MX-Linux user here..and a happy one! Made the switch from Win10 early this year and haven't looked back since! Absolutely loving the stability it provides, I would hate it have troublesome / breaking OS all the time.
@@caglarkorkmaz33 my primary daily driver is the XFCE version...stable, highly composable, lightweight. At first I tried the Fluxbox, ultra lightweight --> idle RAM usage was around 400-500 MB lol...but one of my stock trading app didn't work well with it so I upgraded to XFCE.
@@caglarkorkmaz33 hey sorry i missed your question..i'm using XFCE now. At first I tried Fluxbox which is fine 90% of the time and super lightweight, but my stock trading app was not working well hence I moved to XFCE. Hearing good stuff from the KDE version as well!
Zero problems with LMDE5 and now LMDE6. NO more crashes since dumping Small-and-Limp software, which I BANISHED from my home, and I also have garlic, silver cross, silver bullets, mirrors, and a stake and hammer set on my desk, just in case anyone ever visits me with a Tiny-and-Shriveled device! I have had no reason to try other distros in a while, as I am just tired of mucking around and want a "lazy old guy's" distro. As an old IT pro, I was burned out, and this is a secure and totally reliable retirement Mercedes kind of OS, that does everything for me in comfort! LOVE IT!
The LM upgrade works best with point upgrades, like upgrading LM 21.2 to 21.3, but for major upgrades like from 21.3 to 22, it does not work so well because the underlying Ubuntu version changes, which makes some of your current installed programs not work. I suspect the same would be true of LMDE.
Trying various distros I kept going back to Mint, I did try others on & off for a few years with the intention of ditching windows. I did just that about 9 months ago & have used Mint exclusively since that time. I tried LMDE & found it unstable so went back to the standard Mint Cinnamon which I have found to be rock solid. I use it at work as well as at home. I tried the various desktop environments & didn't particularly like any of them except KDE. Hated the Ubuntu desktop lol.
I installed MX Linux on an old Core 2 Duo 4GB laptop and i was pleasantly surprised at how well it runs. I enjoyed using it so much, I'm going to install and dual boot it (via separate SSDs) with Win10 on my main i7 32GB desktop system. Hoping that I'll be sble to set it up with the same FOSS apps that I currently use in Windows, or find Linux alternatives. Then I can go fully Linux when Win10 loses security support late next year.
I have a very old Acer laptop I use to distro hop all the time. MX ran very well on it but both versions of Linux Mint/LMDE didn’t run as well. I’m currently running Arch with XFCE and have no issues.
@@lettuceprayamen Me too. Bodhi is not as light as it used to be so AntiX runs much better on my Eepc. But the Eepc does not have enough RAM to run modern web browsers well, so I don't have much use for it, expect maybe typing notes, and with the tiny screen it is not ideal for that either. Someone said he used a netbook for playing mp3 music. Maybe that is all it is good for now. The average phone nowadays has more computing power.
I've installed MX Linux on my old laptop that I use for scanning, was a good choice 💻 I choose the KDE version, just because. But I do have to admit having a hard time to select a personal favorite when both choices are equal good in order to get the job done.
Thanks for this comparison! I use MXLinux since 2020 (after End of Life for Win7) and it just works. It's stable and also works on my 10 yo laptop. I've tried a lot of distros and got stuck here for the time being.
I use Linux mint its the first operating system I learned to use since switching from windows an I totally love using it. But I just might try out MX Linux in the near future based on you very nice review of that operating system.
now on EndeavourOS, but still reminiscing MX Linux days - i think it's one of the best distros out there. as for LMDE, i had issues installing it as the installer wouldn't recognise my EFI partition, whereas regular Mint installed just fine
Good video! I ran MX about three years up through 2022, then switched back to Mint, which I had used for a long while before MX. In the Debian world, these two are my favorites. I've enjoyed Arch, Fedora, and many others, but I keep coming back to these. I love MX's tools but Mint does feel nicer. As far as looks go, I put Cinnamon on everything, including MX, and I run the Liquorix kernel on both also. I've got Mint on my main work machine, LMDE6 on my general use laptop, and MX on a Thinkpad I experiment with. You can't go wrong with any of them. Oh...one of my favorite features among them all? They found and installed my Canon printer when other distros couldn't even see it. If you run MXLinux, there's a good video by Dolphin Oracle, an MX dev, showing how to setup MX with btrfs.
