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?
I switched from Windows to Mint. Best thing I ever did for myself as It’s extremely user friendly.
Is it the best choice for you? That depends on what you’re looking for in Linux.
Personally I was just fed up with Microsoft and all the corporate shenanigans. But I’m too old and dumb to learn how to properly utilize Linux (not gonna kid myself on that front), and Mint has proven a great “Baby’s First Linux” for me.
If you’ve just installed Ubuntu, stick with it for a bit. Get things set up the way you like them. Make a mess if you must. But don’t switch because someone on the internet said one is better than the other. Lots of the Linux sites are just content farms (that 9to5 site) and copy other sites and then people read those and they suggest what they read.
Mint does have some bespoke tools that users like, but those tools can be installed on other distros.
Anyway. First, play around, make a mess, clean it up, get used to it. Then figure out how to backup the configs before you reinstall a new distro.
Other beginner distros are Zorin and Elementary.
I’m a Debian user myself, but I’ve been around and have tried many different distros, WMs, DEs, etc. over the past 19 years. Keep messing around and you’ll find your comfort zone.
Thanks for the reply. I have been searching around for how to further customize Ubuntu. As of right now, I have it basic. Nothing even on my latop, so I can cause some chaos and figure it out from there. What I’m finding that tutorials online are mixed. Some are great, but majority are terrible on how to actually work around the system. But what you suggested is appreciated and I will take the information.
@bbbhltz @Doodz The truth is you can make almost any distro work like any other. Main differences out of the box are desktops, but you can install virtually any desktop on virtually any distro, I have Mate on ALL of mine despite all the different distros, the other main difference is package managers. There are some outliers that are exceptions, gentoo for example, you compile the whole damn thing yourself, this has a learning curve but the advantage is 100% customization and you can optimize for your particular hardware and needs, arch and manjaro some packages provided as binaries but most things you can also recompile and customize. Then there is kali which is your friend if network penetration is your thing. There are a variety of immutable releases, more pain in the ass than they are worth in my view but that provides a layer of security, but those things are outliers. Probably 90% of distros are either offshoots of Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Debian or of Ubuntu which is an offshoot of Debian. And the main difference between Debian and Redhat flavors are two things, package manager, dpkg/apt in the case of Debian and rpm/dnf in the case of Redhat, and of default security which is SeLinux and Debians which uses apparmor. Of the two selinux is probably more secure but is also more ubtrusive being a pain in the ass to change on the fly and requiring re-labeling which on systems with rotary drives is a slow and torturous process during which the machine is unavailable for anything else. The kernel security systems of the two, if you use secure boot, are also somewhat different, the Redhat version is able to use TPM, so of the two flavors I would say in theory Redhat is potentially more secure, but in practice ALL of the exploits I’ve seen on my servers have been on the Redhat flavor so perhaps practice and theory are somewhat incongruent in this case. At any rate, I agree with bbbhltz, take the time to get to know what you have well before distro hopping is that likely you can customize it to be what you want without changing. I personally find Ubuntu to be a good starting point, it’s easy to learn initially and it is flexible enough to bend into what you want long term.
Thanks for the reply. I appreciate the information, I will mess around with Ubuntu some more. Then either eventually find a good spot to be in or I’ll jump to Mint and give that a go.
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.
I have reliably upgraded Mint in place the last, dunno, 5-6 major releases or so, works exactly as well as Ubuntu’s
@jherazob That’s great, my experience has not gone as smoothly, I’ve ended up with dependency loops that in spite of my best efforts, I could just not readily resolve. Things like there is a new version of python required by the new apt, but it installed the apt before the python, so now I’m stuck with a system that has a new version of apt but old version of python, thus apt won’t work to install the new python manually. I’ve not encountered this with Ubuntu but more than once with Mint, like I said my success rate with Mint has been around 50/50.
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.
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.
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
Also, I experienced better driver support with Mint than with Ubuntu, so it also worked better out of the box.
Though that may (no longer) be an issue for OP.
If you’re already using Ubuntu, I don’t think it’s worth it. They’re fairly similar. Then again, I didn’t even get to install Ubuntu in the first place, the installer kept crashing.
Unless the laptop is a potato and you don’t have a better computer, you can try Mint, or any other distro in a VM to see for yourself.
