I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable” packages.
I had a negative bias on Mint as I disliked the idea of a newbie’s distro and was two steps away from Debian so for some time I left it aside.
A couple of weeks after that I decided to dust off an old 2013 iMac for my wife to be using as desktop machine and, she being a windows gal, I thought a safe bet would have been Mint that doesn’t feel alien for those coming from that OS.
Again, mind blown by the performance.
I decide to play it risky and so I reimagine it with LMDE: everything works out of the box. I just install the NVIDIA driver from Synaptics and then the computer is set.
This was the drop that made me go on the rabbit hole. I went on a spree to install LDME on an old gaming laptop that was hidden in the dust for now 5 years and then to a few other machines. (Yeah I have a bit of spare hardware lying around)
The last few days I have been thinking to put mint on the main desktop but was afraid of letting GNOME go… and so I decided to test GNOME on one of those LDME machines…
Omg…. Mind blown again. Essentially we can now have Debian with all the delicious little Mint tools. This kinda feels like how Debian is supposed to be! But it is Mint! Even GNOME contains all the little things that, on Fedora for example, I used to have to install manually but now they were there already! Like Gnome Tweaks, or extensions like the Places indicator or other small ones…
I am not sure I am managing to convey how this feels… I have always wanted to have Debian but Debian has made it, one way or another, impossible for me to stay. Mint is making it possible today. What a blessing of a distro.
Rant over.
Side note: I think I have fallen in love with Cinnamon, oups!
The post says as much. Don't discount the immense value of that eye candy, not to mention the crucial aspect of great usable defaults and a system that works excellently out of the box for a layman user. Debian alone does not pull that weight. Cinnamon is the easy to spot differential, sure, but LM does a lot more to maintain a really good user experience that you can just install and use painlessly.
An example that comes to mind of the extra effort LM goes to, is that they removed and blocked snap from their Ubuntu-based flavours (i.e. the main one). They point it out in the Release Notes for each release, and link to an explanation of the reasoning behind it (it's good reasons) and, if you still want to enable it for some reason, instructions to do so.
Mint also has its own tools that reduce or eliminate dependence on terminal interaction.
My interpretation is that Linux Mint does a lot under the surface to maintain an excellent general-purpose distro that anyone can pick up and use.
Edit: even in your meme post, the yacht provides all of the amenities that make the trip a tolerable and enjoyable experience, which the truck doesn't even try to compete with... So we might be in agreement!
Indeed, what makes the trip pleasant is not the truck, it is the yatch. The truck does takes you to places though, and we are all grateful!