LMDE runs perfect on both my laptops, but on a desktop I always had some minor problems, mostly concerning NVidia stuff - outdated driver versions, Blender loosing GPU and stuff like that. Probably I did something wrong while installing drivers from Nvidia. Now I'm running OpenSUSE on a desktop and no issues so far.
The desktop environment is just x11 not wayland, correct? I guess these are good for old hardware. But I guess in the future they might improve Wayland support. Just make sure you get the right ISO image if you have newer latest hardware.
Both are very nice distros, as you say. It took me a while to get around to trying MX since I tend not to distro hop when I'm happy with things. Unfortunately, I started running into problems with Debian-based distros more recently, though I've had some wi-fi issues on Mint and Ubuntu going back to 2018. Most of this stuff is probably specific to my hardware and not widespread, but it is odd and frustrating to have such a run of bad luck. One odd quirk specific to MX was that it couldn't use the USB 3 port on one of my old Thinkpads, and I couldn't give up the port. Sometimes I'll try to troubleshoot things, but on a fresh install I'm more likely to just try something else. I'm on a different Thinkpad right now and have LMDE on it, so it's solid there. No wi-fi issue since it's broken on this machine and I use a workaround to connect. On the machines that didn't like Debian stuff, I looked at OpenSUSE and Mageia and chose the latter. It's only been a few weeks, but it's pretty good so far. But I would still recommend MX and LMDE to people as I think they are good and I think most people won't have those hardware issues.
The greatest handicap of MX Linux is the missing upgrade tool to the next version, which LM has. In the event MX issues the next version, you will need to back up your files. reformat your drive, install the new MX version from scratch, and restore your files and configurations.
The LM upgrade works best with point upgrades, like upgrading LM 21.2 to 21.3, but for major upgrades like from 21.3 to 22, it does not work so well because the underlying Ubuntu version changes, which makes some of your current installed programs not work. I suspect the same would be true of LMDE.
Tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu Budgie, Linux Lite, Manjaro, Big Linux, Zorin, Pop os, PikaOS. Nothing compared to Linux Mint Cinamon. Its stable, beautiful and easy to use. I moved to Linux Mint from Windows 11 a year ago and regretted not doing it earlier.
XFCE menu is BACKWARD--- can that be reversed? The categoreies go on the LEFT not the right. IT IS blazing fast.. Love LMDE 6-- and once COSMIC comes out-- I may use it.. (the official release-not some alpha or beta...the FINISHED cosmic.
Love (XFCE) MX Linux, but it starts up more often than not with no sound on my Alienware laptop.... 🙄 This does not happen using Debian (on same computer) Am contemplating deleting MX Linux and just expanding Debian's ssd space...
With some work, you can make it pretty similar, that's true. But both MX and LMDE still have some advantages, e. g. a current Firefox in their repos instead of Debian's ESR. LMDE puts some extra love into making all apps nicely integrated in terms of theming. And both, expecially MX, add many extra tools and preconfigure things nicely. But for most other Debian-based distros I'd agree and suggest people to just go for plain Debian.
I have used Mint and MX a lot and like both. Mint has a more polished-looking and thematic user interface and is more user friendly to new Linux users out of the box, on fresh install. MX needs a bit of work and tweaking and customizing to get it to something approaching the same look and feel after installing it. However, MX is more customizable and comes with more system utilities than Mint and is lighter on CPU and RAM usage so for me personally, i prefer MX. I do not care much about the aesthetics of an OS as i don't spend much time looking at the desktop. Rather, i want the OS to be small and light so my apps run faster. MX is slightly better than Mint in this respect.
Out of the box there is no comparison. Linux Mint for the win. I like the MX tools but thats the only thing going for it. MX looks like crap. Its unstable if you try to make it look better. Its just not a good experience. I have tried every version that comes out and it has not gotten any better. No idea why its so high on distro watch other than a few youtubers overhyping it.
I agree that Mint looks better out of the box. But stability wise there is no difference. Both LMDE and MX are basically customised versions of Debian stable. I do have to do a lot of tweaking to make MX look how I like (for me, being an ex Windows user) but I have not found that to cause any stability problems.
@@BengYongTang That has not been my experience. I've tried installing and using MX about 15-20 times on different hardware over the years and it ALWAYS breaks. it has never been stable for me.
