LMDE6 came out within the last couple of months. It's based on Debian 12 which, at time of writing, is less than 6 months old.
Upgrading is still wise every couple of years because the base Debian distro also reaches EOL, but yes, rolling updates occur constantly in the meantime. Provided the system owner allows them to anyway.
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.
There’s already more than one version without snap, it’s already a confusing mess. Not all distros are compatible with the exact same binaries. And people probably don’t want to compile everything form source.
Snap could potentially unify things, and remove all of that confusion.
I am so sorry this got so long. I'm absolutely horrible at brevity.
Applications use things called libraries to provide particular functions rather than implement those functions themselves. So like "handle HTTP request" as an example, you can just use a HTTP library to handle it for you so you can focus on developing your application.
As time progresses, libraries change and release new versions. Most of the time one version is compatible with the other. Sometimes, especially when there is a major version change, the two version are incompatible. If an application relied on that library and a major incompatible change was made, the application also needs to be changed for the new version of the library.
A Linux distro usually selects the version of each library that they are going to ship with their release and maintain it via updates. However, your distro provider and some neat program you might use are usually two different people. So the neat program you use might have change their application to be compatible with a library that might not make it into your distro until next release.
At that point you have one of two options. Wait until your distro provides the updated library or the go it alone route of you updating your own library (which libraries can depend on other libraries, which means you could be opening a whole Pandora's box here). The go it alone route also means that you have to turn off your distro's updates because they'll just overwrite everything you've done library wise.
This is where snaps, flatpaks, and appimages come into play. In a very basic sense, they provide a means for a program to include all the libraries it'll need to run, without those libraries conflicting with your current setup from the distro. You might hear them as "containerized programs", however, they're not exactly the Docker style "container", but from an isolating perspective, that's mostly correct. So your neat application that relies on the newest libraries, they can be put into a snap, flatpak, or appimage and you can run that program with those new libraries no need for your distro to provide them or for you to go it alone.
I won't bore you on the technical difference between the formats, but just mostly focus on what I usually hear is the objectionable issue with snaps. Snaps is a format that is developed by Canonical. All of these formats have a means of distribution, that is how do you get the program to install and how it is updated. Because you know, getting regular updates of your program is still really important. With snaps, Canonical uses a cryptographic signature to indicate that the distribution of the program has come from their "Snaps Store". And that's the main issue folks have taken with snaps.
So unlike the other kinds of formats, snaps are only really useful when they are acquired from the Canonical Snaps Store. You can bypass the checking of the cryptographic signature via the command line, but Ubuntu will not automatically check for updates on software installed via that method, you must check for updates manually. In contrast, anyone can build and maintain their own flatpak "store" or central repository. Only Canonical can distribute snaps and provide all of the nice features of distribution like automatic updates.
So that's the main gripe, there's technical issues as well between the formats which I won't get into. But the main high level argument is the conflicting ideas of "open and free to all" that is usually associated with the Linux group (and FOSS [Free and open-source software] in general) and the "only Canonical can distribute" that comes with snaps. So as @sederx indicated, if that's not an argument that resonates with you, the debate is pretty moot.
There's some user level difference like some snaps can run a bit slower than a native program, but Canonical has updated things with snaps to address some of that. Flatpak sandboxing can make it difficult to access files on your system, but flatpak permissions can be edited with things like Flatseal. Etc. It's what I would file into the "papercut" box of problems. But for some, those papercuts matter and ultimately turn people off from the whole Linux thing. So there's arguments that come from that as well, but that's so universal "just different in how the papercut happens" that I just file that as a debate between container and native applications, rather a debate about formats.
Sometimes you use a Library pre-made sauce or spice blend as part of a recipe, so you don’t need to waste time remaking something that is commonly used.
Every so often, a company will tweak the recipe for the things you are using, but it still basically tastes the same. Sometimes they just decide that now it’s salty instead of sweet, so it would complete ruin the dish you would like to make.
The recipe you are using assumes you live in Australia where the new version of the sauce/spice blend is more common, but where you live still only sells the old version.
