What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe.

If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.

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cyberrock 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well

I'm pretty sure it was due to nonfree codecs and drivers not being in other distros by default. The mainstream distros only have themselves to blame.

	▲	helterskelter 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They were one of the few distros at the time which had a sane out-of-the-box desktop experience for non-tech people, back when Ubuntu was pushing (the original) Unity and GNOME was still the the early days of 3.x. Drivers and codecs were easy to install as well, generally speaking, without having to hit the forums or ask your tech family member for help.

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Pxtl 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers.

And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.

	▲	ehnto 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		EndeavourOS works really well in this regard. It also smoothes out working with Arch without being too opinionated. It was a GUI install, defaults to KDE Plasma, auto installs and manages the graphics drivers. Very smooth, better than Windows install in most ways.

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ewoodrich 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot.

In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.

	▲	twothreeone 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's basically what I heard ten years ago from individuals (and even universities) for why they switched to Mint.. but even now, if you ask Perplexity for a "debian-based distro thats not ubuntu" Mint is the second option.