If this question was asked before, I apologize in advance for the redundancy.
I recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu on my laptop. Still getting the hang of Ubuntu, but I see a lot of comments on different posts in which a majority of them point to using Mint instead.
Would the best recommendation, be to switch to Mint from Ubuntu?
Welcome to… being a normal Linux user
Switching distro is something every user does, thinks about doing, then does it again.
It’s normal. You just discovered a new way of using your computer, and opened a ton of possibilities in front of you, from customising your current install to the death thanks to the choice in desktops and display managers to just slap an entirely different distribution on your machine. A ton of possibles.
Try them out! There’s Live USB for about every one out there, but my favorite way is to dual-boot and see fully how the install process turns out, how the software management works, how updates occurs etc.
You’ll notice a lot is the same, a lot is different, and most any feature from a distro can be slapped on another!
To give you a taste, try openSUSE Tumbleweed - not because I think you should switch to Tumbleweed over Ubuntu, but because it’s quite different in a few key points, and I believe it is interesting for you: there’s this Rollback backup feature, a beautiful and quite simple installer, a polished user interface, a different software format, and a powerful admin tool.
Have fun with your hardware. Now backup your files and go crazy! So many out there!
(I started with Ubuntu)
Thanks for the reply, you’re the first to actually recommend Tumbleweed. I will give it a look. I appreciate the suggestion and information.
Still getting the hang of Ubuntu, but I see a lot of comments on different posts in which a majority of them point to using Mint instead.
Ubuntu should be okay; it’s not necessarily a bad pick. However, the community has been upset with some of its past decisions and (more recently) the implementation of its vision, i.e. their enforcement of Snaps. This has eventually led to our current situation in which it has become popular to hate on Ubuntu.
Would the best recommendation, be to switch to Mint from Ubuntu?
Personally, I’ve stopped recommending beginners to Ubuntu. This is primarily for how the above mentioned enforcement has lead to
brokenunintuitive interactions. However, if you’ve already started using it and are content with what you have, then the negative sentiment by itself shouldn’t warrant a switch.Though, granted, (I think) most Linux users have indulged in distro hopping; some have even made it their hobbies. So you shouldn’t feel bad about switching either. Though I implore you to practice best practices while at it:
- Keep using your home base until you’re certain of the switch.
- Don’t nuke your home base to experience another distro. Make ample use of live USBs, VMs and dual booting instead.
- Try to understand the difference between the fundaments and the auxiliary when experiencing new distros; i.e., what is and isn’t possible for you to import to your home base without outright switching.
Thank you for the reply, luckily I kept my laptop basically blank. Nothing on there, so I can fly around the OS and check it out. I may give Mint a try, if I hate it, I’ll just come back to Ubuntu. But I appreciate the indepth response.
It’s like a favourite drink, there’s no correct choice.
I quite like xubuntu. I know that linus tech tips recommended mint to people coming from windows.
Many have a live USB option, that’s great for trying them out.
Thanks for the reply, do you happen to have any recommendation to any specific tutorials for adding windows programs or how to customize further?
Mint has a more noob friendly approach with almost everything having a ui and it is Ubuntu under the hood so there wouldn’t be extra to learn after switching. Popularity wise mint is one of the best stable distros with Ubuntu as its base with community support as well so if you have doubts you can most probably find the answer just by searching
The big thing to consider is how much are you going to customize it and how many external apps are you going to install, because with Mint when the next release you are more likely than not going to have to re-install, with Ubuntu you will be able to upgrade in place. Snap is trivially easy to get rid of, I’m typing this from a Ubuntu-Mate 24.04 system with NO snap.
with Mint when the next release you are more likely than not going to have to re-install
First time hearing this. Got anything to back that up?
@lancalot Only that I’ve run just about every debian derived distro there is and Ubuntu is the only one that has reliably upgraded in place.
Fair. Even if some may dismiss it as anecdotal (N=1), I do think it’s valuable. Thank you.
@lancalot I run an ISP so quite a few servers thus though anacdotal, not a super tiny sample. And again I think it’s an important point to consider but a lot has to do with how much effort you are going to put into customization. If your use is very generic, install and go, then no big deal, but if you spend a lot of time fine tuning and installing apps you have to get from third parties and compile yourself then a re-install is a big deal. I find myself often in the latter situation so it is important to me, to someone else perhaps not. For me windows is like the former situation, all I do with Windows is play games, and it takes me maybe 1/2 hour to install the games so do I care about a re-install of Windows? Not really.
Important elaboration. Much appreciated.
I’m mostly oblivious of what’s required to run an ISP. But you mentioned servers yourself. Do you install Linux Mint on your servers?
@lancalot Consider things like setting up mail servers and web hosting configuration, when you’ve got hundreds of virtual domains, when you’ve highly optimized apache compiled from scratch and modified to your needs, that is the kind of thing I’m talking about that is time consuming and I don’t wish to do from scratch more often than is necessary.
@lancalot And for the record, I don’t have anything against Mint as an OS, it’s Ubuntu with some pretty GUI admin apps thrown on top. I rarely use the GUI’s so updates aside it’s six of one or half dozen of the other. From a command line perspective, except when things break,they are identical and admittedly the aesthetics of Mint are in my view superior.
snap is easily excised, snap list, snap remove (everything in list0, apt remove snapd, only thing of importance is Ubuntu’s introduction box and firefox, firefox can be installed directly from mozilla’s repo. In my view the introductory box has zero value so no reason to install it.
What you are referring to as the system search isn’t, it’s only part of the default desktop. If you use anything but gnome you’ll never see it.
I have mint, ubuntu, debian, zorin, mxlinux, popos, fedora, alma, and rocky8 systems here, oh and one old centos6 system, and I use ubuntu for the majority of my infrastructure. Ubuntu always upgrades from one release to another in place successfully, the others do not. All the Redhat’s are always a fresh install. Mint is about 50/50, and debian pretty much always requires a re-install. That and Ubuntu tends to be less problematic, especially after I excise snap.
