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?
I think Mint gets shit on because it’s based on Ubuntu (which already gets shit on a lot) and only gets a new release when the Ubuntu LTS does, so it’s kinda out of date.
Rolling release distros get recommended over it a lot because having a newer kernel gets you better gaming performance and a lot of the techy people who’d even care about switching, also like gaming. And nowadays, immutable distros get recommended a lot so you can’t fuck things up with a weird config change. Mint just doesn’t do anything significantly better than any other distro, it’s lukewarm.
I don’t think the desktop environment actually has much to do with why people dislike Mint. It’s just fine IMO. I’ll take it over Ubuntu, but these days I’m on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Rolling release, and comes with snapshots configured straight out of the box so when I fuck something up, it’s fairly quick do undo.