Only if you have something against Debian. Since MX is base on Debian. MX is the best. To know that you have to use it. If you got to have everything shiny and new like a rolling release. Than MX isn't met for you.
Actually, LMDE has more problems than the normal Mint. Despite all the hate ubuntu gets, they have done a lot of custom work on the kernel and other parts of the system to make sure it boots everywhere. It just works. Debian is not so. Debian's support for hardware is more limited, because the default kernel and other code doesn't have all the tricks ubuntu has implemented. I saw that first hand when I was installing Debian on my Dell Xeon PC: Debian couldn't work properly with uefi, while ubuntu could without a problem. Others have reported similar problems too with their PCs. On top of that, the LMDE version doesn't have the nvidia support for easy installation, which can be a big headache for users. So yeah, LMDE is useful "just in case" ubuntu stops being as open, but ubuntu is a superior option for new users. I'm a Debian user and yet, for new users, I suggest Linux Mint (ubuntu-based).
Ubuntu forces SNAPs, which are a potential entry path for malware, and when you have a limited speed connection, like in suburbs and rural areas, or simply do not 100 bucks a month for a fat link, any one of which factors affects more than half the population here in North America. Since they force SNAPs, Ubuntu has continuously declined. It takes users time to see how they screwed by SNAPs, but once they do, they jump ship. Ubuntu with SNAPs is the evil enemy, that is almost worse than Windows, as there is no control over them. Forced updates in the gigabyte range and dumping me off the web and off TV-binging for days are the exact evil that was one of the MAJOR reasons I dumped S&M software (as a non-masochist, I refuse to let MS on my machines). Debian has implemented inclusion of "non-free" hardware and software support (drivers, codecs, etc) in their "Live" versions, available in all major desktops. This "non-free" support is also no problem with LMDE, which includes everything needed. NVIDIA is just loaded with proprietary junk anyway, that causes problems in every OS, whether Linux, Fruit Company, or Small-and-Limp, so why waste money on it? For non-gamers the usual on-board graphics are just fine, even for flight sims, and AMD has great graphics, since they bought ATI, which was always the least fussy GPU system anyway.
Hardware manufacturers also often provide Ubuntu drivers. Not just hardware, Ubuntu also has more software support. Often, Windows programmes will have an Ubuntu version as their only Linux version. Things like VPN clients and some games. Still, as Ubuntu moves towards using only snaps, it's advantage over Debian may wane. Snaps run slow and waste storage space. As it is, LM22 has to package some software packages as apt/deb because Ubuntu 24.04 uses snap versions of them. If this gets worse Mint may have to drop Ubuntu and go with LMDE.
@@BengYongTang Normal Debian is outdated, but Debian-Testing (Trixie) is actually pretty good. It's not unstable like Debian Sid is, so it could be an option. In fact, Trixie is what Google uses internally too, it's stable enough. But yeah, the default Debian is too old.
For me LMDE and the latest Mint version!
MX-Linux user here..and a happy one! Made the switch from Win10 early this year and haven't looked back since! Absolutely loving the stability it provides, I would hate it have troublesome / breaking OS all the time.
Which desktop environment do you use? Xfce ,Fluxbox or Kde?
@@caglarkorkmaz33 my primary daily driver is the XFCE version...stable, highly composable, lightweight.
At first I tried the Fluxbox, ultra lightweight --> idle RAM usage was around 400-500 MB lol...but one of my stock trading app didn't work well with it so I upgraded to XFCE.
@@caglarkorkmaz33 hey sorry i missed your question..i'm using XFCE now.
At first I tried Fluxbox which is fine 90% of the time and super lightweight, but my stock trading app was not working well hence I moved to XFCE.
Hearing good stuff from the KDE version as well!
Bro what about GPU drivers and System Apps like Armoury Crate ?
Zero problems with LMDE5 and now LMDE6. NO more crashes since dumping Small-and-Limp software, which I BANISHED from my home, and I also have garlic, silver cross, silver bullets, mirrors, and a stake and hammer set on my desk, just in case anyone ever visits me with a Tiny-and-Shriveled device!
I have had no reason to try other distros in a while, as I am just tired of mucking around and want a "lazy old guy's" distro. As an old IT pro, I was burned out, and this is a secure and totally reliable retirement Mercedes kind of OS, that does everything for me in comfort! LOVE IT!
