- 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.
My first “daily driver” distro was Arch, and i love every minute of it.
It’s a tinkerer’s dream
I started in the middle and have ultimately landed on the right. Most distros weren’t around when I started. Slackware on floppies in '92, Gentoo and many others along the (gasp!) decades) including all the major players - roll your own or otherwise.
About 8 years ago I tried out Mint as a Daily driver. After years and years of countless tinkering and compiling and swapping distros, I just wanted something to get rid of Windows. It did well and it stuck. About a year later, I didn’t even have a Windows partition. I tried a few other distros like it, but Linux Mint “got me” and their stance on things is refreshing (looking at you Snaps & Canonical). I still mess around with other distros now and then, but the fact that my machine(s) have like 5 9’s of uptime (reboots for new kernels not withstanding) for nearly a decade feels so good. I also use it as a base for all of my servers. It’s rock solid, has everything I want, and really minor overhead to have everything convenient in the gui. Yes, I’ve been a sysadmin, etc. Don’t care. :)
Hard to tell if the 𝑦-axis is quantity or loudness
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.
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.
You are missing the “Cinnamon on Arch” guy a little further up the scale, but you gotta crop somewhere I guess 🤷
hell yeah mint
Mint. When you just need it to work now and forever without having to think about it ever.
I mean I love LFS as much as anyone, but damn son, I’ve got shit to do.
Nixos when you want to work on it and then it works forever ever
Nah I take OpenBSD that works, work on it, then break it forever right after it’s been pushed to prod at 4:50 before a holiday weekend. Like men do. (giant /S)
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
With the snap store in the condition that it is, would you even want to risk installing anything from an Ubuntu community repository?
Manjaro user here, they’re both cool
Of course Mint is cool. If it wasn’t it’d be Spice.
I run Tumbleweed btw.
Guy on the right will use Debian stable, rest is correct.
Hell yeah LMDE
I just wish they had it w MATE
Thats the best mint flavor
hell yeah debian
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.
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.
Does Gentoo already count as “build yourself” on your list?
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…
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 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.
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.
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
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 🙃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.
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 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.
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.
This is really useful. Thanks a lot! (Agree about the wiki).
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.
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.
Am I missing out?Borking your system I guess. /j
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 upgradeand 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.
For me, it’s quite the opposite. I love that apt commands are so close to natural language.
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.
hell yeah mint
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.
