Seriously... At SCaLE this year I saw people from various distro booths taking breaks and visiting other distro booths. Each time they looked genuinely interested and excited about what the other distro was doing.
I kinda feel like there's very little overlap between distro fans and distro developers. Probably because distro devs tend to know all the dirty secrets of their distro.
You go on Reddit or wherever and it's all "distro X is evil, use distro Y instead," "No, Y is terrible! Use Z!" And then you sit at a table with a SuSE developer, a Fedora developer and an Ubuntu developer and the conversation is all "so how are you guys dealing with this issue?" "Oh, I think we came up with a great solution, I'll share the patch set with you!" "Wonderful, thanks! By the way I opened up a merge request on your stuff because we figured out how to fix that namespaces issue."
Copy-pasting the image will upload it to the lemmy instance, taking up storage space. You should instead embed externally hosted images using the following markdown expression:
Yes, this way you reduce the load on your instance, but I often see image hosting deleting images
and I get scared when I see an imgur link because it often blocks image viewing for me
Saaaame. Been using Mint almost exclusively for 5-10 yrs and i still feel like im playing in the wading pool of what u can do with it. I learn more as I need to, and generally enjoy that process. I always feel super satisfied with myself when i use the terminal, even if its sudo apt-get install Firefox.
Whenever I need to do something, I'll figure it out. Sometimes it's a pain, like getting VNC to work. But then I'll write down the most important bits and duly forget the rest. I just want this stuff to work.
Pacstall is AUR for Ubuntu (so UUR?) based distributions.
It is certainly less complete than AUR, but still it might be useful depending on your needs.
I'd rather trust an Ubuntu community repo than the snap store. At least, for pacstall, the community is able to review the package.
Since the snap store is the default store on Ubuntu , there is more chance that he will be targeted by malicious software than a community repo than has to be manually installed.
At that point, what are you using Mint for? The Cinammon DE?
IMHO, KDE feels much more modern, while Cinammon kind of feels like it's stuck in 2003. It reminds me of the stock gray boxy Windows 9x/NT/2000 interface.
I love cinnamon it's the main reason I use mint I tried debian with mint but the theming was ugly but the cinnamon on mint mmm beautiful I find it very comfortable and familiar like all the good parts of windows 7 just with a tad bit more modern design
I stuck an Arc theme on it and that modernized it a lot.
To me, Cinnamon sits somewhere between the extremes of Gnome and KDE.
Gnome is an Android launcher with a concussion. Every major update is a list of things it can't do anymore. Hopefully by Gnome 52 the system won't even POST let alone boot. Every utility is a blank window with an empty menu up in the top bar that does as little of its job as it can, apparently in service to some "blank is beautiful" aesthetic.
KDE feels like the control panel of a nuclear power plant, LOADS of crap everywhere. Widgets and wodgets and panels and sidebars where does it end? Every utility is an incorrectly sized window completely crammed full of drop downs, radio buttons and text fields with several tabs and sub-menus with lots of options, because what if esoteric use case?
Cinnamon is a middle ground in between; they have a "most users, most of the time" approach so that UIs are understandable and digestible, and usually let you do what you want to do, without being uselessly blank or obsessively crowded.
Yeah I agree with the sentiment, use whatever is good for you, but I feel like most advanced linux users are not using Mint. They typically come to the realization that everything is either Debian, Arch, or build it yourself so they use one of those.
I'm running Debian 12 for while now and it works great. Gossip says you need to get everything from flatpak because the packages are so outdated, but that's bullshit.
Use Linux professionally. Worked with RHEL for years. Current gig uses Debian servers. Daily driver is a system 76 machine with the pop OS that came on it. Debian derivatives make great daily drivers for those of us that just need a browser, terminal, working wifi, and the ability to build and run containers.
The true Linux users are the ones that realize that all Linux is the same. The only differences is package management, Desktop Environment, and customization by the Distro creator.
You can literally just install Debian stable with Cinnamon DE and get basically Linux Mint on Debian. Bonus points for adding backports so you get a slightly more updated kernel.
I know this is a joke, but you should use whatever distro you want to use....because at the end of the day it's all Linux.
Don't forget, that the Mint developers and developers of other "user-friendly distros" do very hard work, so you can enjoy less-hassle distro.
But it is very boring for "Never Settle" philosophy to use such distros.
Don't forget, that some people enjoy tinkering thing around them. Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora etc are simply not interesting for them. They choose the hardest possible way and enjoy it.
I don't have any need for arch, fedora is fine as it is. Might try arch if I have more reliable internet someday, my main concern is my system going brrrr one evening when I need to do some important legal work.
Different distros are better at different things. Need a stable distro for your grandma? Use Debian or Mint. Need latest software? Use Arch or Gentoo. (And people do need latest software sometimes. For playing games, or in my case, for doing research. The F is FOSS stands for Free after all.) Similarly, there are server distros like AlmaLinux tuned for high reliability. I think it's counterproductive to argue about the "best" distro.
