Laughs in Debian Stable
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Excitedly get new machine. Install Debian.
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Not so excitedly search error messages.
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Dejectedly find need kernel/drivers that’s 18 months later than the Debian versions
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boot sysrescuecd to find next distro to write to USB drive …
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kick self for buying shiny, latest hardware without checking for linux support. Again…😡
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Problems? ‘old’? I seem to need a little clarification.
By default Mint ships 3 years old kernel and a lot of hardware don’t work with it. Mint allows installing newer kernel easily but one must know that is the case.
Mint only works on X11. This is fine to some, but to others it’s a showcase of X shortcomings right away
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I don’t know the difference between Wayland and X11, all I know is that they’re options, and I’m 30 days into the Arch-derived(is that the right term?) Garuda Linux that defaults Wayland with a 3080 and I haven’t had any problems? Aren’t the Mint problems that it’s a stable distro with outdated stuff?
Stable has nothing to do with outdated packages.
That’s a personal decision by a distro.
Fedora is a stable distro because generally the packages stay on the same major version throughout the version, however they have a list of exceptions for certain applications that should be updated for security or perhaps they don’t follow a major/minor/bugfix release and it’s bad practice to hack together your own versions.
Fedora rebases it’s packages every 6 months, so it’s never left far behind.
I see! Thank you for the explanation, I’m still very new as this is my first Linux and I did no planning or intentional research before swapping over, I just got mad at Windows and was formatting my main dive 15 minutes later. I avoided Mint specifically because I’d seen lemmy threads saying it was using old packages on purpose for stability reasons, and that for actual gaming I’d want rolling release?
It all depends on what you actually want to do.
I have a computer connected to the TV with Chimera installed because that’s SteamOS 3 with emulators preconfigured and is completely couch + controller friendly.
My laptop has Fedora because it’s up to date, but everything is tested before release, and all upgrade paths are automated unlike Arch which burnt me in the past with breaking changes.
On my Pi’s I have Diet Pi, which is Debian but has images for each of the different ARM boards and has a bunch of scripts for setting up print servers, Home Assistant, etc. I want Debian for it’s slow unchanging nature there.
On my desktop, less so.
But underneath they are all Linux, and they all behave in very similar ways, it’s all about the initial setup.
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Screen tearing hasn’t been a serious issue in X11 for years now, unless you run XFCE. It’s just not an issue in Gnome or KDE.
I run Wayland+ optimus and it worked on PopOS just fine. Took a slight bit of tweaking on Universal Blue, but nothing major. Mainly it works with gaming on Bazzite but not Aurora for some bizarre reason. CUDA worked fine in all of the above.
I’ve tried a few distro’s recently. Pop os, mint, and nobara. Mint was pretty bad (i really wanted it not to be), nobara was good but had issues with sleep and after a month my sound quit working. Pop OS has been flawless and I love that I can set the workspaces hot key to the windows key.
Arch is actually reasonable as the foundation of an easy to use Linux OS, provided you don’t care about stability. It’s up to date with all the latest stuff, has support for many apps and packages without having to add extra repos, and it has fantastic documentation. All that’s really missing is the GUI installer and stuff to help newbies. Projects like EndeavorOS and Garuda provide that.
If you actually need stability though, which lots of new users would appreciate, use Fedora or a derivative like Nobara or Universal Blue.
I daily drive Nvidia plus Optimus with wayland, but it’s easy enough to switch back to X11 just using a menu on the login screen.
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How are you managing to break Linux OSes so much?
I don’t understand why people don’t go for something like ZorinOS or Nobara. Both work great out of the box with support for like everything.
To be fair the nobara website is very “pet project” both in the design and also in the frequent warnings about using it for anything real. Is a good distro tho, having said that.
Because choosing a distro to begin with isn’t easy. Ask ten people and you’ll get eleven suggestions.
Because people suggest distros based on their preference, not what is best suited in a given situation.
On one hand Mint is limited to X11 for now and surprise surprise “dealing with multiple monitors is horrible on Linux”. On other hand they’re on NVIDIA. This is close to not be the case, but X11 was a hard requirement for decades
I daily drive Optimus plus Wayland. Doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore.
Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability. Problems can also come from packages being too new and not having all the standout issues worked out of them.
Older packages, but not too old, generally provide better stability.
