it is to just make some installation media and try them out. Certainly wasn’t meaning to come off as argumentative, sorry if I did!
Debian is not a good distro for the tech illiterate. The point of Linux Mint is to be a good entry point for people to Linux, some will stick to it and that’s fair cause it’s a good distro, some may move past it. Debian isn’t very friendly to noobs. Ubuntu is just garbage, I’d love it to be good but snaps are just that awful.
I stuck with it because it worked and I could do all my electronics, software, 3dp development. It’s kind of nice to mostly forget about the OS and just get projects done.
TBH I haven’t used helix extensively, but I do like that I can just expect things like auto-complete and linting to work, which I would usually expect from something like vscodium, but that’s not cli. So yes, helix is nice. I’m just a bit afraid that I’ll forget my vim bindings because helix does things a little differently: wd instead of dw
I don’t know if Firefox is at fault. It could be Firedragon (the fork I’m using), it could be any of the desktop portals messing things up (looking at you, xdg-desktop-portal-gtk), it could be Arch Linux due to how packagers package each portal, it could be that I stepped on a landmine by switching from Sway to Hyprland - this is when the problem first occurred.
Firedragon’s (and the Firefox flatpak’s) output doesn’t say anything, nothing stands out in their logs, same goes for both Sway and Hyprland - for all I know XDG portals don’t even have standalone logs, they just dump error messages to stdout in my experience (which, again, have not been dumped).
I could send bug reports to everyone, and get told “this isn’t our problem, write a bug report to ${OTHER_SOFTWARE}”. But then, which logs do I provide? All of them? Sure, I can gather up logs and non-existent messages from several pieces of software, one of them being a glorified API.
It would have taken me a good hour to find the relevant data, find the correct places to write reports to, word things in a quasi-professional manner, all for a small chance for any of the developers of something to answer something that is not a variation of “can’t help you bro, your logs are anorexic”.
So, after reminiscing the days of writing Windows registry keys and seeing no results (by writing XDP hints all over the system AND rebooting), I took 10 minutes to vent and make a meme - NoScript was intefering with imgflip, otherwise I would have needed 3.
I could not, in fact, definitely have raised a bug report in the time it took me to make this.
It does, but the Steam DRM bypassing thing that I’m being peer-pressured into using does not
(not that I’m against buying good games like BG3, it’s just that I’m not going to spend 70€ on a game that is just not my type (plus, there’s peer pressure going on here))
Perhaps an invalid opinion, but a bug report that falls outside of scope because of lack of detail or lack of reproduction is still a valid bug report for metrics and general user experience imo. Could lead to interoperability efforts, user experience recommendations, user education utilities, or a bug getting patched but the end result is always the same: a better experience for the end user.
In that case you could maybe see if it works correctly for you in firefox installed via flatpak from flathub. Those are official builds and bug reports on them should go to Mozilla directly.
It could be related to hyprland though. I think I read somewhere that one of those lightweight WMs (or whatever it really is idk sry lol) doesn’t ship a portals config file for x-d-p to exactly know which exact implementation to use. Maybe arch doesn’t have that issue though
I stepped on a landmine by switching from Sway to Hyprland
That’s 100% what it is. Changing desktop environments has almost always led to issues in my experience. If you want to use a different DE, make a new user account or reinstall the distro.
I disagree.
Some months ago I had weird behavior with compose sequences, I went on the ff c, made a post on it, and there was a fruitfull discussion leading to pinning it on gtk doing compose sequences weirdly. No hate was experienced.
I’ve noticed what that person is saying outside of the Firefox community, the evangelism and all, and then criticism of Firefox and more specifically Mozilla’s actions in the Firefox community. Case in point, someone laying down the issues with the upcoming Fakespot integration.
As I said in another other comment to someone else, there is a quite noticeable difference in effort between typing sentences on imgflip and hunting bugs.
The only thing I can correctly report is that the termfilechooser portal causes something to die somewhere at some point - it never even worked in the first place.
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