I guess the meme technically doesn't say that Mint is the best, but it kinda gives off that feeling by ridiculing Arch users.
I use Fedora more (at work) but I love the concept and execution of Mint. I’ll definitely use it on future personal machines.
I’m not an expert on distros, but it seems to me like the best drop-in replacement for Windows. It’s familiar for windows users, but it feels much better to use. That combination is great for getting normal people to consider using it.
I would hapilly use linux mint if only it didn't use apt, honestly don't like it as a package manager.
Ghere is also the fact that mint will have older versions of packages, for example neovim which I need to be latest version always.
That's why I loved arch and gentoo before, for their package managers and roling distro nature.
Now I'm on nixos unstable and it's currently my favourite unbreakable distro, and the nix package manager is really good and making my own pqckages is really easy.
If you never do more than update, upgrade, install and remove, then just skip every post recommending different distros for their package manager. For you (as for most users), it will not make the slightest difference if you are using apt, packman, whatever else. If there's something you want your package manager to do but it can't, you'll know. And if it comes to that, you can start diving into the different managers and which one is best suited for the specific thing you want to do.
But it has to be mentioned that aptitude does not have super cow powers of course.
You don't miss out on anything if it does what you need.
For me apt is just slow and clunky, don't like the way some of the commands are and they are long, I prefer the way that pacman and portage do it where I can make commands be sinple and only be couple characters instead of whole words.
I liked pacman because it was fast, and it was really easy to block a package from upgrading and downgrading packages is really easy.
I liked portage because it worked with program's sources so I was able to just remove part's of program's and their dependencies I didn't need.
I like nix now because of the way it manages dependencies, and for the fact that packaing programs in it is really easy to do.
That first sentence is what I love about Linux bros. For all the supposed gatekeeping and pretentiousness that goes on in these circles, i find this to be much more representative of my experience. As i said elsewhere in the thread, im really not very well versed in all that Linux is/can be. And yet, somehow someway, ive never really felt put down for it when seeking help.
Before this comment, i honestly didnt know there could be such preferences to ur package managers.
Nala is a great apt frontend. It supports parallel downloads of packages and speeds up the whole process up a lot.
Not sure which commands irk you as too long. Nala makes a good overview of changes like which package is bumped to what version and where it stands now. So I basically only use
nala upgrade
and take it from there. Updates the sources, lists the diff for upgradable packages and ask me to go forward or abort.
Just the pure act of installing a package is longer than with pacman for example.
And the way that apt has seperated regular package and -dev packages irks me a lot when I need a library for something I need to make sure to install a =dev package compared to most other package manager where libraries are installed with the lackage itself.
Nah, apt is great. I use Arch, but the package manager does not make a difference for me. I think I'd prefer apt for the user friendly terms to use it: apt search, apt install, apt remove, apt purge. Much nicer than the pacman equivalents I haven't even bother to learn.
I don't like apt too as much. But, interface-wise, you can make it way better with Nala, which is a frontend for it.
NixOS is too complicated and demanding for most users, who aren't programmers or hobbyists, imo.
I prefer Fedora Atomic. It has the same pros (unbreakable, highly configurable with universal-blue.org, etc.) but feels way more user friendly.
I use it with Distrobox on top, so I can use my package manager/ distro of choice (turned out to be Arch btw) on a extremely reliable system.
For your case, you can replicate Mint by just installing the Cinnamon image from uBlue and applying some minimal tweaks.
Then you get the user friendliness from Mint with the flexibility and unbreakability from NixOS. Do you like the idea? Just in case you get annoyed by NixOS in the future 🙃
Seems like a fine idea, but nixos is just exactly what I want from a distro it turns out and nix is just the package manager I wanted but never knew I did.
I like the idea of the fedora immutable distros, but the reliance on flatpak makes me a bit nervous (guess I’m just old-fashioned)… I think some kind of solution that puts a stable system like Debian or immutable fedora with a package manager like Nix might be very good (I know the U-Blue guys have been playing with homebrew?)
You can still install Nix (package manager) on Atomic, on uBlue, it even comes pre-installed afaik.
And also, there's Distrobox, which is totally enough if you prefer package managers over Flatpaks.
I personally like the "reliance" on Flatpaks. I think it reduces the fragmentation and makes it easier for devs, but that's just my opinion. Do as you prefer.
Actually, I just tried both homebrew and Nix with a Debian 12 installation and I’m not impressed. Homebrew only ships CLI apps, and GUI applications installed with Nix famously don’t show up in application launchers… it seems like you don’t really get the features of Nix unless you use NixOS.
I don't think OSTree systems can quite reach the flexibility of NixOS. For instance with NixOS (with direnv and nix-shells) you can essentially swap out your running system based on the different directories you enter and I think that's still just scraping the top of the iceberg. From my experience with OSTree (which is admittedly somewhat limited) I don't think you can reach that level of flexibility.
It's still really cool, I don't mean to shit on that, I'm just saying NixOS and OSTree have different pros and cons and use cases.