And worse compatibility. Old packages are a no go for upstream supported hardware like Intel’s and AMD’s.
around 1 year and a half, thats way too long, considering the Pipewire, OBS, Kernel, Gaming and other drivers updates. Not even mentioning all the updates KDE and Gnome just got in the last 3 months.
stay away from debían stable or slackware then…
I generally would for desktop use, and absolutely wouldn’t rexommend them for a new user.
And I’m on 6.5 right now running the Mint Edge ISO edition on Mint 21.3
it hasn’t been a problem lately, but for basically an entire year I was helping first timers through getting a more recent lutris for games because the one mint shipped was ancient and broken and on top of that the 32 bit wine dependencies were practically impossible to resolve for some games
It’s the Lutris version shipped with 22.04, which by today’s standards is definitely ancient. Because I’m not generally a Flatpak fan for stuff that requires larger packages or dependencies, I went directly to the Lutris PPA. And because I’m running KDE Neon, I had to work around the annoying libpoppler dependency issue that’s always plagued Wine on Neon.
It’s my favourite distro because of three reasons.
- Arch worth lightweight with minimal QOL improvement
- best user community 3 ) who doesn’t like space theme distro?? lol
I just setup on my T480 with BTRFS and BTRFS-Assistant and snapper last night. It’s working well
I refuse to use anything that isnt arch based unless its a niche linux distribution for something specific because the arch user repository basically solves the biggest issue for newbies which is getting a grasp of packages for software. it has any of the common software and if you do need to build something from a github repo, that is ofc easy enough on any distro. I’m not the most technically inclined with linux and I use a chatgpt got thingy called code copilot in their search thing and I can use it to solve even really niche problems I have like a USB DAC not being recognized because it doesn’t have the correct read/write permissions. most of the time I just ask basic things like how to get whatever github repo working and it helps me troubleshoot if I run into weird issues. I even got it to help me set up neo-matrix to run in alacrity terminal on bootup, it was a nice introduction to scripting and autostart and stuff when it helped me, so now I have a little bit better grasp on how that all works out.
It’s because Mint used to be Ubuntu without the fuss. Now Ubuntu is Ubuntu without the fuss and mint is Ubuntu with broken packages.
The funny part is that Mint was always just Ubuntu with broken packages.
Edit: I think I hurt some feelings
What packages are broken? I haven’t run into any.
P.S. I think Snaps are now the fuss, so I still think Mint is Ubuntu with the fuss.
Mint is what Ubuntu should of been. Ubuntu is kind of a dumpster fire that everyone abandoned.
I agree that Linux Mint is closer to what the vocal Linux desktop community would like to see, but Ubuntu is anything but abandoned. Where I work, both my coworkers (excluding myself) and customers are either using RHEL or Ubuntu. That’s it. Sure, everyone on Lemmy and Reddit swears against Ubuntu and has no need for plain-RHEL, but a lot more of the non-vocal Linux community is using Ubuntu. I prefer Pop!_OS, but that’s besides the point.
Source: Ubuntu is anywhere between 4th and 6th place on these charts:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres-mobile.php?resource=popularity
Now Ubuntu is Ubuntu without the fuss
Ubuntu is a trojan horse for Snap.
I only just switched to Linux this past week and I use Mint. It was suggested to me by someone here on lemmy. It was easy to set up, customize, and get all my stuff working on it. I have World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Elden Ring and a few other games all working on it. The only issue, and right now it’s a minor one, I’m having is the 535 nividia drivers can cause random stutters/lag every now and then but nothing major.
My point is for people like me who are new to linux and don’t want to get overwhelmed I think Mint is great. I know eventually i’ll change to a different more “advanced” distro, right now I have my eye on CachyOS, but I don’t think I’m there quite yet to confidently install it.
Because it is stable and works really well. It has GUI apps that are not only not broken but well designed and snappy.
Ubuntu has a lot of “snappy” GUI apps as well…
You said the bad word that hipster Linux boi’s don’t like. I rarely have trouble our of Ubuntu. I’ve slowly eliminated most of the snaps. But its not cool for it to work. It has to be hyped. This is what they can’t stand.
Ubuntu is a lot of things but it isn’t snappy
Snappy and bloaty
Not slow and bloaty. I’m not sure why you think snaps are snappy. They aren’t.
I’m not sure why you think snaps are snappy. They aren’t.
It is pun. Snaps are bloaty and not snappy.
Stable is not equivalent to “works well”. It is randomly frozen at some point, mostly not in contact with upstream devs, so you just have outdated packages.
OpenSUSE slowroll sounds like a way better model. Or maybe CentOS stream.