So now you can either wait for the store to sell the new sauce/spice blend, import it from Australia, or try to make it yourself. But you might have another recipe that still needs/uses the old sauce/spice blend. Needing to have both can lead to issues where you use the wrong one, ruining the food you are trying to make.
This is where snaps, flatpaks, and appimages those dish-in-a-box kits come into play. They’ll have the correct version of the spices/sauces you want, so it doesn’t really matter which version you have in your kitchen.
Snaps branded dish-in-a-box kits are developed by Canonical, and they can be kinda weird. You need to check for updates if you need to re-buy them manually, and you can only get them from the “Snaps Store”. Other dish-in-a-box kits allow you to get them from whichever store you want, and will automatically re-order when needed.
And that’s the main issue folks have taken with snaps. If you have 50+ programs are making a meal with 50+ dishes, and you need to constantly check if you need to rebuy them one by one, it gets old quickly.
Also, Snaps takes up a lot of room, and generally just kinda suck compared to installing things normally or through flatpack.
My first introduction to them was “hey why does startup take so long now? This machine used to be so much faster.” and realizing it was snapd that was eating up the time. It’s also not exactly efficient at using storage compared to native installs of dependencies.
For a desktop these may not be noticable but for low power embedded systems it’s a nightmare. It should be an option but really isn’t ready to be default. And when appimages are already a thing that work well I don’t really see the point.
I’m not suggesting appimages are better, just that I’ve had fewer problems with them relative to snaps. Ultimately I’d argue all attempts to remove dependencies are not ready to replace typical packages for low powered systems. For desktop Linux the performance difference is negligible anyway.
I’m not completely sure but don’t flatpaks offer good sandboxing. If they do it could be a good idea for people who use/need proprietary software like steam and zoom so when you run those programs at least it can’t read through your files and stuff
You don’t need to break everything that exists, cause maintenance issues and incur that much overhead to have sandboxing. The security features that allows sandboxing in the first place are also available for regular binaries not installed in some weird ways, with all their advantages and flaws.
Snap is just Canonical’s way of getting more control over things. The only upside of Snap was “easier distribution”, which turned out to not be that true. The downsides, however, especially regarding maintenances and software updates, are very real.
Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel and the systemd init system. The packages, called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions[3] and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users. Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system. Snap was originally released for cloud applications[4] but was later ported to also work for Internet of Things devices[5][6] and desktop[7][8] applications.
So (having tried various distro for almost 2 decades now, but always reverting to windows) the two useful things as I read that are 1) not having to know thst some bullshit distro doesn’t use apt and you need to figure out wtf the package manager is because this distro is a special snowflake and they wanted to show the world by being a bitch and not using apt; and 2) direct from devs, which is nice and imo preferred.
But like… native packages mostly handled this? I’ve been watching from the sidelines for a few years as this happened and I’m still like ‘this is a solution looking for a problem, and adding complexity in the name of simplicity’.
Can I get a tl;dr on flatpak? I think it’s basically snaps but again ‘we can make this standard better! by creating another fragment to the available standards!’ which is just, ugh.
That kinda is (one of) the big issues with Linux, in my eyes - everyone thinks their shitty implementation is best, and this happens for everything, and so instead of having one standard for everything you have 53 and none of them get the proper dev time and so ‘I can do this better’ and now you have 54 standards and […]. Like, it’s cool to be able to patchwork together the special sauce of 18 distros manually, but like… There could be consolidation and then 1 would have the special sauce of 18 in a user-friendly iso instead of taking 35 hours to get working. As a user, I want shit to just fucking work, or be moderately easy to get. Adding more fragmentation to the space is doing a disservice to the whole community.
forgive my ignorance, I also hated teams when I had to first use it, but now other than it being a microsoft and probably data hungry app, what’s bad about it?