MX Linux user myself. Only downside it has no upgrade tool, so you have to install it again when a new version comes out.
Search "upgrade mx Linux" upgrading from 21 to 23 was easy and worked with no problem.
Maybe this used to be true, but they've had an update since 19.
@@martinlroth6772 Yes, but to my knowledge they don't have an upgrade tool like Linux Mint for instance.
The LM upgrade works best with point upgrades, like upgrading LM 21.2 to 21.3, but for major upgrades like from 21.3 to 22, it does not work so well because the underlying Ubuntu version changes, which makes some of your current installed programs not work. I suspect the same would be true of LMDE.
how to know when to update ?
Trying various distros I kept going back to Mint, I did try others on & off for a few years with the intention of ditching windows. I did just that about 9 months ago & have used Mint exclusively since that time. I tried LMDE & found it unstable so went back to the standard Mint Cinnamon which I have found to be rock solid. I use it at work as well as at home. I tried the various desktop environments & didn't particularly like any of them except KDE. Hated the Ubuntu desktop lol.
lmde is unstable
@@alimirolyaee7543 Not my experience.
I happily use both of them and have done for years with no problems at all from either of them. Good video and very fair.
I'd LOVE to use MX right now-- but I've tried and can't get my PROTON MAIL BRIDGE to work with it.. if I COULD- I'd use it all the time.. love it!!!
I installed MX Linux on an old Core 2 Duo 4GB laptop and i was pleasantly surprised at how well it runs. I enjoyed using it so much, I'm going to install and dual boot it (via separate SSDs) with Win10 on my main i7 32GB desktop system. Hoping that I'll be sble to set it up with the same FOSS apps that I currently use in Windows, or find Linux alternatives. Then I can go fully Linux when Win10 loses security support late next year.
I have a very old Acer laptop I use to distro hop all the time. MX ran very well on it but both versions of Linux Mint/LMDE didn’t run as well. I’m currently running Arch with XFCE and have no issues.
AntiX would be even better for the oldy. The same repo btw
@@RustedCroaker I had AntiX running on and old EEpc netbook and it was good and before that I had Bodhi Linux.
@@lettuceprayamen Me too. Bodhi is not as light as it used to be so AntiX runs much better on my Eepc. But the Eepc does not have enough RAM to run modern web browsers well, so I don't have much use for it, expect maybe typing notes, and with the tiny screen it is not ideal for that either. Someone said he used a netbook for playing mp3 music. Maybe that is all it is good for now. The average phone nowadays has more computing power.
I've installed MX Linux on my old laptop that I use for scanning, was a good choice 💻
I choose the KDE version, just because. But I do have to admit having a hard time to select a personal favorite when both choices are equal good in order to get the job done.
old laptop and KDE in one sentence
that's why I love linux
Personally, on an old laptop I would use the Xfce or fluxbox versions as KDE is a lot more resource hungry than those 2 or even Cinnamon.
Thanks for this comparison!
I use MXLinux since 2020 (after End of Life for Win7) and it just works. It's stable and also works on my 10 yo laptop. I've tried a lot of distros and got stuck here for the time being.
Ty deff going Mx as a learning Linux person i like the flexibility to learn.
I use Linux mint its the first operating system I learned to use since switching from windows an I totally love using it. But I just might try out MX Linux in the near future based on you very nice review of that operating system.
now on EndeavourOS, but still reminiscing MX Linux days - i think it's one of the best distros out there.
as for LMDE, i had issues installing it as the installer wouldn't recognise my EFI partition, whereas regular Mint installed just fine
Good video!
I ran MX about three years up through 2022, then switched back to Mint, which I had used for a long while before MX. In the Debian world, these two are my favorites. I've enjoyed Arch, Fedora, and many others, but I keep coming back to these. I love MX's tools but Mint does feel nicer. As far as looks go, I put Cinnamon on everything, including MX, and I run the Liquorix kernel on both also.
I've got Mint on my main work machine, LMDE6 on my general use laptop, and MX on a Thinkpad I experiment with. You can't go wrong with any of them. Oh...one of my favorite features among them all? They found and installed my Canon printer when other distros couldn't even see it.
If you run MXLinux, there's a good video by Dolphin Oracle, an MX dev, showing how to setup MX with btrfs.
Thank you 🎉. Excellent video.