And welcome to Linux. If someone recommends you Arch Linux, Gentoo or LFS as other newbie-friendly option, it’s a joke.
Thank you for the reply. Nobody has recommended Arch Linux, Gentoo or LFS, yet lol. But Im happy I switched from Windows to Linux. However, Ubuntu is taking me a bit to get used to. It took me a few days to get Ubuntu to even work. Thankfully, I don’t have anything on my laptop. I kept it blank for a reason to fly around and try out this OS.
Then again, the archlinux wiki and forums are the best places to get every kind of help a linux user might need. And this is true for every distribution, to some extent.
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.
I agree with most folks here that usability-wise, both are truly fine! Mainly I think philosophy is where Mint might have an edge here.
Ubuntu, run by a corpo named Canonical, has had some controversial decisions in the past, such as inserting amazon ads into the system’s search feature, or “opt out” analytics being default, and lately, a system called “snap.”
Snap is controversial because it has a closed source backend, but effectively works just like its open-source counterpart, the “flatpak.” It’s packaged so the software has everything it needs to run.
Some people say they work great, others hate them, but Ubuntu doesn’t make it very easy for you to have a choice in the matter.
If you don’t like the idea of snaps, it’s a bit of a pain to get rid of it. And otherwise, Ubuntu will sneakily use it as the default way to install most software. Philosophically, this can feel a lot like why people left Windows behind!
Long term, that’s why I favor and recommend Mint to most newcomers: It doesn’t play those games, sometimes the drivers work even better, the community is fantastic, and the vast knowledge that works on Ubuntu should work on Mint too.
So that’s mainly where the difference will lie.
Either way, I wouldn’t sweat it too much while you’re learning, as long as it does what you want! And purple-orange is pretty snazzy. ;)
Mint just feels a little “cleaner” in my humble opinion. Most software you’d want the latest of, like GIMP or Discord, will be found as a Flatpak in Mint’s app store.
Hope this helps you get a clearer view!
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.
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.
I also love Tumbleweed and rock it as my daily driver!
To complement this point, OP, you can also get that sweet rollback functionality in any distro! Usually the easiest way is selecting BTRFS as your file system on install, and installing a software called “TimeShift” that will manage snapshots for you.
BTRFS can be complicated, but basically, it allows remembering the changes in files, without needing to copy the ENTIRE file. This saves a ton of space. (You don’t need to get into the weeds deep diving if you don’t want to. Snapshots are great, everything else is great, as long as you aren’t doing crazy specific RAID setups or something lol)
Otherwise, on EXT4 for insurance, your rollbacks would just literally be copied files, which can eat your storage fast. :)
Tumbleweed is known for rolling (heh!) this in quite smoothly by default, but this is just an example how any distro can be tweaked how you like! (Highly recommend setting up Timeshift on ANY install.)
I absolutely second the advice in this comment: Try some live USBs or virtual machines and just play around for what feels right. Distro hopping can be lots of fun, but you’ll find one that “feels like home.”
:)
@MonkeMischief @reallyzen NIS is seriously broken in Suse and I’ve had a bug report in four at least four years and they won’t fix it. So no good in a network.
Stay with ubuntu unless you have an issue with ubuntu itself, because the grass isn’t greener on the other side despite what some people might say. The only real difference that you’ll find are different default settings/programs and the time it takes for a software update to reach your final linux install.
Some distros like Ubuntu prefer slightly older versions that have been proven to be stable/bug free while others like Arch mostly go for the newest everything where available, at the cost of stability. If you like something a little bit more balanced, you have Fedora (which is my preference).
The beauty of Linux is that most software will work no matter the distribution you use. If the reason you want to use Linux Mint instead of regular Ubuntu is the desktop environment, you can at any time install the Cinammon desktop (the one used by Mint), here’s an article that guides you through the process: https://itsfoss.com/install-cinnamon-on-ubuntu/
You entered in the 3’ rather than 2.5’ end of the pool, it will be mostly the same, you can seriously dm me with basic tech support, even. No worries in the FOSS end of the pool, just humans helping humans be human.
Touché lol. But I appreciate the reply and the offer, I more than likely will reach out. I love learning, so I may ask further questions.
@Doodz no harm in switching. Mint offers great GUI tools. Almost everything that can be done on Mint can be done on Ubuntu and vice-versa.
If you find Mint’s GUI simpler go with it. Happy exploration.
