I learned recently that cinnamon was a fork of gnome from when gnome went shitty. I personally jumped to xfce without knowing about cinnamon until recently.
And I switched from xubuntu to mint when snap took over, because mint explicitly said they wouldn’t use snap.
It seems like mint is a refuge for the people who run away from shitty decisions made by other Linux projects. Keep up the good work.
Cinnamon is not a “fork” of GNOME. MATE is a fork of GNOME as MATE started from GNOME source code.
Cinnamon was a reaction to GNOME 3. But Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.
In the days of GTK 3, Cinnamon shipped quite a few of the default GNOME apps. Later, when GTK4/ libadwaita appeared, Cinnamon stayed with GTK3 and formed the XApps project which did fork many GNOME apps to stay on GTK3. XApps was meant to be a cross-desktop project serving all the GTK desktop environments.
These days, Cinnamon is trying to fork libadwaita to make GTK4 apps look better on their desktop.
In general, Cinnamon is fairly conservative. They are the last major desktop environment to default to X11 for example (though you will disagree with that view if you count XFCE as one of the major DEs).
I hope they don’t feel pressured to change just because there’s more users. They’ve reached their success by being deliberate and streamlined, it’s what makes Mint great. Long live boring and reliable.
The more Ubuntu enshittifies, the more work Mint has to do to work against it. That’s why my personal recommendation is against Mint. Ubuntu just isn’t a good foundation to build on, IMO.
For awhile there, PPAs were the reason to stick with Ubuntu as a base, because the .deb package format was (and still is) very popular, and PPAs allowed fairly easy distribution of software without dealing with the standard repository. Flatpak has kind of solved that problem by now, and so like you say defuckulating Ubuntu is just getting to be a bigger and bigger chore.
Which is why LMDE exists.
Which is why LMDE exists.
Too bad LMDE is based on Sid. Some stuff can break on occasion.
I few months ago I helped an older lady at a repair café to replace her Win10 with LMDE (because that’s what she wanted). Installed just fine but didn’t boot after reboot. Installed LMDE 2 or 3 additional times, to make sure I didn’t overlook something. Same result.
Then installed Fedora and it just worked.
I have never had a problem with LMDE. My mother has been using it for about a year now. I used to have to come solve Windows problems for her a couple times a year but she had never asked me for any help with LMDE.
It’s unlikely that an already properly installed bootloader just breaks. The base is Sid, Debian Unstable.
Just because breakage doesn’t happen all the time, there is still a higher than average chance. Sid is Debian’s beta test branch, not a rolling release distribution. It just wasn’t the right choice for the lady at the repair cafe.
Agree. There are dozens if not hundreds of Linux distros, I’d they want different, try another. Just keep it simple, secure, and windows can fuck off. I have bazzite on a gaming laptop for games with the kiddo, Zorin on my main laptop and desktop.
And before I get shit for having so many devices, I save devices the clients were going to trash because it was “old” and not reliable enough for professional business environments. Which I do agree a bit. Most of my devices are 8th or 10th gen Intel, I replaced the nvme with my own and canibilize memory, I’m not rolling in several thousand dollar systems. And I give away SO many to neighbors, full systems, laptops, monitors, etc, ready to go. Wasting tech is against my religion.
I have bazzite on a gaming laptop for games with the kiddo, Zorin on my main laptop and desktop.
Btw, if you want Bazzite but without the gaming stuff for work computers, there are also Aurora and Bluefin. The latter is more conservative, based on CentOS and using Gnome. They are all Universal Blue projects, so you’re not dealing with vastly different systems.
I like Zorin, I was going to try cachy next. Bazzite I use specifically for games.
You have seriously misread Lemmy as a whole if you think having three devices is going to make people angry. What an odd thing to get defensive about.
There’s many more, those are the Linux devices (plus a steam deck). I don’t like taking about all the shit I’ve accumulated over the years, makes me feel sad and wasteful.
I have well over a dozen Linux machines running in my home. More than half of them would be considered garbage by most people. Clearly, I disagree.
Some of mine too lmao.
I mean, if you are recycling devices that others would have thrown away, I’d say you are not wasteful at all.
A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.
If you want Wayland and stability, use Bazzite.
If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy
That’s a terrible recommendation for new users…
If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland. Cinnamon is built on X.
If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland.
That’s different than outright suggesting Arch.
But SteamOS is Arch? So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?
But SteamOS is Arch?
No, it’s an immutable OS based on Arch. Also not rolling release.
So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?
You were also suggesting regular Arch and that’s irresponsible.
There is an experimental Wayland for Mint… on the login screen there is an icon in the upper right. Clicking that allows you to select the experimental Wayland version or X11… there’s one other but I forget what it is at the moment. So it is possible to run Mint and Wayland, just not recommended.
Oh, right. I never see the login screen, so I keep forgetting it.
Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.
I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.
Bazzite is Fedora Silverblue with a bunch of quality of life additions.
As usual, most people don’t contribute back in any way (money, nor code, nor documentation).
You should probably read the article.
If there only small percent of contributors from all users count - anyway the more users the more contributors.
Might want to read the article first. Mint has received more donations last month than any on record for them, $47,000.
I read that. How many users do they have? 47k seems like a lot but how many devs does that really pay for? The answer is obviously “not enough”. Otherwise they wouldn’t be talking about dev pressure.
That amount of money is one developer full time maybe. Which can make a really, really big difference for an Open Source project actually.
That amount of money a month is extremely substantial for an open-source project, and especially for a non-corporate distro. It also far exceeds previous years.
The pressure mostly seems to be from adding wayland support to Cinnamon, combined with perhaps maintaining more projects at too regular an interval than their team can chew.
