What problems?
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.
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.
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.
If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue. But most people don’t and for them Mint will work just fine. If you want cutting edge, don’t use Mint. But that’s not their focus at all. Mint is for people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
The machine I have running mint is a fifteen year old Core 2 Duo T6600 laptop. Works great!
I do want to add that new games can also require new packages, the way Alan Wake II did at launch. Even on Arch you had to compile the development version of Mesa for it to run.
If you have cutting edge hardware, this might be an issue.
No, thanks to Valve’s efforts for Steam Deck all RDNA2 hardware directly benefits for upstreamed improvements.
people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle.
Elementary OS. Hassle-free, elegant and polished, distraction-free.
I’d give it a shot if i was on the lookout for something new, but I see absolutely no reason to switch from Mint.
Yeah there’s no need to change if you’re content with what you’re using.
If you have cutting edge hardware
If you have cutting edge hardware, you would probably need linux-next kernel. Otherwise you don’t have cutting edge hardware.
Any distro will “just work” if used correctly…
If you have to tiptoe around to use it “correctly”, it doesn’t “just work”
I never said anything about “tiptoeing around”, but what you said here is correct…
The thing is that Linux has gone mainstream, with young adults and teens trying it out for Gaming and Streaming. The target people has changed so recommending Mint is not suitable anymore.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say it’s gone “mainstream” since you still have to be moderately nerdy to know about it. I get your point though. This is one of the reasons I am so happy the Steam Deck exists. Before Valve released the Steam Deck nobody wanted to make games for Linux, so Valve said “fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves” and proved it was not only possible, but a better experience overall. While not all games work, having 78-80% of your game library work on Linux, with no Windows OS performance tax, is a great experience. Even with the Proton compatibility layer games generally run faster than on Windows.
this video from last month has 600k views. Ive seen several recent linux videos with 150k+ views. Brodie, Horn and the Linux Experience constantly pull 50k to 200K views on some of their videos.
You don’t have to run linux to watch a video about linux.
It mean to say its not an obscure thing anymore, Id say its becoming mainstream.
Not even close to approaching mainstream!
It’a close. Isn’t it at 4% market share? That’s higher than Firefox.
As someone who daily drives Mint, wut.
Linux users can’t even agree on what distro is actually beginner friendly, so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?
Linux users can’t even agree […] so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?
Easy. You make a post like the OP, count the positive mentions of distros in the comments, and bam, you have your distro of choice. It’s called the Linux newbie roulette and works kind of like the magic hat in Harry Potter that sorts you into your house.
I know its one of the strengths of Linux, but I can’t help but laugh that the response to “you can’t agree on one, how can I?” is for several people to suggest several distros.
Linux is a niche. Picking any distro that isn’t the most popular is going one step deeper into a niche. A niche, within a niche.
Just use the most popular distro… Ubuntu
Problem solved.
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Ubuntu isn’t the most popular and hasn’t been for a while. It actually has a lot of issues new users are likely to run into, including lots of spurious error messages. Apparently the top 5 according to distro watch is: MX Linux, Mint, EndeavorOS, Debian, and Manjaro.
So essentially debian, arch and ubuntu derivatives.
I’m sorry, I can’t believe that MX Linux and EndeavorOS are popular or recommended. I’ve never heard of those or seen any recommendations for that.
I’ve seen Mint recommended.
People pushing arch on newbies? Wtf?
If you haven’t heard of EndeavorOS that’s because you are out of the loop. Entirely your issue. It’s a much better alternative to Manjaro essentially.
Also that’s general popularity according to page hits, nothing to do with newbies. Newbies aren’t the majority of Linux users.
Not that there is anything wrong with recommending EndeavorOS to Newbies. The whole point of arch derivatives like that is to make installing arch simpler and easier for the user. Arch is actually a better base distro imo than say Ubuntu for this. It has packages for pretty much anything in the AUR, no digging up PPAs for everything. Likewise it’s all up-to-date too.
I don’t remember MX Linux ever being that popular before, but maybe I am out of the loop.
I fucking hate Ubuntu. Mostly because you’re right.
That’s really depending on your use cases, for example if I want to install distro for my grandma use Mint, for a graphic guy (as in this example) use Arch or Fedora (or even OpenSUSE), etc.
Because choosing a distro to begin with isn’t easy. Ask ten people and you’ll get eleven suggestions.
Because for most use cases, Mint works flawlessly. It changes little from time to time. It has all the drivers to get started with a wide range of common hardware. It has all the codecs to play common media formats.
Of course if the package update is too slow, it’s not for you, but then unlike you, most people don’t need the latest and greatest. They just need something that works from the get-go with predictable behavior.
The software I use doesn’t get significant updates often. Kennel, vi, grep, find? They’ve been around for decades.
I’m genuinely curious what kind of things people can’t do because of lag on package updates.
It usually has something to do with programming. Again, most cases, the versions in the packages included in your garden variety stable distros should cover most use cases.
