Mint is for everyone. It’s still one of my favourite distro as it’s reliable, yet not too far behind. It’s also batteries included so I’d say it’s the best distro for learning, and you can stick to it too.
Went to nix for nerdy reason, but my emergency distro is still my old mint partition
And, you can use mainline to run bleeding edge kernels.
I run mint on my laptop and desktop, and its great. Only problem i have is that sometimes i want bleeding edge stuff besides kernel and i cant because its ubuntu/debian based and ill have to compile it myself… Which i wont
Before I gone to nixos, I actually installed nix on mint, and it worked as great as flatpacks.
Ok yeah it’s complicated to use, but you can just use it as a traditional package manager with nix-env.
So if you want more recent packages, you may want to look into it (and ignore the complicated declarative part, unless you want to fall in the rabbit hole)
Depending on your experience with flatpaks that’s not exactly a rousing endorsement :P
I generally like the idea but often ran into issues that only the flatpak versions of applications would run into (stuttering/performance/permission issues mostly in my case). Most of the stuff I have is still a flatpak, but I do occasionally need to use appimages instead.
If you ignore problems due to lack of permission to open a folder (good. Get sandboxed, idiot.), I don’t have any issues with flatpacks apart that it uses a lot of space.
Nix does too, but it actually reuse duplicate versions, and if you have BTRFS you can just dedupe it.
Nowadays I don’t use flatpacks. Nix got everything I need
Last time I used Mint, the ffmpeg version was so disgustingly old that I couldn’t play YouTube videos I had downloaded. I understand why it’s recommended to beginners so much, but I think that something like Bazzite which has much newer software in its repos is much better if one wants everything to just work.
Bazzite is an immutable distro, which is great for something like a console or a hand held, where it’s only really supposed to do one thing, but not really advisable for a daily driver system. it’s not unreasonable that someone might want to change some core element of their system, and an immutable distro makes that super difficult to do.
The newer packages come from it using DNF package manager via being based on fedora. So if the issue is old packages then Fedora or something Arch based would probably a better suggestion then bazzite which is for a very specific use case. But realistically, outdated packages is not usually due to using the APT package manager, usually it comes from getting an unofficial package that isn’t being maintained well, usually from a “software store” or “software center” that allows unofficial packages to be listed. Flat pack (what bazzite defaults to using in its software store I think) has less of this issue, but there are plenty of poorly maintained flat packs out there that will cause this issue as well. Out dated packages are just the risk of relying on an GUI program for interacting with the package manager at the moment.
You still need to enable third-party repositories like RPMFusion on Fedora for a lot of packages, which may annoy the average beginner. Immutability is really not an issue for most use cases, and if it is then Nobara also exists.
But realistically, outdated packages is not usually due to using the APT package manager
No outdated package is the fault of the package manager. The software in Mint’s (and also Debian’s) apt repositories are just old because they are long-term support distros.
Mint is for everyone. It’s still one of my favourite distro as it’s reliable, yet not too far behind. It’s also batteries included so I’d say it’s the best distro for learning, and you can stick to it too.
Went to nix for nerdy reason, but my emergency distro is still my old mint partition
And, you can use mainline to run bleeding edge kernels.
I run mint on my laptop and desktop, and its great. Only problem i have is that sometimes i want bleeding edge stuff besides kernel and i cant because its ubuntu/debian based and ill have to compile it myself… Which i wont
Before I gone to nixos, I actually installed nix on mint, and it worked as great as flatpacks.
Ok yeah it’s complicated to use, but you can just use it as a traditional package manager with nix-env.
So if you want more recent packages, you may want to look into it (and ignore the complicated declarative part, unless you want to fall in the rabbit hole)
Depending on your experience with flatpaks that’s not exactly a rousing endorsement :P
I generally like the idea but often ran into issues that only the flatpak versions of applications would run into (stuttering/performance/permission issues mostly in my case). Most of the stuff I have is still a flatpak, but I do occasionally need to use appimages instead.
If you ignore problems due to lack of permission to open a folder (good. Get sandboxed, idiot.), I don’t have any issues with flatpacks apart that it uses a lot of space.
Nix does too, but it actually reuse duplicate versions, and if you have BTRFS you can just dedupe it.
Nowadays I don’t use flatpacks. Nix got everything I need
Last time I used Mint, the ffmpeg version was so disgustingly old that I couldn’t play YouTube videos I had downloaded. I understand why it’s recommended to beginners so much, but I think that something like Bazzite which has much newer software in its repos is much better if one wants everything to just work.
Bazzite is an immutable distro, which is great for something like a console or a hand held, where it’s only really supposed to do one thing, but not really advisable for a daily driver system. it’s not unreasonable that someone might want to change some core element of their system, and an immutable distro makes that super difficult to do.
The newer packages come from it using DNF package manager via being based on fedora. So if the issue is old packages then Fedora or something Arch based would probably a better suggestion then bazzite which is for a very specific use case. But realistically, outdated packages is not usually due to using the APT package manager, usually it comes from getting an unofficial package that isn’t being maintained well, usually from a “software store” or “software center” that allows unofficial packages to be listed. Flat pack (what bazzite defaults to using in its software store I think) has less of this issue, but there are plenty of poorly maintained flat packs out there that will cause this issue as well. Out dated packages are just the risk of relying on an GUI program for interacting with the package manager at the moment.
You still need to enable third-party repositories like RPMFusion on Fedora for a lot of packages, which may annoy the average beginner. Immutability is really not an issue for most use cases, and if it is then Nobara also exists.
No outdated package is the fault of the package manager. The software in Mint’s (and also Debian’s) apt repositories are just old because they are long-term support distros.