If for some unspecified reason you truly and absolutely need the latest version of something, nothing's stopping you from pulling the repo and building it yourself.
For me it's the fact that I almost always need a feature from a program that's in a recent release that is never in debian/ubuntu until a couple years later.
Right out of the box it functions enough like Windows that even my wife swapped with barely a hiccup
Yes, other distros can be great and all that jazz, but Mint makes a strong first toe dip for those who are less confident in tech
Shit, I'm confident and I actually preferred my mint install over the other couple of distros I tried partly because it came mostly pre done and only my server gets my IT time these days
Tried out fedora and it was really good, but mint just felt a little bit more right to me
Which sucks cuz I fuckin own a fedora like a massive nerd and wanted to make that joke as often as possible. I mean I grow mint too but big fucking whoop it's a dollar to get a plant and near impossible to kill
Tried out fedora and it was really good, but mint just felt a little bit more right to me
Oh I definitely like the idea of Mint, but for gaming I need a distro that keeps itself up to date more often, especially when it comes to graphics drivers and Proton, etc.
Which sucks cuz I fuckin own a fedora like a massive nerd and wanted to make that joke as often as possible. I mean I grow mint too but big fucking whoop it’s a dollar to get a plant and nest impossible to kill
Could you explain the highlighted bolted part for me? Is that a typo, or some kind of gardening term?
No I get they are being tongue and cheek, I just don't literally understand the meaning of using the word 'nest' and 'impossible to kill' together in a sentence.
Been using arch + sway + neovim for 5 years now. Everyone says it’s the “I spend more time fucking with configs than getting work done” setup but then why does my dotfiles repo look like this?
If you use vim and/or tmux you'll commit a lot to your dotfiles initially, but after you reach a stable configuration that you like you won't be changing much
Arch is great if you want to customize your system, but I wouldn't say it really needs "maintaining" beyond just updating more frequently. (which you don't even really need to do very often, you just have the option to get newer versions of software.)
I don't even update my Arch setup that often. Most of my stuff lives in flatpaks. I just want updated software and rolling release, which Arch is the best for that.
I stay away from AUR because it is completely unsandboxed and unmonitored.
To be fair, I don't believe flathub is constantly monitored, but at least it is (somewhat) sandboxed, if I set everything up in flatseal.
I have recently replaced my final .tar.gz app (git-credential-manager) with the builtin github extension of codium, and removed my final two ostree overlay with flatpak sdk extensions.
I mean, there are two options: You either don't have the technical knowledge or time to install it yourself and thus you'd are fucked, or you don't have the technical knowledge to read through the AUR and make sure it is safe and you could be fucked.
Or, a third option for the gurus: You build it yourself, but then you might aswell read through AUR and save yourself time.
Ideally you would install app directly from the app developer, who you are trusting by using their app; or your distros maintainer, who you are trusting by using their OS.
The use of AUR and/or unverified flathub app adds an additional person to trust, that is the person packaging these apps. flathub is slightly better as the app is sandboxed, so the damage they can cause is confined.
Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no store for sandboxed command line apps, this is one of the reason I like to minimize my command line usage. So that I don't need app that isn't packaged by my distro maintainer (like oh-my-zsh) to improve my cli experience.
idk man, i just like me a good non derivative distro. Debian, arch, nix, gentoo, whatever as long as it has less hands it's being passed through im happy.
for me that's just a script that auto installs the software i need at minimum to be productive. Gimme an X server, i3wm, and some applications to compliment it and i'll be one very happy user.
Meanwhile I'm over here dual booting Mint and Artix. I like fun, bleeding edge hobby distros and reliable boring ones that do everything I really need completely reliably.
Definition of standing on the shoulders of giants. Even from the start when it offered the codecs Ubuntu didn't mint has been there. Same for arch want something specified but don't want to start at a lfs or Gentoo it has your back all you have to do is read up on the bits you want. I think it's amazing that for me the best distros are still community ones.
Dayum, 9 years ago i started with mint and distro hopped a bit then daily drived arch for many years, and now I'm back to lmde6, so you ain't gotta call me out like that
The Nvidia card I bought about 3yrs ago to replace my old AMD one. Kinda wish I'd stuck with AMD, but they really need to up their game in terms of gaming performance tbh.
Always a generation behind, both in performance and tech. Which is kinda a pain, as I love em and have a 5800X CPU and would love an all AMD setup eventually.
My only issue with mint is that it is downstream of Ubuntu so I feel like the maintainers have to spend too much effort fixing kinks and bypassing Canonical's dumb ideas.
LMDE is cool too, but then its too stable and doesn't have all the nice UI features of regular mint lol.
I find it amusing and interesting that a heap of people work hard to create Debian, then a bunch of other people build on it to create Ubuntu, then a third group of people do a heap of additional work to wind back some of the changes to create Mint.
Yeah, this is me completely, although I did use Fedora kde spin as I was getting tired of the mint ui. I used it exclusively for many many years and the steamdeck completely changed my opinion.