It has indeed improved a lot over the last 2 years or so and is now actually quite a mature product, as much as I hate to admit that about an MS product. My biggest gripes with it are its refusal to acknowledge you may be using multiple devices (to this day) and MS’s insistence that a person only do one thing at one time (can’t edit calendar items while checking a chat, for example). Their Linux app is a joke and I’m better off running it from Chrome. The phone app makes the WiFi interface crash constantly and I have to run it off 4G; it is the only app I have this issue with.
Which brings me to another gripe. Teams documentation insists that screen sharing on Linux is not supported, and sure enough you cannot see the option for it while on a call with someone. However if you are in a meeting (with however many people), the option magically appears and works absolutely perfectly.
what do you mean by the multiple devices thing? also my experience has been mostly fine on the linux app, granted I’ve never been in a teams call, so it makes sense.
Apologies for the late reply, still getting a hang of this!
By multiple devices issues I meant the following. Sometimes for example, I am on a Teams call on my phone but want to use my laptop to view screensharing stuff and join the call there too (without hanging up the phone). Teams will insist that my audio switch over to the laptop too and I have to manually disable the audio on the laptop and re-enable it on the phone. It shocks me that such a mature offering from a massive corporation still cannot figure out that I may want a screenshare/audio split onto two devices and ask me at least. Another smaller nag, if I want audio only on the phone, it will constantly bug me to tell me the incoming video is switched off. I kind of understand this however, I get that they want to let the average user know why there is no incoming video, but surely there ought to be a “leave me alone” setting for this.
I think they’re a good way to package apps. Superior to Flatpak for sure. I like Flatpak too and if Canonical abandoned Snap tomorrow, I’d switch my snap-packaged apps to Flatpak. The only non-bullshit downside of Snap is the proprietary server-side and the lack of multi-repo support. I don’t care much about either because I know implementing either is fairly uncomplicated and it will happen should the reason arise. If Debian wanted to start using Snap, it’d take them a month to get the basics working with their own server side. If the client side was proprietary too, I’d have had a completely opposite opinion on Snap. Finally Canonical supplies all the software on my OS. I use third party repos only when absolutely necessary. If Canonical ran a proprietary apt server side, I wouldn’t even know, apt doesn’t care. Some of the myriad HTTP mirrors could easily be running on IIS, or S3, or Nexus. The trust equation for snap is equivalent.
Because you can package and deploy OS components with it. As a result you can build an OS with it, do foolproof updates of it and …gulp, happy tear… rollbackcomponents without involving any other system like a special filesystem.
My bravery comes from being a software guy that’s been doing OS software development for over a decade so I believe my opinion is somewhat informed. 😂 I’m currently working on a software updates implementation for an automotive OS.
I think this is just a difference in the use case. Flatpaks are designed for desktop applications while Snap was initially designed for exactly the purpose you describe.
The initial use case for Snap, when it used to be called Click (circa 2012-13), was mobile apps for Ubuntu Touch. Those were the same as desktop Qt apps, just using the a mobile theme and layout. Canonical developers just had the foresight to create a design that isn’t limited to that use case. As a result Snap is a superset of Flatpak in terms of use cases. Flatpak can probably be rearchitected to match that if anyone cared. If that were the case I’d also be drumming it up.
The funny thing is, we wouldn’t be having any of these discussions over the merits of Snap if RedHat came up with it instead of Canonical and the server side was OSS from the get go. When RedHat was cool that is. In fact likely Canonical would have been using thet too. Just like they use PulseAudio, Systemd, and Wayland.
Tell us you don’t know why you need Single Source of Truth on package installation and content without using the phrase “dependency hell is self-inflicted”.
A single source of truth for software is one way to solve that. There are others with different pros and cons in active use that have shown pretty good results.
What’s your alternative? I’ve used OpenRC before and it was nice, but it didn’t take long to find a use-case that systemd handled easily but OpenRC made difficult. Also a few packages expect systemd to be present and either fail to install or partially install so I had to figure out how to implement the missing functions in OpenRC.
