I hope they don’t feel pressured to change just because there’s more users. They’ve reached their success by being deliberate and streamlined, it’s what makes Mint great. Long live boring and reliable.
Agree. There are dozens if not hundreds of Linux distros, I’d they want different, try another. Just keep it simple, secure, and windows can fuck off. I have bazzite on a gaming laptop for games with the kiddo, Zorin on my main laptop and desktop.
And before I get shit for having so many devices, I save devices the clients were going to trash because it was “old” and not reliable enough for professional business environments. Which I do agree a bit. Most of my devices are 8th or 10th gen Intel, I replaced the nvme with my own and canibilize memory, I’m not rolling in several thousand dollar systems. And I give away SO many to neighbors, full systems, laptops, monitors, etc, ready to go. Wasting tech is against my religion.
I have bazzite on a gaming laptop for games with the kiddo, Zorin on my main laptop and desktop.
Btw, if you want Bazzite but without the gaming stuff for work computers, there are also Aurora and Bluefin. The latter is more conservative, based on CentOS and using Gnome. They are all Universal Blue projects, so you’re not dealing with vastly different systems.
Only Bluefin LTS is based on CentOS. Standard Bluefin is based on Fedora.
Standard Bluefin is based on Fedora.
I don’t get Universal Blue’s desire to give slightly different flavors and entirely new name. With the non-LTS option, what is the difference between Bazzite Gnome and Bluefin? Preinstalled code editors instead of Steam and Lutris?
You’re hitting a problem I have with Ublue as well. I wanted to experiment with immutable distros last year, but Ublue provided extremely little information on how their different flavors actually differed under the hood. I ended up having to search through their forums for like an hour to find snippets of how their different when some people asked, but it was never comprehensive.
From what I recall, Bazzite had a few kernel optimizations for gaming, and received updates at a faster frequency than Bluefin, with one of the devs saying that Bazzite would be more likely to experience regressions due to it being more bleeding edge.
Looking at Bazzite’s front page now, they actually seem to be doing a better job of mentioning what’s unique about it than when I last tried it. But Bluefin and Aurora are still ambiguous.
The more Ubuntu enshittifies, the more work Mint has to do to work against it. That’s why my personal recommendation is against Mint. Ubuntu just isn’t a good foundation to build on, IMO.
For awhile there, PPAs were the reason to stick with Ubuntu as a base, because the .deb package format was (and still is) very popular, and PPAs allowed fairly easy distribution of software without dealing with the standard repository. Flatpak has kind of solved that problem by now, and so like you say defuckulating Ubuntu is just getting to be a bigger and bigger chore.
Which is why LMDE exists.
Which is why LMDE exists.
Too bad LMDE is based on Sid. Some stuff can break on occasion.I few months ago I helped an older lady at a repair café to replace her Win10 with LMDE (because that’s what she wanted). Installed just fine but didn’t boot after reboot. Installed LMDE 2 or 3 additional times, to make sure I didn’t overlook something. Same result.
Then installed Fedora and it just worked.
LMDE is not based on Sid, it’s based on Debian Stable. LMDE 7 is currently based on Debian 13 Trixie. You sure you had the right ISO?
I have never had a problem with LMDE. My mother has been using it for about a year now. I used to have to come solve Windows problems for her a couple times a year but she had never asked me for any help with LMDE.
I learned recently that cinnamon was a fork of gnome from when gnome went shitty. I personally jumped to xfce without knowing about cinnamon until recently.
And I switched from xubuntu to mint when snap took over, because mint explicitly said they wouldn’t use snap.
It seems like mint is a refuge for the people who run away from shitty decisions made by other Linux projects. Keep up the good work.
Honestly i wouldn’t hold it against them if they take some time off and relax, they have done so much over the years without asking for anything in return they are finally getting some appreciation they deserve and of course donations help a lot but donations can’t help with burnout.
I hope they do not take their foot too far off the gas before completing their Wayland transition.