Wow, all this time and you've prevented the screen bezel bumps from making chips in the top case (the palm rests). Clearly, you take better care of your computer than any of the university students I helped at an Apple Store back in the day.
IMO Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch: a pile of duct tape in the name of user experience ready to blow at the worst time, down to the TLS certificate mishaps.
I think you give Manjaro a little too much credit here. Not that I want to hate on it, but Ubuntu is much less closely related to Debian than Manjaro is to Arch.
Yeah, my point was more that both Manjaro and Ubuntu are systematically mismanaged derivatives of brilliant upstream distros with regular blunders in their development process, but with inexplicably large communities.
when i decided to dump windows, i tried lots of distros. most would refuse to install or even boot to live, and the ones that do install successfully have issues with nvidia. like parts of the screen going unresponsive, constantly reverting to 60 hz, and just completely crashing. ubuntu does all three, fedora won't even install, arch distros can't find any of my sound devices. but mint works. no nvidia issues, no crashing, all devices work, refresh rate stays at 120. that's some damn good duct tape.
Not shown: The top 0.05% - "Use whichever distro you're satisfied with. The different distributions exist to offer choice, not to compete."
Seriously... At SCaLE this year I saw people from various distro booths taking breaks and visiting other distro booths. Each time they looked genuinely interested and excited about what the other distro was doing.
Seriously: this non-competitive behavior in the FOSS community is soo fucking refreshing!
Almost like humans find cooperation is healthier than competition on the whole...
FOSS til i die, please.
“Don’t compete! — competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!” -Pjotr Kropotkin
Based and breadpilled.
My God I love Lemmy. Finding a Kropotkin quote in the wild? Outside of an anarchists sub? Without specifically searching for it?
It makes me feel less alone. Thank you.
Glad to be able to quote it and receive so much positive feedback :)
I kinda feel like there's very little overlap between distro fans and distro developers. Probably because distro devs tend to know all the dirty secrets of their distro.
You go on Reddit or wherever and it's all "distro X is evil, use distro Y instead," "No, Y is terrible! Use Z!" And then you sit at a table with a SuSE developer, a Fedora developer and an Ubuntu developer and the conversation is all "so how are you guys dealing with this issue?" "Oh, I think we came up with a great solution, I'll share the patch set with you!" "Wonderful, thanks! By the way I opened up a merge request on your stuff because we figured out how to fix that namespaces issue."
Capitalism thrives on exclusivity, teaching people that others doing the same thing is competition and not friendship.
Read this and your brain might get a new wrinkle: it's possible to appreciate multiple distributions for their own merits.
https://i.imgur.com/suaSSMr.jpeg
Why didn't you just paste a picture in the comment? That's more faster
Copy-pasting the image will upload it to the lemmy instance, taking up storage space. You should instead embed externally hosted images using the following markdown expression:
Yes, this way you reduce the load on your instance, but I often see image hosting deleting images and I get scared when I see an imgur link because it often blocks image viewing for me
I’m using memmy, and I dont see an obvious way to do that.
https://i.imgur.com/suaSSMr_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=grand
This is what happens when I copypaste the same image
Furthermore I cant even expand your thumbnail.
That said my phone has been glitching like crazy so idk
Well, I'm still in the noob stage and i intend to stay there. My OS is just a means to an end and Mint is perfect for that.
That’s fine. Most people aren’t “Windows pros” either.
My windows have arches, BTW.
Saaaame. Been using Mint almost exclusively for 5-10 yrs and i still feel like im playing in the wading pool of what u can do with it. I learn more as I need to, and generally enjoy that process. I always feel super satisfied with myself when i use the terminal, even if its sudo apt-get install Firefox.
Whenever I need to do something, I'll figure it out. Sometimes it's a pain, like getting VNC to work. But then I'll write down the most important bits and duly forget the rest. I just want this stuff to work.
I see more posts complaining about annoying arch users than I actually see annoying arch users
That being said, hell yeah mint
Arch user here. Mint is cool. Go mint!
Of course Mint is cool. If it wasn't it'd be Spice.
Cinnamon hearts DE is pretty spicy. Perfect counterpart to Spearmint OS.
I wish mint + AUR was a thing
Pacstall is AUR for Ubuntu (so UUR?) based distributions. It is certainly less complete than AUR, but still it might be useful depending on your needs.
h
I'd rather trust an Ubuntu community repo than the snap store. At least, for pacstall, the community is able to review the package.
Since the snap store is the default store on Ubuntu , there is more chance that he will be targeted by malicious software than a community repo than has to be manually installed.
Manjaro user here, they're both cool
Linux Mint has been good so far, but Debian is still the one I'm going to use mainly.
Hell yeah Linux Mint Debian Edition
At that point, what are you using Mint for? The Cinammon DE?
IMHO, KDE feels much more modern, while Cinammon kind of feels like it's stuck in 2003. It reminds me of the stock gray boxy Windows 9x/NT/2000 interface.
