I’ve been having a big think over Linux distros. See, I’ve been looking back at my still-new Linux experience of nine months, and wondering how my own journey can help other people get started with FOSS operating systems. Whenever the topic of a Windows refugee-friendly OS came up, I would recommend Linux Mint because, first, it’s the one everyone says, and second, it was the Linux OS that I started with, fresh off Windows.
I always follow that up with a comment about how you don’t have to stick with Linux Mint if you don’t want to. You can do what I did, which is to dip your toe into the Linux distro water and find something that suits you better. But if I’m setting up Linux Mint as “my first Linux distro,” why not just skip the middleman and get right into the distros that have a bit more meat on them?
Warning, this is my opinion:
No, a distro with a modified depricated non-upstream window manager is not a good introduction to Linux.
I am looking at you Cinnamon. Cinnamon is for Linux users who don’t want to use Gnome 3 or KDE Plasma, I think.
I always recommend Fedora to newbs and Debian to newbs with existing Linux knowledge, because all the desktops are as close to upstream as possible. This is why I cannot recommend Ubuntu or any Ubuntu based distro for the desktop. ubuntu-server can ve good enough on servers only.
Cinnamon is the reason I don’t recommend Mint to people, but it’s mainly because I don’t like it. The default UI has so much wasted space it’s revolting, they tried to get the windows XP/7 feel with the app launcher and ended up with blocky, boring blank space.
Unless someone is familiar with MacOS and wants to use something similar w/ GNOME, I’ve only been recommending KDE spins or distros with it as default.