Once KDE, GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, and Cinnamon are all Wayland, 90% of all Linux desktops will be Wayland. With XFCE, it could be 95%.
I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen. I am looking forward to putting it behind us and we are so close.
At the same time, I have a lot of respect for conservative desktops like Cinnamon and XFCE that, while acknowledging that Wayland is the future, are taking great pains to minimize disruption for their current users and even to allow users to keep X11 as a fully supported platform. I am all for that.
I do not expect Cinnamon to maintain X11 as an option very long after they switch to Wayland as the default. First while many distros ship Cinnamon, it is really a product of the Mint project and Mint is very much a Linux Desktop. Second, Mint does not have the resources as they point out in this article. Of course, I could be wrong.
XFCE will probably keep X11 around much longer. First, XFCE is very popular in non-Linux settings. But mostly I say this because xfwm4 itself takes very little dev effort and it is the only XFCE component really tied to x11. Xorg is essentially in features freeze. As long as XLibre does not break everything, xfwm4 will just continue to work. The other components of XFCE work fine in both environments already. The goal of xfwl4 (the XFCE Wayland compositor) is to mirror the xfwm4 experience. And xfwl4 is deferring to other components to define behaviour (eg. xfsession and xfdesktop). So, it should be easy to keep the overall XFCE experience in sync on both display servers without much wasted effort.
Clem, the lead dev of the Cinnamon project, wrote in the last blog post, that they only need to migrate the cinnamon screensaver from X11 to Wayland and that this is the last piece for full Wayland support. See https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4991
Seems like the upcoming Mint release will fully support Cinnamon with Wayland, even if X11 might still be the default.
A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
If you want Wayland and stability, use Bazzite.
Agree!
I’ve managed to convert three friends this last year. Two to Mint, one to Bazzite because he mostly games.Immutable distro is perfect for him, just working out of the box.
Next «level» for him would probably be Fedora KDE Plasma, for sure not Arch.
Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.
I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
Bazzite is Fedora Silverblue with a bunch of quality of life additions.
I don’t generally recommend Silverblue or Bazzite to newbies, as there’s generally much less documentation and help if they run into problems, and if they ever need an app that isn’t flatpak’ed, it’d be very daunting and offputting for them to then figure out Distrobox or Toolbox to install it. Fine for more experienced folk, but at least until they become the default, I personally think it best to stick with regular Fedora or Mint, depending on the hardware requirements.
YouTube is full of Bazzite tutorials. Whatever is out there at documentation is also quite recent. When people ask ChatGPT about how to do something on Ubuntu or Mint, the answers are generated from 15 years old forum posts. Often not only unusable but also damaging. My expectationnis that for immutable distributions LLM answers in 15 years will not break the OS. At worst it’ll recommend some tool deleted from Flathub and it’ll merely not work instead of breaking everything.
If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy
That’s a terrible recommendation for new users…
If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland. Cinnamon is built on X.
If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland.
That’s different than outright suggesting Arch.
But SteamOS is Arch? So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?
But SteamOS is Arch?
No, it’s an immutable OS based on Arch. Also not rolling release.
So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?
You were also suggesting regular Arch and that’s irresponsible.
As usual, most people don’t contribute back in any way (money, nor code, nor documentation).
If there only small percent of contributors from all users count - anyway the more users the more contributors.
Might want to read the article first. Mint has received more donations last month than any on record for them, $47,000.
I read that. How many users do they have? 47k seems like a lot but how many devs does that really pay for? The answer is obviously “not enough”. Otherwise they wouldn’t be talking about dev pressure.
That amount of money a month is extremely substantial for an open-source project, and especially for a non-corporate distro. It also far exceeds previous years.
The pressure mostly seems to be from adding wayland support to Cinnamon, combined with perhaps maintaining more projects at too regular an interval than their team can chew.
That amount of money is one developer full time maybe. Which can make a really, really big difference for an Open Source project actually.
That amount of money is one developer full time maybe
$564,000 / year??? I’d think definitely two, maybe three.
