I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.

  • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Every couple of years I think to myself “You know, I can’t actually remember why I don’t like Ubuntu. It must have just been some weird one-off thing that soured me on it last time. Besides, I’ve got N more years of Linux experience under my belt, so I know how to avoid sticky situations with apt, and they’ve had N more years to make their OS more user friendly! I pride myself on not holding grudges, and if this distro still gets recommended to newbies, how bad can it possibly be, especially for someone with my level of expertise?”

    And then I download Ubuntu.

    And then I remember.

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Admittedly, it’s been a few years and I’m coming due, but let’s see what I can remember…

        • apt will brick itself if it gets interrupted mid transaction with no clear recourse apart from a total reinstall, so try not to get greedy and Ctrl+C if it looks like dpkg is hung
        • trying to install any software that isn’t already packaged explicitly for Ubuntu is a nightmare because there is no equivalent of the AUR for people to push build steps to and you’re quite often left guessing what dependencies you need to install to get something to compile
        • snapcraft, need I say more? Firefox takes several minutes to start up, we don’t talk about disk usage, installing a package with apt will sometimes install the snap version anyway requiring a Windows-registry-edit-esque hack to disable, and the last time I checked in, the loop devices it creates didn’t even get hidden in the file manager.
        • I’ve also definitely encountered my fair share of bugs and broken packages which are always fun to fix