I love cinnamon it's the main reason I use mint I tried debian with mint but the theming was ugly but the cinnamon on mint mmm beautiful I find it very comfortable and familiar like all the good parts of windows 7 just with a tad bit more modern design
I think Cinnamon is version 6 on Mint while Debian is stuck on a v5 build.
I stuck an Arc theme on it and that modernized it a lot.
To me, Cinnamon sits somewhere between the extremes of Gnome and KDE.
Gnome is an Android launcher with a concussion. Every major update is a list of things it can't do anymore. Hopefully by Gnome 52 the system won't even POST let alone boot. Every utility is a blank window with an empty menu up in the top bar that does as little of its job as it can, apparently in service to some "blank is beautiful" aesthetic.
KDE feels like the control panel of a nuclear power plant, LOADS of crap everywhere. Widgets and wodgets and panels and sidebars where does it end? Every utility is an incorrectly sized window completely crammed full of drop downs, radio buttons and text fields with several tabs and sub-menus with lots of options, because what if esoteric use case?
Cinnamon is a middle ground in between; they have a "most users, most of the time" approach so that UIs are understandable and digestible, and usually let you do what you want to do, without being uselessly blank or obsessively crowded.
Cinnamon doesn't need therapy, Gnome and KDE do.
Guy on the right will use Debian stable, rest is correct.
hell yeah debian
Hell yeah LMDE
Thats the best mint flavor
I just wish they had it w MATE
Yeah I agree with the sentiment, use whatever is good for you, but I feel like most advanced linux users are not using Mint. They typically come to the realization that everything is either Debian, Arch, or build it yourself so they use one of those.
Does Gentoo already count as "build yourself" on your list?
Man, might swap to Debian 12, trying it on my netbook, it's nice.
I'm running Debian 12 for while now and it works great. Gossip says you need to get everything from flatpak because the packages are so outdated, but that's bullshit.
I get newer packages on my netbook then my desktop running u Ubuntu 22.04.
Hell Cinnamon DE is literally an install option on Debian. LOL.
hell yeah mint
Use Linux professionally. Worked with RHEL for years. Current gig uses Debian servers. Daily driver is a system 76 machine with the pop OS that came on it. Debian derivatives make great daily drivers for those of us that just need a browser, terminal, working wifi, and the ability to build and run containers.
The true Linux users are the ones that realize that all Linux is the same. The only differences is package management, Desktop Environment, and customization by the Distro creator.
You can literally just install Debian stable with Cinnamon DE and get basically Linux Mint on Debian. Bonus points for adding backports so you get a slightly more updated kernel.
I know this is a joke, but you should use whatever distro you want to use....because at the end of the day it's all Linux.
My first "daily driver" distro was Arch, and i love every minute of it.
It's a tinkerer's dream
Nixos when you want to work on it and then it works forever ever
The only way to win the argument is to come up with an association that has nothing to do with computers at all.
I use Linux Mint because I like Mint Ice Cream
Well it quite literally says it in its name that it is fucking mint, why wouldn't you run it
mmmm thin mints
I don't have any need for arch, fedora is fine as it is. Might try arch if I have more reliable internet someday, my main concern is my system going brrrr one evening when I need to do some important legal work.
If you need the stablest of stable stuff there's nixos.
Different distros are better at different things. Need a stable distro for your grandma? Use Debian or Mint. Need latest software? Use Arch or Gentoo. (And people do need latest software sometimes. For playing games, or in my case, for doing research. The F is FOSS stands for Free after all.) Similarly, there are server distros like AlmaLinux tuned for high reliability. I think it's counterproductive to argue about the "best" distro.
I guess the meme technically doesn't say that Mint is the best, but it kinda gives off that feeling by ridiculing Arch users.
hell yeah mint
I use Fedora more (at work) but I love the concept and execution of Mint. I’ll definitely use it on future personal machines.
I’m not an expert on distros, but it seems to me like the best drop-in replacement for Windows. It’s familiar for windows users, but it feels much better to use. That combination is great for getting normal people to consider using it.
I would hapilly use linux mint if only it didn't use apt, honestly don't like it as a package manager.
Ghere is also the fact that mint will have older versions of packages, for example neovim which I need to be latest version always.
That's why I loved arch and gentoo before, for their package managers and roling distro nature.
Now I'm on nixos unstable and it's currently my favourite unbreakable distro, and the nix package manager is really good and making my own pqckages is really easy.
What do you not like about apt? Genuinely curious, never used anything besides apt/apt-get and aptitude. Am I missing out?
If you never do more than update, upgrade, install and remove, then just skip every post recommending different distros for their package manager. For you (as for most users), it will not make the slightest difference if you are using apt, packman, whatever else. If there's something you want your package manager to do but it can't, you'll know. And if it comes to that, you can start diving into the different managers and which one is best suited for the specific thing you want to do.
But it has to be mentioned that aptitude does not have super cow powers of course.
You don't miss out on anything if it does what you need.
