A few months ago I finished building my system and commented that I'd installed Mint and had been enjoying it for a week. Some guy felt that he needed to suggest a different distro to me (and actually got some upvotes from people agreeing with it).
I had JUST switched from Windows to Linux and had only been running for a week! CAN I RUN WITH ONE DISTRO FOR ONE FUCKING WEEK WITHOUT HOPPING ALL OVER THE DISTRO-SPHERE?! Holy shit. Just let me enjoy my system for 7 days without telling me I should change again.
I switched to linux 3 years ago. And started and stayed with pop_os. Why? Because Anthony at the time from Linus tech tips recommend it to me. Am I gonna switch? No. I use Nvidia btw.
NGL sometimes you can only find the software you want as a snap, it sucks, but it's the price you pay for not using Windows or Mac. At the end of the day, it's Windows 11, OSX or Ubuntu for most folks outside of Lemmy. I really want to swap to Mint w Debian, but they don't have support for MATE out of the box. Maybe in a year or two. Hoping 24.04 LTS works well.
Debian has had MATE since forever. It's as simple as typing
sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment
Honestly you don't even need Ubuntu if you absolutely need snaps. You can install snapd on a lot of apt distros, or you can spin an Ubuntu container in Distrobox in a few seconds.
I gave up on tumbleweed recently. I bought Suse at Best Buy back in the day, and have always had it on a second PC around the house. I love the chameleon, but a few different showstoppers led me to remove it from my laptop. I miss it, but the last snapshot booted so slowly, and I couldn't get past it. I'm sure I'll put it back on there, but I like being able to diagnose it and I just couldn't this time.
Good to know! Any recommendations of where I could post? I'm trying to update an old 2013 Mac so it can play robox and minecraft. I have a portable HDD to work with as well. And Mac is pretty damn foreign to me and it's so old. But damn for 10 years old it's fantastic and most of the specs were better than modern macs (dedicated graphics card for one)
What's the advantage of NixOS? The thing about package isolation to overcome dependency issues sounds attractive but surely that comes with at least some kind of disadvantage.
The disadvantage is there's no global libraries. If you want to run a plain executable you need to steam-run it instead of just launching it and it will create an environment similar to Ubuntu
The advantage is you just run things and they work. I heard there was some packaging issue with hyprland because of different library versions, but it never affected NixOS because there's no global library
But it sucks in ways you can always find a solution for. You're never like "oh so these two packages have incompatible dependencies and I can't have both"
I don't want you to download Manjaro, but I had one partition as root and another as home and Manjaro just asked me to install itself in root, to replace my previous borked Ubuntu installation and use old home without data loss, instead of making me set everything myself again, like Ubuntu does.
No chance of overwriting your bootloader when you distrohop using LiveUSBs and LiveCDs.
But srsly, Trisquel GNU/Linux is a distro that provides Ubuntu with all the non-free and contrib removed.
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre is Arch with all the nonfree packages removed.
Worth a look if you support software freedom and transparency.
On my main workstation I'm on windows but somebody suggested Mint for a smooth transition and I made a VM just to emulate it and try it. Cinnamon 21.3.
My takeaways:
I honestly have no idea if it's the Debian version of mint or which version of Debian. Kind of important to figure out what software can be used on it.
It's really easy to glitch the screen while changing resolutions. No idea what the hotkeys to change it back to default would be, so hard reset time when that happens.
TBH I'll probably just delete it and start on something more standard for my intended use cases. It's main feature appears to be limited Windows program compatibility but... I have a Windows, so...
Use arch if you want more compatibility. Debian is stable but it also means their official package repository will lag behind some feature that is present on the bleeding edge. IMHO, stability is good if you are already familiar with Linux AND want it that way, but with windows compatibility in its current state (emphasis there), it is better to go bleeding edge for new users since you are transitioning anyway, you might as well try the latest feature available. Also, the biggest game changer, valve and steam, is basing their OS on Arch.
LFS -Linux From Scratch. Or if you can't handle that, either Slackware or Arch - I don't run Arch by the way. Maybe try some obscure distro produced and maintained by one person.