LMDE is a killer distro, but I moved my ThinkPad to Archcraft (which has offered the best battery life of any distro I've tried).
i use mx linux and it is powerfull linux
I have a six years old Laptop , i3 4th gen.....I use mx xfce.....this has kept my device usable.....linux mint xfce is also good alternative.
LMDE runs perfect on both my laptops, but on a desktop I always had some minor problems, mostly concerning NVidia stuff - outdated driver versions, Blender loosing GPU and stuff like that. Probably I did something wrong while installing drivers from Nvidia. Now I'm running OpenSUSE on a desktop and no issues so far.
MX Linux their XFCE new styles darkcold,darkblood, and darkfire tells us why they are number one.
Thanks for the video. Debian with xfce is the stability champion for me.
The desktop environment is just x11 not wayland, correct? I guess these are good for old hardware. But I guess in the future they might improve Wayland support. Just make sure you get the right ISO image if you have newer latest hardware.
What's so good about Wayland?
@@BengYongTang Reduced latency, better graphics performance and features, enhanced security, simplified configuration, future proof.
I have been using OPEN SUSE recenlty- and it's turning out to be FAR more stable than even the Debian distros I've used.... and easier to correct.
Both are very nice distros, as you say. It took me a while to get around to trying MX since I tend not to distro hop when I'm happy with things. Unfortunately, I started running into problems with Debian-based distros more recently, though I've had some wi-fi issues on Mint and Ubuntu going back to 2018. Most of this stuff is probably specific to my hardware and not widespread, but it is odd and frustrating to have such a run of bad luck. One odd quirk specific to MX was that it couldn't use the USB 3 port on one of my old Thinkpads, and I couldn't give up the port. Sometimes I'll try to troubleshoot things, but on a fresh install I'm more likely to just try something else. I'm on a different Thinkpad right now and have LMDE on it, so it's solid there. No wi-fi issue since it's broken on this machine and I use a workaround to connect. On the machines that didn't like Debian stuff, I looked at OpenSUSE and Mageia and chose the latter. It's only been a few weeks, but it's pretty good so far. But I would still recommend MX and LMDE to people as I think they are good and I think most people won't have those hardware issues.
The greatest handicap of MX Linux is the missing upgrade tool to the next version, which LM has. In the event MX issues the next version, you will need to back up your files. reformat your drive, install the new MX version from scratch, and restore your files and configurations.
Maybe this used to be true, but it definitely isn't anymore. I upgraded from 21 to 23 without any issue. Search "upgrade mx Linux".
Search "upgrade mx Linux". They have instructions for updating from 19 to 21 and 21 to 23. I upgraded from 21 to 23 myself and it worked flawlessly.
The LM upgrade works best with point upgrades, like upgrading LM 21.2 to 21.3, but for major upgrades like from 21.3 to 22, it does not work so well because the underlying Ubuntu version changes, which makes some of your current installed programs not work. I suspect the same would be true of LMDE.
Tried Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Ubuntu Budgie, Linux Lite, Manjaro, Big Linux, Zorin, Pop os, PikaOS. Nothing compared to Linux Mint Cinamon. Its stable, beautiful and easy to use. I moved to Linux Mint from Windows 11 a year ago and regretted not doing it earlier.
XFCE menu is BACKWARD--- can that be reversed? The categoreies go on the LEFT not the right. IT IS blazing fast.. Love LMDE 6-- and once COSMIC comes out-- I may use it.. (the official release-not some alpha or beta...the FINISHED cosmic.
yeah it can be reversed, check the Whisker Menu preferences
Yes the XFCE menu can be easily customised. Right-click on the menu button and edit its properties. You can set where to position the categories.
I distro hopped a bit but came back to Mint 22 Cinnamon. Even Fedora cinnamon spin was giving me a little problems finding .rpms
I am currently on Fedora with KDE latest version. It's way ahead of both these distros & smooth performance. You may add a review video of it.
Is MX able to upgrade version on the roll like LMDE without need to format and fresh install ?
MX is not a rolling release distro. So fresh install is peobably best, but I just format root partition leaving home intact wit my reistalls.
@@ebattleon thanks, good to know.
I have used every distro, mint, mx, Ubuntu, arch,kde,. Lmde is most stable of them😊
I use MX Linux XFCE for work, it's the one that works best with my HP ProBook 655 G1 Laptop!