For me apt is just slow and clunky, don't like the way some of the commands are and they are long, I prefer the way that pacman and portage do it where I can make commands be sinple and only be couple characters instead of whole words.
I liked pacman because it was fast, and it was really easy to block a package from upgrading and downgrading packages is really easy.
I liked portage because it worked with program's sources so I was able to just remove part's of program's and their dependencies I didn't need.
I like nix now because of the way it manages dependencies, and for the fact that packaing programs in it is really easy to do.
That first sentence is what I love about Linux bros. For all the supposed gatekeeping and pretentiousness that goes on in these circles, i find this to be much more representative of my experience. As i said elsewhere in the thread, im really not very well versed in all that Linux is/can be. And yet, somehow someway, ive never really felt put down for it when seeking help.
Before this comment, i honestly didnt know there could be such preferences to ur package managers.
For me, it's quite the opposite. I love that apt commands are so close to natural language.
Nala is a great apt frontend. It supports parallel downloads of packages and speeds up the whole process up a lot.
Not sure which commands irk you as too long. Nala makes a good overview of changes like which package is bumped to what version and where it stands now. So I basically only use
and take it from there. Updates the sources, lists the diff for upgradable packages and ask me to go forward or abort.
Just the pure act of installing a package is longer than with pacman for example.
And the way that apt has seperated regular package and -dev packages irks me a lot when I need a library for something I need to make sure to install a =dev package compared to most other package manager where libraries are installed with the lackage itself.
Am I missing out?Borking your system I guess. /j
Nah, apt is great. I use Arch, but the package manager does not make a difference for me. I think I'd prefer apt for the user friendly terms to use it: apt search, apt install, apt remove, apt purge. Much nicer than the pacman equivalents I haven't even bother to learn.
I don't like apt too as much. But, interface-wise, you can make it way better with Nala, which is a frontend for it.
NixOS is too complicated and demanding for most users, who aren't programmers or hobbyists, imo.
I prefer Fedora Atomic. It has the same pros (unbreakable, highly configurable with universal-blue.org, etc.) but feels way more user friendly.
I use it with Distrobox on top, so I can use my package manager/ distro of choice (turned out to be Arch btw) on a extremely reliable system.
For your case, you can replicate Mint by just installing the Cinnamon image from uBlue and applying some minimal tweaks.
Then you get the user friendliness from Mint with the flexibility and unbreakability from NixOS. Do you like the idea? Just in case you get annoyed by NixOS in the future 🙃
Seems like a fine idea, but nixos is just exactly what I want from a distro it turns out and nix is just the package manager I wanted but never knew I did.
I like the idea of the fedora immutable distros, but the reliance on flatpak makes me a bit nervous (guess I’m just old-fashioned)… I think some kind of solution that puts a stable system like Debian or immutable fedora with a package manager like Nix might be very good (I know the U-Blue guys have been playing with homebrew?)
You can still install Nix (package manager) on Atomic, on uBlue, it even comes pre-installed afaik.
And also, there's Distrobox, which is totally enough if you prefer package managers over Flatpaks.
I personally like the "reliance" on Flatpaks. I think it reduces the fragmentation and makes it easier for devs, but that's just my opinion. Do as you prefer.
Actually, I just tried both homebrew and Nix with a Debian 12 installation and I’m not impressed. Homebrew only ships CLI apps, and GUI applications installed with Nix famously don’t show up in application launchers… it seems like you don’t really get the features of Nix unless you use NixOS.
I don't think OSTree systems can quite reach the flexibility of NixOS. For instance with NixOS (with direnv and nix-shells) you can essentially swap out your running system based on the different directories you enter and I think that's still just scraping the top of the iceberg. From my experience with OSTree (which is admittedly somewhat limited) I don't think you can reach that level of flexibility.
It's still really cool, I don't mean to shit on that, I'm just saying NixOS and OSTree have different pros and cons and use cases.
If for some unspecified reason you truly and absolutely need the latest version of something, nothing's stopping you from pulling the repo and building it yourself.
That's fine when you need only one or two things, but when you wan't your whole system to be up to date as much as possible it becomes tedious.
And I'm questioning the need for that.
For me it's the fact that I almost always need a feature from a program that's in a recent release that is never in debian/ubuntu until a couple years later.
For every single package?
Just about 90% of packages that I wan't to use
X
Fairly long-term Mint veteran here: usually if I need software that's more up to date than what's in the standard repo, Flatpak will do.
Oh god no
I really like the idea of Nix, but having to have GitHub account to publish a package is a big no for me, even if I have one.
I'm in the same boat as you, but haven't tried making my own packages. Is there a guide somewhere I can follow?
I mostly just searched
nixos how to package pyrhon/go/rust/ programornixos how to package sddm theme/gtk/...The best resource honestly are the randon blogposts since the wiki itself is really bad.
I also recommend the channel vimjoyer.
I also recommend to get into the habit of searching for options on https://search.nixos.org/options and for packages on https://search.nixos.org/packages which are great resources to know what you can set or install and already packages.
