We’re talking linux. “It just works” is something relatively new lol

Honestly that’s a big part of the fear of changing OS. If it works why something else. Users with specific use cases are rarer.

I’ve tried many distros. Nothing you’ve said is unique to Mint.

Just don’t use Manjaro.

Every single Linux version is going to have something it can’t handle. Linux mint is stable and handles most stuff just fine.

If you’d like to know that Mint can’t handle…

*raises hand*

6 monitors connected to 2 GPUs – one old Radeon and one 3090. I tried Mint and it could not handle that setup, no matter what I tried doing to it. Currently on Ubuntu, which worked with that setup right out of the box, no tweaking necessary.

Yeah I’m not saying it’s the worst distro, I just don’t think my multiple experiences with it remotely align with the reputation.

Regarding the UI, I think people want familiarity and even think they want something with a design like that. But in practice the similarities are only skin deep and to me if they’re already going to need to learn all the ways it differs from windows, why not put the same effort into learning something that also varies superficially from windows (just in a different way than mint)?

I think the real reason people recommend mint is, while deep down they know users will have a better time on Ubuntu, they cannot stand the idea of recommending that company’s product directly.

Yup. People need to understand that “stable” is not a synonym for bug-free.

As you said, DEs in particularly move so fast that the rare bug that makes it through and is subsequently quickly fixed is much less problematic than sometimes years of missing features and longstanding bugs that don’t get backported.

Wayland: display server. The thing that shows the visual stuff on screen. Wayland=new and more features (features explained below). X11=old but stable and takes time to transition from without bugs.

HDR: high dynamic range. If you have a really nice TV or monitor, this gives you better color accuracy. Make sure you have good brightness levels with brightness cranked up, or it will counter intuitively look worse, like the brown filter PS3 era of video games.

VRR: variable refresh rate. When you run a game, some parts are harder to render than others due to increased detail and things happening in the screen. Thus, your frame rate will dip, making a noticeable jittery effect that is not smooth, especially if you have a high refresh rate monitor. My monitor refreshes 165 times per second to detect changes, and if the frame rate goes from 140 frames generated to 90, that is very noticeable. VRR syncs the refresh rate of your monitor to the GPU itself, so it knows exactly how many frames it will be getting. My monitor will refresh 90 times for that second that I got a frame drop instead of 165, which drastically decreases the jittery effect of the dropped frames. You can still kind of tell, but it is more smooth and responsive in terms of what is happening on screen.

Heterogeneous displays: monitors of different resolutions.

Fractional scaling: this allows you to set display zoom at different percentages on different monitors, as well as setting non-integer scaling (integer is 100% to 200%, non integer is 100% to 125%). This is important because 100% scaling is often too small on high resolutions, and 200% is comically large. Also for the multiple monitor scenario, most people have a new monitor and their old monitor as the secondary. For example, 4k will require 150% scaling at least to be readable st most screen sizes. 1080p will look too zoomed in at over 100%, and not match the look of the other monitor.

In summary, most of this is going to matter only if you are a gamer or watch HDR content like movies on your computer. Having matching monitors despite non matching resolutions is pretty nice though. But if you have matching monitors or 1 monitor it doesn’t matter either. Hence, Mint is not a good choice for a gaming or home theater situation, but its hyper focus on being stable makes everyone else like it more because they never do anything different unless it is for sure going to work. At this point though, most distros are using Wayland with no issues.

Love seeing Clone High memes in the wild.

Was just reminiscing the theme song a couple days back.

It definitely takes time, and stable distros should exist. Wayland has been the clear choice moving forward for 7 years though. It feels like Mint & a few others are just stalling at this point.

Most anything that used KDE or GNOME will use all Wayland features. Every once in a while some distros with GNOME won’t but I forget who and they may have fixed it by now. KDE has better customization and looks more like Mint/Windows by default so I’d stick with that personally.

I use Fedora KDE. It gets more updates than Ubuntu based stuff but nowhere near what rolling distros like Arch do. It’s a very well documented “regular person” distro. I like their package manager better than apt. Can still use KDE Discover for just about any app installation. Downsides: you have to install Nvidia drivers manually, and sign them + your Secure Boot keys if you want to use Secure Boot. Not relevant to you though.

Bazzite is Fedora Atomic but with additional gaming tweaks. Atomic/immutable means you can’t break it, but also aren’t supposed to/can’t install native packages and drivers yourself. But Bazzite gives you everything you need from the jump like drivers. Also Secure Boot needs Universal Blue’s signature I think which isn’t too hard but you will have to look it up. You must use flatpaks only.

Cachy OS is Arch but with a sane installer that walks you through everything in GUI. It has even more optimizations than Bazzite, and is #1 for gaming. It also holds back updates slightly from regular Arch, so breaking happens less often. But it’s still “basically” a rolling distro, so breakage may happen. You pretty much have to use their app store instead of KDE Discover or whatnot. No Secure Boot.

Overall Fedora and Bazzite are both easy to medium difficulty at worst, but for different reasons. Cachy is medium difficulty but best at gaming & general performance optimization.

For some variety, I recently switched from x11 to Wayland and it fixed some problems I was having with game input.

We are not pretending. Debugged and working reliably is better than new. Being new is not automatically useful value.

It’s also kinda antithetical to what people are saying, which is that mint is great out of the box.

Edit: also, since you wanna fuckin go there, Linux Mint is downstream from Ubuntu, which is corporate BS. So you’re making accusations in a mirror.

yeah, corporate bs with all the corporate bs taken out.

also, LMDE exists.

Me: At least my neighbors aren’t those inbred hicks over there
You : Actually, those people have only practiced cousin marriage, which has been socially acceptable for various centuries
Me : Yeah, the point is more that they are hicks.

Woah, mint is still on x11? Yikes, I didn’t realize that, if that’s true.