this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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The youtuber matt from thelinuxcast sucks.
I am regular user, i don't code for living and my job is not tech related. I wanted to try linux and many of you guys supported and now I'm using Linux since 2 weeks its linux mint. That matt guy was so against linux mint that i thought it was shit too. But when i installed and started using it. It has been a smooth journey. Many people in linux community were helpful. But people like matt really make it for us regular guys scared to use linux. I really hope many good linux user help regular people switch to linux and increase this number.
Mint is great and is absolutely enough for most people using computers, still as of now. It comes with its limitations though:
All of the above can easily be irrelevant to you and Mint is just perfect for what you need. It’s important to point out limitations of that choice, but crapping on it because you don’t like it is just pointless fuss
On your last point, there's also Flatpak which is available right from the baked in software center... That's not without its issues too, but they've been an overall smooth experience for me so far
Yes, Flatpak fixed a lot of the old shenanigans we used to have when everything was either native package, or a binary to hope for the best and install libraries manually, or source code to collect everything that’s needed for building and again, hope for the best. It is however designed to provide a way to install graphical apps, but can’t handle everything native package does (like out-of-tree kernel modules, CLI utils, system services)
I believe it can do CLI, but that's not always been the case and not a lot of CLI apps adopted it as a result
But for most of what the typical user, or even a lot of what a technical user, needs, it does a good job
Do you have an recommendation for a distro? I wanted to use mint, but i probably need wayland for a multiscreen setup with different scalings.
ubuntu
Mint should have Waylant support if you don't use Cinnamon; I know Xfce has Wayland support (though I don't use it, they can pry X11 from my cold dead hands)
Neither Cinnamon, XFCE or Mate have stable Wayland support. You need GNOME or Plasma for that if you want a desktop (or wait for the new Cosmic desktop and new PopOS)
atm Mint only has experimental wayland support, i tried it an got instant graphical issues on the desktop. :(
Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)
Garuda (Arch-based distro) is worth looking at, but has a ton of UI customization that I personally don’t like and, same as with Manjaro, I’d spend some time on cleaning it up to more vanilla state.
Endeavour is cool option as well, but other than GUI installer, it provides you with Arch base and is purely terminal-centric.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed - personally never liked RPM based distros, and Zypper (the package manager) is pretty slow, but the distro itself is beloved for being great balance between bleeding edge and stability and set of GUI tools for system management.
Fedora (defaults to GNOME but has decent KDE spin) is great option for a workstation, but it has couple of advanced configurations that not everyone needs (like SELinux getting in your way sometimes) and because it’s very concerned about licensing, you might need to manually add extra video encoding/decoding drivers and media codecs with royalties.
Nobara is modification of Fedora that comes pre-packed with gaming related stuff. It’s pretty cool, but in my experience it tends to ship experimental packages with regressions.
Last but not least, if you’re patient enough to read through some documentation and follow guides step by step, can invest some time and want to learn, go with Arch Linux. The ISO ships now with text-based
archinstallinstaller that guides you through basic install and brings fairly functional Linux system out-of-box EASY, but still pretty bare bones without any assumptions on what you’re going to use it for and how. Everything that you need (like gaming, bluetooth, printing, file sharing…) has its Wiki pages with thorough explanation in form of step-by-step guide. It’s all about installing packages and changing config files, it’s not doing anything automatically for you.I keep hearing people say this. But I've got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I've had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn't new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.
... Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I'd prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so ... I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don't expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!
Yeah, Flatpak installing user-space driver for itself is unfortunately not solvable until there’s open source driver that is part of the Mesa project. Every time you update the driver in your system, Flatpak must update its nvidia-utils too, because their versions must match exactly. For Mesa drivers, Flatpak also installs the drivers as Flatpak, but they’re compatible back and forth and it only updates when it ships new version.
The cleanup should be more automatic, but try
Because it always worked on X11 and Mint Cinnamon is just that. I used NVIDIA graphics on X11 in 2007 and, apart from the extra dkms driver that could break at times, it was fine, and much better anyway than ATI/AMD with proprietary fglrx driver. Rest in piss son of a bitch.
The question was what would I recommend for Wayland. Only the brand new 555 driver combined with most recent compositors (and other packages like mesa, xwayland,…) offers decent NVIDIA experience. It’s a matter of new distro releases around this fall.
Cinnamon can run Wayland in experimental mode. It's just an extra click during login. Mint also has direct support for flatpaks repositories, with flathub by default directly on the software center.
Any experience you can share on how complete and stable is that experimental session? I probably wouldn’t throw newbie on that
There's a bug where flatpaks seemingly disappear from the system the first time you run Wayland. But it resolves with a reboot. It happens too if you change back from Wayland to X11. Other than some minor glitches from very old software that hasn't seen an update in decades, it runs perfectly fine.
I get what you mean. I see a decent chunk of often more tech-proficient Linux users putting down Linux Mint, and it saddens me because even though I don't use Mint anymore, it was still the first distro I properly daily-drove and I still consider it an amazing system for people who are new to Linux.
I'm very glad you've been having a good experience with Mint!
I don't get them putting Mint down either, and I've built multiple Gentoo systems... I don't need an easy distro but still use Mint and like it for what it brings (basically, it's Green Ubuntu, what Ubuntu was supposed to be before they lost their way)
I assume the problem is hardware. Matt's hardware didn't work well with LM, therefore Matt thinks LM sucks.. I do wish there was better hardware support but it's the reason apple went with 1 product = 1 OS = 1 general set of hardware. Sure not every iPhone has the same hardware, but that's why they have the model numbers, and it's so much easier to test 200 model mixes than 2,000,000 (Android). Windows gets all the debug info sent directly to them like the others but they also have a huge stack of hardware they can use or they can buy it to test.
Did Matt try putting the regular build on a newish machine? That's what I did with my current and was struggling until I put the latest kernel on it, should have gone with Edge, but had little trouble after)
This is an interesting post. I know the YouTuber you are talking about. I do not really like him but I would have considered him harmless. It is interesting to get your take.
Mint is great and quite popular. So, if you are going to make a YouTube video saying otherwise, I guess you have to go out of your way to come up with reasons why. I am sure that makes it sound worse than it is. Something to think about.
I have distro preferences too but most of the differences really only make a difference to those already using Linux. It is a bit like arguing about Ford vs Chevy in front of people that have never seen a car ( or truck ). In the grand scheme, they are both amazing and mostly the same thing. To listen to a fan though, one is God’s gift and the other is trash. Same with Linux distros.