People doing the 30 days linux Challenge are having several problems because of Mint's old packages and technology. Why people still recommend it when there is Fedora and Opensuse with KDE and Gnome?
People doing the 30 days linux Challenge are having several problems because of Mint's old packages and technology. Why people still recommend it when there is Fedora and Opensuse with KDE and Gnome?
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What problems?
outdated mesa, monitor scaling, cinnamon in general being outdated
What features were lacking from mesa or Cinnamon generally?
I have 4k 1440, 1080 monitor (120hz or higher) on Mint edge, what would I gain from switch to somethibg else?
mesa is outdated by default, not supporting rx 7000 cards unless you use the edge iso.
If you have new hardware, why wouldn't you use the Edge ISO?
why should you have to? it's a really bad choice by the distro maintainers.
It's a bad choice to have choice?
Can you explain? As a Mint user with really old hardware, I appreciate using the LTS kernel. However, I also appreciate them giving users other options.
there is no benefit to old lts kernels on the desktop, kernel releases are always extremely stable
plasma has wayland support, tons of customizability, better multi monitor support, a great suite of applications including a text editor with lsp support and much more, and in general looks nicer. cinnamon is sort of the bare minimum
better multi monitor support
I run a 3x1 setup and KDE didn't handle it any better than Cinnamon did.
Wayland support is coming to Mint. You can actually use it on 21.3 right now but it is unstable.
Rest of what you said is opinion.
Wayland has objectively better multi monitor support in every case. You were encountering tearing issues before switching, maybe you just didn't notice.
Well, I got rid of KDE and I'm on Cinnamon right now, so where are these tearing issues? You think I would have noticed after over a year of use.
Are your monitors all the same resolution, refresh rate and size?
Resolution yes, refresh rate, no.
the rest also isn't just an opinion, cinnamon does not have an equivalent to kdenlive, krita, or kate. even the existing applications are just not on the same level. it's an acceptable desktop, but plasma and gnome are just better.
Why would I care what software KDE comes with? This is Linux. I can install whatever works best for me. Including the whole of KDE software suite if I so chose. You KDE fans are voracious.
I use KdenLive on Mint whenever I need to edit a video. I've never bothered to look for the other two because I use Darktable and GIMP for my photo editing, but I can check to see if they're available if you want me to.
Does that include support for variable refresh rate with multiple monitor (Freesync in my case).
Yes
Cinnamons compositor doesn't turn off for games (it's supposed to but has been bugged for years) which costs you fps.
Playing Alan Wake 2 at launch was only possible with the latest Mesa drivers compiled from the AUR due to some graphics features that it required.
It doesn't just cost FPS. It straight up breaks some games that run fine on other distros.
Does it still have that feature that kills and restarts cinnamon when memory leaks start getting to be too much? I honestly had to laugh at that when that was introduced.
wait is THAT why my mint edge iso randomly fucking sends me back to login screen??
No clue. Haven't used it in years. I was done when I went looking for a fix for the compositor thing and found a years-old open bug report.
I assume compiling Mesa is rather difficult to set up? For reference I've not bothered to try and compile Lutris or Wine.
Looks like mid-to-high-level difficulty if you really want to build from source, due to multiple complex interdependent configuration flags that have to match your hardware, and the need to check a kernel option or two. (Based on the Gentoo ebuild for mesa 24.1.2).
With AUR it's as easy as installing any other package, actually.
You just install the git version from AUR.
Installing Arch appears to be more complex than Mint's Click Yes x4 GUI. Should I expect almost everything to just work after install?
Not even close, if you actually install barebones arch, then barebones arch is exactly that, barebones. You wont even have a DE.
Endeavour is what you want. It's just straight up arch, but with all the stuff you'd want to set up anyway done for you.
And if you want an "app-store" style app to browse packages with, and not fiddle with the command line to manage packages, install pamac. It can be expanded with AUR and flatpak support.
If I knew what parts I most wanted then maybe I could do bare arch but I guess Endeaver is the way to ho.
Well, Endeavour is just arch. If you want, you can achieve the same install that has only the things you need, by removing things instead of just adding.
IMO it starts off closer to the config most people want, so it's less work to take it the rest of the way.