But it’s not randomly frozen, it’s tied to Ubuntu’s LTS builds. And they didn’t say “stable” is the same as “works well”, they said Mint is both (which is true from my experience at least)
If you need newer packages with Mint, Flatpak is a good way to go (yes it has its own issues, but they do work well for a lot of people)
It is randomly frozen as not all developers follow Ubuntus release schedule. They just release when it is ready.
Stability means backporting tons of bugfixes to tons of small packages and libraries. I dont think Ubuntu does that for enough packages, best example Plasma 5.27 on Kubuntu. I have reported over 200 bugs I guess and most of the newer ones are just fixed in Plasma 6.
Flatpak for sure is a good way, and if a distro is stable, they should only install Flatpaks.
It is not randomly frozen as Mint does follow Ubuntu’s LTS releases, every new version they put out is based on whatever the current Ubuntu LTS is. Their release cadence isn’t linked that closely as a new LTS usually takes a few months to spawn a new Mint release based on it, but they aren’t just freezing some arbitrary point in time of development.
If you mean Ubuntu is randomly frozen, it isn’t either. It follows a release schedule, determines a roadmap, and at a certain predetermined point in developing a new release, they do freeze for new versions so they can complete testing and ensure everything works together in time to release on schedule. It’s certainly not “random”.
And that’s also not what stability means. Stability means functionality doesn’t change, so an up to date Mint 21.3 installed on release is going to be the same as one installed and updated now, functionally speaking. This is accomplished by only backporting important security patches and bug fixes to the version of the software that’s used by the system rather than getting it with new versions where there are new features and changes to existing functionality that can break things based on the previous version. This does not mean it gets all fixes, just the ones they deem worth the effort of backporting.
Yes I think you mentioned the relevant points here. Ubuntu tests their preinstalled software, while there is tons more in the repos that is not as tested. Same with Mint.
And they backport only stuff they think is necessary. For example Plasma 5 is based on the EOL Qt5 and backporting things to Plasma 5 is nearly impossible as you need real Plasma devs and nobody really wants to do that.
Plasma 6 is really stable, 6.1 not so much, but the timing was not perfect. Simply because they do their release schedule as fixed as that.
It is a total pain if you simply want working software, as they may backport some stuff, but all the stuff not preinstalled, or that is very complex, will not get fixes.
This is the same with all stable distros, if the maintainers dont literally maintain all the software there is.
I mean, that’s definitely a downside to long term stable distros. So, basically, the choice is between that and a rolling release which has the downside of the possibility of things breaking on update and never really having an easily reproducible build
No, Fedora is semi-rolling with less random freezes. Regular Ubuntu is similar but just not Ubuntu please.
Fedora also had 13 months of support so staying on the older version gives an extra stability.
And then there is OpenSUSE slowroll, which is CI/CD with more testing
Trying different distributions is a must on using Linux, I still remember my first one, Mandrake, and is not a happy memory. Now Arch is my master, to get here It was not an easy or direct ride, I tried several ones through the years until I find the light ;)
You are right, I wanted to do some nodejs and realized that the package in the repo was Node version 12.something while latest node is version 20.something.
Also they still ship Python 3.10 which is ancient technology by today’s standard, luckily nothing major is added between 3.10 and 3.12
Their mirrors are worst, ALL OF SELECTABLE OPTIONS FROM MIRROR SELECTOR which shows up at 47 KB/sec which just hurts your area spanning from asshole to large intestines.
I use bridgetide linux mint mirror btw
So why am I not switching?
Here is why: Linux mint is based on Ubuntu meaning that you can add Ubuntu repos or ppas or whatever they need directly into Linux Mint and dont have to worry about it breaking.
Say that you need to have some software for a reason and you cannot find one in Flatpak or an appimage, etc. You will be happy to realize that many of these software are built for Ubuntu and provide their deb package with own repo with updates.
I run Linux Mint 21.3 and that means I can just use a program built for Ubuntu Jammy as Linux Mint Virginia is based on Ubuntu Jammy. If I need to install something out of repo, I can just go and install Ubuntu jammy deb package and it will work normally.
You think LM being “too old” is a problem for newbies? I’ve been running some distro or other since RedHat 5. I it took me 6 weeks of waiting for Fedora to sort out most of the issues, (and I STILL have some minor ghosting issues and I ain’t no gamer), and 4 tries to get Fedora 40 to successfully take the nVidia drivers for the GTX1650 chipset in my laptop.
You think a new wannbe convert is going to put up with that?