Proprietary doesn't bother me at least not how snap is currently implemented
I don't recall noticing a size difference between snaps and flatpaks
I've found snaps as fast as flatpaks, but I know snaps has issues before I started using them
Honestly, if you’re satisfied, there’s not really a compelling reason to switch. Keep using snaps if that’s what works for you. But I would like to remark that we should preferably support open solutions to proprietary ones. That’s not saying that we should never use proprietary software, but just something to keep in mind.
You had me at proprietary. But seriously, I use FOSS. I’ll tolerate proprietary software if I have absolutely no other choice. There’s absolutely no reason for me to put up with this bullshit. While it’s a long way from the kind of shitfuckery Microsoft is so fond of, it’s still completely unnecessary.
Me reacting to analogies with “Did you know these two things are not completely identical?”, completely unburdened by the knowledge that I’m supposed to explain how the differences invalidate the comparison.
I’d argue it’s pretty stupid to use FOSS but then depend on a proprietary server that only one for-profit company is allowed to run to deliver all that software, trusting them to just never do wrong or leave you high and dry. I’d also argue it fits the analogy perfectly, because the analogy was about saying “I haven’t had a problem yet” in response to being shown the potential problems of the action.
But the problem with snaps is an opinion. If Canonical goes bonkers I'll just go use something else. Until then I don't have any issues with them using proprietary software within their own ecosystem.
It’s not an opinion that proprietary for-profit software will betray you, it is an inevitability. It has happened every single time. If it was FOSS, we could salvage it. It’s proprietary, so we can’t. When it fails it must simply be abandoned. I just hope you learn the right lesson when this happens.
WinRAR will either die, or be sold and squeezed by its new owners. Nobody lives forever and no asset goes unflipped in this market. You can say you won’t update, but that just leaves you vulnerable.
If I were to list every FOSS project that has lasted longer, I’d have to spend all day writing the post. winRAR is unique in that it’s one of the only pieces of long-lasting proprietary software that didn’t die or turn to crap. Such things are not unique or even rare in FOSS.
Snaps just don’t really work very well. When I have had problems in the past and gone looking for answers, what I consistently find is that the problem is fixed by installing the non-snap version of . I love containers but if I am going to use them I want to have control over how they are configured and that they have access to.
Or at least if I don’t control them I just want them to work, and they never do. I would use them if they weren’t consistently shit.
I hated it and it made me switch to debian, I don’t see the point to install all dependencies for each apps, I guess they don’t want to deal with package dependencies anymore, so let’s install the same version of python 10 times
I would actually benefit from beig able to keeps different versions of dependencies rn. Got a deprecated software wich forces me to exclude a package from my updates.
It’s supposedly containerisation, but not really docker. After all, docker itself merely presents the OS’s underlying feature in a somewhat more accessible way (keyword: somewhat).
Snap is more like a big ecosystem around that idea that breaks everything that should work in that context, is a security nightmare and is sold as “work anywhere” but really only work in one place, which developers could have targeted in the beginning without having to rely on Snap to begin with.
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.
The redundancy is always good, but I really don’t see what benefits the switch would provide. The Linux Mint team removed all the stuff they didn’t like from Ubuntu anyway when packaging it as Linux Mint, and plus, Ubuntu’s software repositories are much more up-to-date than Debian’s owing to their regular release schedule. Unless they want to base LMDE on Debian Sid, anyway.
The web version isn’t a standalone client like Signal, which registers as an additional device with e2e. WhatsApp web communicates with the WhatsApp app, so it doesn’t work if the phone isn’t connected to the internet (in early versions it had to be the same network, if I remember correctly).
I believe WA introduced a feature which allowed the desktop app to function standalone like Signal. Signal Desktop adds a second device with it’s own keys, so contacts send automatically messages to two devices. I’m not sure if it works the same for WA, and if they even have the feature. I don’t have a compatible desktop.
No, it’s probably because websites running in Chrome might lack the ability to detect keystrokes in the background. If they did, that’s a very very concerning security risk.
If they wanted to force you, they’d just disable the web app lmao
I want to be high and mighty and dislike Snaps for all the technical reasons but the single most irritating thing is definitely all the loopback devices.
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