linuxmemes

imo the rumor that mint is the easiest is harmful to the whole ecosystem. it implies there arent countless other easy distros and stifles accurate choices for many new people.

I admire how Linux Mint makes it easy to set things up for the user's liking. Also, it gives so much confidence to the end user in learning the new platform.

An OS should GTFO and let you get on with the business of doing shit on your computer, Linux Mint does that nicely. 🐧

I'm a relative basic bitch, I don't want to spend forever in terminal. Mint has been a god send and I'm so happy I left windows for it. A special shout out to steam for being the goat and making what little gaming I do easy.

Desktop? Debian with GNOME. Laptop? Debian with GNOME. Tablet? Debian with GNOME. Server? Believe it or not, Debian without GNOME.

I feel like I’m missing out on the mint hype train tbh. I’ve never tried it before but there’s an ignorant part of me that’s like “how much better could it possibly be than Ubuntu with Cinnamon?”. I know it must be because so many people default to it and rave about it, even after using Ubuntu.

My default ol reliable used to be Solus Linux. God I loved that distro. I had an install that lasted 4 years straight, no issues whatsoever.

But in recent years I’ve taken a major liking to Bazzite. Oh my god it’s incredible: immutable OSs are fucking amazing. I shouldn’t be trusted with accessing system files, it never ends well. So this really helps. 

After testing LM with Cinnamon, and a ubuntu based distribution with KDE… KDE is just better.

@ekZepp For me, it's Debian. It always just works.

Its nice if you aren't on a laptop and need Wayland.

I use Debian as my daily driver for at least a decade, but I still recommend Mint because it has all the good things about Debian with extra.

Debian developers just push out kernel updates without warning you about any possible system incompatibilities, so for example if you have an Nvidia GPU you might get a notificaton to "update" and a normie will likely press it only for the PC to boot to a black screen because Debian pushed out a kernel update that breaks compatibility with Nvidia drivers and does nothing to warn the user about it, and then a normie probably won't know how to get out of the black screen to the TTY and roll back the update.

I remember this happening before and I had to go to the reddit for /r/Debian and respond to all the people freaking out explaining to them how to fix their system and rollback the update.

Operating systems like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, etc, will do more testing with their kernel before rolling it out to users. They also tend to have more up-to-date kernels. I had Debian on everything but my gaming PC that I had built recently because Debian 12 used such an old kernel that it wouldn't support my motherboard hardware. This was a kernel-level issue and couldn't be fixed just by installing a new driver. Normies are not going to want to compile their own kernel for their daily driver, and neither do I who has a lot of experience with Linux.

I ended up just using Mint until Debian 13 released on that PC because my only option would be to switch to the unstable or testing branch, or compile my own kernel, which neither I cared to do on a PC I just wanted to work and play Horizon or whatever on.

Fedora

Why bother with distro hopping when you can desktop hop? 

Went back to Mint a few times but ultimately I like Plasma over Cinnamon, so Debian it is!

Mint has been glazed since the beginning of time. Not a single laptop or computer I have ever owned has worked out of the box with it. As opposed to alternatives like Ubuntu or Fedora. I must be the single most unlucky person in the history of Linux.

I don't know how long I've used Debian at this point.

Man... I just fucking love CachyOS. I switched from Win11 a few weeks ago and up until now it is just a great experience.

Arch is pretty reliable

I never left!

I think I'm just old enough, have fiddled with my PC enough times in the past, have enough other shit to do, and get enough coding and troubleshooting experience at work that I look at the quest to find my spirit distro and think "that's a youngster's game."

Or, you know, maybe Mint is already my spirit distro and I am experienced enough to not fix what isn't broken!

I started with Debian and XFCE and I still use Debian and XFCE lol

A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite or aurora if you don't like gaming is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

There is no one reliable distro. Mint, itself is based off Ubuntu and also releases LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).

If reliablility is measured in terms of how stable a distro is, then likely Debian with it's conservative approach to packaging updates comes to mind (No wonder large number of distros are based off Debian only).

I would even argue as long as someone isn't messing with a niche distro such as KDE Neon( meant to showcase KDE packages) or Linuxfx (or whatever it has renamed itself to, one of the few shady ones IMO ) or Trisquel OS (a GNU certified distro where running into dependency hell isn't new); it will suit user's case.

Debian, Slackware, Void, Zorin, even rolling release like Arch (basically any one that meets the user's use case is reliable)

Yup, I do regular distrofuckery on my spare pc but Mint is just a rock solid option for me, great distro, feels good.

I mean, depends on your style. I've been running endeavouros (Arch spin) on my desktop for two years now and it's finally felt like home. Though I did my first mint install in maybe 5 years just last week on my media player box in the living room (Cinnamon version) and I've gotta say, it really does feel like "ubuntu, absent all the bloat". Runs really great on a 15-year old dell optiplex with almost zero bullshit beyond having to install vlc-plugin-base.

Limewire?

Neckbeard here. I run Arch btw.