However, once in a while one would encounter the need of using the cutting edge features on certain compiler or interpreter. Rust comes to mind. I know Python introduced some features that could drastically alter workflow (e.g. switch statement). NodeJS is another one known to be lagging behind from time to time.
In other cases, hardware support might be taken to consideration, especially for newer machines. However, with Mint including the optional newer kernel, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Modem hardware.
The default kernel Mint has installed isn’t new enough to support cards like the 7900 XT. Though this can be fixed by updating the kernel using Mint’s kernel version utility
Hmm vim is the reason I dropped all debian based distros. Cause I wanted v8 when it was released but sorry you have to wait 2-4 years. Wasn’t in the mood for compiling it myself so just went with arch based distro and haven’t looked back since.
Laughs in Debian Stable
The moemorphic character shown in the picture is Archchan, created by ravimo. I wonder why show her in a discussion about Mint?
I have no idea wtf you’re talking about
This was news to me as well, but I assume that the Arch Linux logo in question suggests that it might be strange to use an Arch Linux specific illustration, for something that isn’t mentioning Arch Linux.
Did that clear it up, or were you just being rude?
I recommend fedora to every one. It’s the correct kind of stable distro. The kernel updates are slow to roll out after being tested and all… But guess what version of plasma I have? 6.1. That’s just a few weeks later than arch got it.
Plus not to mention how easy setting up my Optimus gpu was because of rpmfusion. I have never had such ease with any other distro.
So I recommend fedora all the way.
Fedora (including Silverblue/Kionite) is hard to recommend as a first distro though. It’s an excellent platform when you know your end goal and how to get there, while providing “leading-edge” packages that’s great for gaming.
But a project like Bazzite? Phenomenal new user experience for gaming and a very easy recommend.
Mint has managed to become a meme and that’s no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.
That’s just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.
I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I’ve run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn’t care what I call Facebook and email.
We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.
I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.
AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I’ve defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.
Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.
Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can’t deal with … something … often gets … educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.
For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I’ve been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.
Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.
Anybody that already has had a computer for 2 years and is coming from Windows will have almost no problems with Mint. Stability is top priority for first time Linux users and you need some visual guide with screenshots. Mint also has a great default look and setup for people coming from Windows. Mint is probably the best distro to put on your mom’s old laptop that is “getting slow” because of viruses.
I’d recommend KDE Neon or Ubuntu also depending on the situation but if I don’t know anything about the person and computer I’d say Mint.
This is a bold statement considering how many daily Windows users don’t understand how to use Windows.
It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch tech enthusiasts are. How much does your average person know about their car? That’s how little they know about their computer.
They might not know what an OS even is, or how to identify where “Windows” ends and applications begin. They do what they bought it for, and if that doesn’t work, they take it to someone who knows how to get it working again. They know how to charge it, and to plug in a headset or USB key or something. If that functionality doesn’t work automatically or they encounter any issue, it might as well have exploded in their hands.
There are people who have been using Windows for 30 years that know literally nothing about it. Putting a “years of experience” metric on it is hilarious. It’s like assuming that if someone has been driving for 50 years that they know anything about cars besides how to drive it and where to put the gas.
Exactly. I know plenty of people who have driven a car for over 3 decades, and do not know what a timing belt or a spark plug does. I don’t look down on those people, but it certainly makes sense as to why they don’t know. They don’t really need to!
You should at least know how to change your oil and clean your car.
Most people get their oil changed at a shop, and drive through a car wash. I wouldn’t really consider those additional skills.
OpenSUSE Thumbleweed or KDE Neon.
Ah, OpenSuse. The distro with the package management that spams your drive full of unnecessary optional dependencies.
Would always recommend EndeavourOS.
Sadly true. When I installed texlive-base it tried to install like 300 recommended packages, I almost accepted D:
I’d still recommend it, I don’t know if you can change the default for recommended packages because aside from that, I actually love it.
Yesss! My first five minutes with OpenSuse.
I mean, you can change that behaviour somehow. But there are so many other small things like the constant vendor changes. Zypper is just so quirky. It’s a cool distro and to have a rolling release option like tumbleweed is always a big plus in my opinion, but I just wouldn’t recommend it to people who are not really eager to play around with their distro.
What I find weird about Tumbleweed is, that updating is not integrated into YaST or another UI. You have to use the commandline to keep your system up to date. That makes it exactly as inconvenient as Arch for newcomers, but Arch has a whole philosophy behind this while SuSE is typically very GUI oriented. It’s weird.
With KDE Plasma it lets me update from its store, even though it’s kind of annoying because I like to do it from the CLI and it blocks Zypper when checking for available updates.
Tried it once and literally could not get nvidia drivers to install. Went straight back to endeavouros and continued to enjoy
Maybe you should have clicked on ‘nvidia repository’ in Yast. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
Except that didn’t work
Mint works. Most alternatives don’t. I can install Mint on a total newbie’s system, and not have to worry about something breaking two weeks later. Hell, most newbies can install Mint if you give them the USB.
On a deeper level, I think Mint devs are one of the few teams that understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy.
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.