You can also check my nixos config on examples for how to package sddm theme and shell scripts.
I also have a couple programs on my selfhosted gitea that use flakes for packaging which you can checkout also.
https://code.cronyakatsuki.xyz/crony/nixos
This is really useful. Thanks a lot! (Agree about the wiki).
There's a Fedora Cinnamon spin.
I used
archinstallto setup my laptop with Gnome and only usepamac-nosnapfor package management (flatpak is fine, but fuck snaps).I made the most noob Arch install ever and I love it.
Noobs don't know to avoid snaps... But that setup wpuld be good to recommend if a noob really needs to use arch, btw.
Right out of the box it functions enough like Windows that even my wife swapped with barely a hiccup
Yes, other distros can be great and all that jazz, but Mint makes a strong first toe dip for those who are less confident in tech
Shit, I'm confident and I actually preferred my mint install over the other couple of distros I tried partly because it came mostly pre done and only my server gets my IT time these days
To be fair, you can say the same thing about KDE.
Tried out fedora and it was really good, but mint just felt a little bit more right to me
Which sucks cuz I fuckin own a fedora like a massive nerd and wanted to make that joke as often as possible. I mean I grow mint too but big fucking whoop it's a dollar to get a plant and near impossible to kill
Oh I definitely like the idea of Mint, but for gaming I need a distro that keeps itself up to date more often, especially when it comes to graphics drivers and Proton, etc.
Could you explain the highlighted bolted part for me? Is that a typo, or some kind of gardening term?
Yahh, i think they are joking about the hat and the plant
That mint ain't going nowhere
No I get they are being tongue and cheek, I just don't literally understand the meaning of using the word 'nest' and 'impossible to kill' together in a sentence.
"near impossible to kill"
Autocorrect and my lack of proofreading foiled me
Two choices in the end game.
Ready to go out of the box? Mint.
Bare install where you pick your programs? Debian.
And then there's the secondary question for some of us... the machine you game on?
Ready to go? Fedora, Pop, or several other choices.
Bare install where you pick your programs? Arch.
I run Tumbleweed btw.
Been using arch + sway + neovim for 5 years now. Everyone says it’s the “I spend more time fucking with configs than getting work done” setup but then why does my dotfiles repo look like this?
Wow, I've been using Linux Mint for 5 years. I don't have nor do I need a dotfile repo.
Big "I don't even think of you" energy. I'm here for it.
Lmao
... But... What is a dot file repo? I just want to play games and do homework.
Configuration files: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/dotfiles-what-is-a-dot-file-and-how-to-create-it-in-mac-and-linux/
Neither do I, but it’s nice to have the same settings on my desktop and laptop
If you use vim and/or tmux you'll commit a lot to your dotfiles initially, but after you reach a stable configuration that you like you won't be changing much
I don't use vim nor do I use tmux.
If you don't use software that needs configuration then you don't need dotfiles
Use Arch if you want maintaining your system to be a hobby in its own right. Use Mint if you just want something that works.
The funny thing is, I feel like I have to maintain my arch system less than Windows
It's definitely not as bad as people make out. That said, I only run Arch on my main machine, and Debian on the rest. Just in case, you understand.
Unless you want two monitors with different scaling.
Arch is great if you want to customize your system, but I wouldn't say it really needs "maintaining" beyond just updating more frequently. (which you don't even really need to do very often, you just have the option to get newer versions of software.)
I don't even update my Arch setup that often. Most of my stuff lives in flatpaks. I just want updated software and rolling release, which Arch is the best for that.
Same with Manjaro 🤟
Jeez, no. Use endeavouros
i've had manjaro break way more than normal arch
Tbf after searching for a just works distro and going down a distrohopping bunny hole I ended up on arch lol.
pacman -S gnome and everything is gucci + AUR is something else.
Yea I'll stick with Arch for the AUR, so many times I've come across something I wanted to try and I see .tar.gz and I'm like ehhhh
9/10 it's on the AUR
I stay away from AUR because it is completely unsandboxed and unmonitored.
To be fair, I don't believe flathub is constantly monitored, but at least it is (somewhat) sandboxed, if I set everything up in flatseal.
I have recently replaced my final .tar.gz app (git-credential-manager) with the builtin github extension of codium, and removed my final two ostree overlay with flatpak sdk extensions.
I am now happy (except I can no longer gpg sign my commit... https://github.com/flathub/com.vscodium.codium/issues/105 )
I mean, there are two options: You either don't have the technical knowledge or time to install it yourself and thus you'd are fucked, or you don't have the technical knowledge to read through the AUR and make sure it is safe and you could be fucked.
Or, a third option for the gurus: You build it yourself, but then you might aswell read through AUR and save yourself time.
Ideally you would install app directly from the app developer, who you are trusting by using their app; or your distros maintainer, who you are trusting by using their OS.
The use of AUR and/or unverified flathub app adds an additional person to trust, that is the person packaging these apps. flathub is slightly better as the app is sandboxed, so the damage they can cause is confined.
Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no store for sandboxed command line apps, this is one of the reason I like to minimize my command line usage. So that I don't need app that isn't packaged by my distro maintainer (like oh-my-zsh) to improve my cli experience.
Wayland is a ton of issues for me. But that was my fault for buying a laptop with an nVidia card. Never again.
You are missing the "Cinnamon on Arch" guy a little further up the scale, but you gotta crop somewhere I guess 🤷
idk man, i just like me a good non derivative distro. Debian, arch, nix, gentoo, whatever as long as it has less hands it's being passed through im happy.
Having a custom distro that installs some extra frequently used software by default is no problem for me.
for me that's just a script that auto installs the software i need at minimum to be productive. Gimme an X server, i3wm, and some applications to compliment it and i'll be one very happy user.
Meanwhile I'm over here dual booting Mint and Artix. I like fun, bleeding edge hobby distros and reliable boring ones that do everything I really need completely reliably.
Definition of standing on the shoulders of giants. Even from the start when it offered the codecs Ubuntu didn't mint has been there. Same for arch want something specified but don't want to start at a lfs or Gentoo it has your back all you have to do is read up on the bits you want. I think it's amazing that for me the best distros are still community ones.
LFS is the linux pilgrimage that turns noobs into greybeards. Whrn it work uou erase it and install debian.
I'm old enough to remember this being Ubuntu.
MINT, MINT , MINT
Dayum, 9 years ago i started with mint and distro hopped a bit then daily drived arch for many years, and now I'm back to lmde6, so you ain't gotta call me out like that
I prefer Fedora. It works great and has no bullshit.
I tried installing Fedora a few weeks back.
It did not like my 3080 and broke horribly.
Back to Endeavour...
The Nvidia card I bought about 3yrs ago to replace my old AMD one. Kinda wish I'd stuck with AMD, but they really need to up their game in terms of gaming performance tbh.
Always a generation behind, both in performance and tech. Which is kinda a pain, as I love em and have a 5800X CPU and would love an all AMD setup eventually.
debian for my server, fedora for my desktop, endeavouros for my laptop
just use what you like if it make sense for the given context
I thought they closed down Mint to get people to sign up for Credit Karma?
Wait what?
They seem to be talking about the budgeting app "Mint" as opposed to the Linux OS. Linux Mint isn't going away any time soon.
Ooh haha, that really confused me there, thanks for the explanation!
After googling, I think that was a joke about an unrelated app.
They did! I switched to Monarch, it's REALLY nice. They even have a feature tracker for ones they are working on AFAIK.
My only issue with mint is that it is downstream of Ubuntu so I feel like the maintainers have to spend too much effort fixing kinks and bypassing Canonical's dumb ideas.
LMDE is cool too, but then its too stable and doesn't have all the nice UI features of regular mint lol.
I find it amusing and interesting that a heap of people work hard to create Debian, then a bunch of other people build on it to create Ubuntu, then a third group of people do a heap of additional work to wind back some of the changes to create Mint.
Hard to tell if the 𝑦-axis is population or loudness
It is a sinus wave from me, went between Ubuntu and Arch several times depending on how playful y feel :D
nixos ftw
Ah, End of The Linux pipeline
I would like a mint.
Yeah, this is me completely, although I did use Fedora kde spin as I was getting tired of the mint ui. I used it exclusively for many many years and the steamdeck completely changed my opinion.
What do you mean? Did it convince you to keep using KDE or did you go back to another desktop afterwards?
Sorry, what I mean is that steamdeck desktop mode made me love kde plasma and decide to switch from mint to kde plasma.
More like Fedora with a bunch of VMs
What flavor?
Is Cinnamon still the default?
Minty MacBook resurrection I did a while back
Wow, all this time and you've prevented the screen bezel bumps from making chips in the top case (the palm rests). Clearly, you take better care of your computer than any of the university students I helped at an Apple Store back in the day.
IMO Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch: a pile of duct tape in the name of user experience ready to blow at the worst time, down to the TLS certificate mishaps.
People pick really weird distros to worship...
It's strange to worship any distro.
The only distro we should worship is Hannah Montana Linux
More like Ubuntu is to Debian what Manjaro is to Arch. And then Linux Mint takes the nice stuff from Ubuntu but does away with the bullshit.
I think you give Manjaro a little too much credit here. Not that I want to hate on it, but Ubuntu is much less closely related to Debian than Manjaro is to Arch.
Yeah, my point was more that both Manjaro and Ubuntu are systematically mismanaged derivatives of brilliant upstream distros with regular blunders in their development process, but with inexplicably large communities.
when i decided to dump windows, i tried lots of distros. most would refuse to install or even boot to live, and the ones that do install successfully have issues with nvidia. like parts of the screen going unresponsive, constantly reverting to 60 hz, and just completely crashing. ubuntu does all three, fedora won't even install, arch distros can't find any of my sound devices. but mint works. no nvidia issues, no crashing, all devices work, refresh rate stays at 120. that's some damn good duct tape.