Love (XFCE) MX Linux, but it starts up more often than not with no sound on my Alienware laptop.... 🙄 This does not happen using Debian (on same computer) Am contemplating deleting MX Linux and just expanding Debian's ssd space...
You can also try Debian with xfce or cinnamon, which will be very similar to MX and LMDE.
With some work, you can make it pretty similar, that's true. But both MX and LMDE still have some advantages, e. g. a current Firefox in their repos instead of Debian's ESR. LMDE puts some extra love into making all apps nicely integrated in terms of theming. And both, expecially MX, add many extra tools and preconfigure things nicely. But for most other Debian-based distros I'd agree and suggest people to just go for plain Debian.
Does MX linux really have a HUGE community ? I kno it is in flavor now in some circles ? But is it really Huge ?
Do they fixed problems with repo keys?
Which distro are you talking about and what problem was that?
You can theme mx to look good as well
💯Usefull information thanks,,🎉💐🔥🔥🔥🔥,
I have used Mint and MX a lot and like both. Mint has a more polished-looking and thematic user interface and is more user friendly to new Linux users out of the box, on fresh install. MX needs a bit of work and tweaking and customizing to get it to something approaching the same look and feel after installing it. However, MX is more customizable and comes with more system utilities than Mint and is lighter on CPU and RAM usage so for me personally, i prefer MX. I do not care much about the aesthetics of an OS as i don't spend much time looking at the desktop. Rather, i want the OS to be small and light so my apps run faster. MX is slightly better than Mint in this respect.
I haven't watched this yet but will guess the ending.
They are both winners!
Wrong.
im an Windows user, im using Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.
The only thing I miss at LMDE are desktop environments.
What do you mean? LMDE has a desktop environment - Cinnamon. You can also install XFCE and MATE on LMDE if you so desire.
Excellent vd ^^
I love Both
Out of the box there is no comparison. Linux Mint for the win. I like the MX tools but thats the only thing going for it. MX looks like crap. Its unstable if you try to make it look better. Its just not a good experience. I have tried every version that comes out and it has not gotten any better. No idea why its so high on distro watch other than a few youtubers overhyping it.
I agree that Mint looks better out of the box. But stability wise there is no difference. Both LMDE and MX are basically customised versions of Debian stable. I do have to do a lot of tweaking to make MX look how I like (for me, being an ex Windows user) but I have not found that to cause any stability problems.
@@BengYongTang That has not been my experience. I've tried installing and using MX about 15-20 times on different hardware over the years and it ALWAYS breaks. it has never been stable for me.
👍👍!
As soon as you complained about the MX panel (your first point) I stopped watching. Really?!
I've been trying to get his videos off my feeds for ages.
MX is overrated.
Only if you have something against Debian. Since MX is base on Debian. MX is the best. To know that you have to use it. If you got to have everything shiny and new like a rolling release. Than MX isn't met for you.
@gimcrack555 das kapital was written in German, thus not liking Marxism is having something against German language according to your "argument".
LUBUNTU & MANJARO CINNAMON ❤❤❤
Actually, LMDE has more problems than the normal Mint. Despite all the hate ubuntu gets, they have done a lot of custom work on the kernel and other parts of the system to make sure it boots everywhere. It just works. Debian is not so. Debian's support for hardware is more limited, because the default kernel and other code doesn't have all the tricks ubuntu has implemented. I saw that first hand when I was installing Debian on my Dell Xeon PC: Debian couldn't work properly with uefi, while ubuntu could without a problem. Others have reported similar problems too with their PCs. On top of that, the LMDE version doesn't have the nvidia support for easy installation, which can be a big headache for users. So yeah, LMDE is useful "just in case" ubuntu stops being as open, but ubuntu is a superior option for new users. I'm a Debian user and yet, for new users, I suggest Linux Mint (ubuntu-based).
Ubuntu forces SNAPs, which are a potential entry path for malware, and when you have a limited speed connection, like in suburbs and rural areas, or simply do not 100 bucks a month for a fat link, any one of which factors affects more than half the population here in North America. Since they force SNAPs, Ubuntu has continuously declined. It takes users time to see how they screwed by SNAPs, but once they do, they jump ship.
Ubuntu with SNAPs is the evil enemy, that is almost worse than Windows, as there is no control over them.
Forced updates in the gigabyte range and dumping me off the web and off TV-binging for days are the exact evil that was one of the MAJOR reasons I dumped S&M software (as a non-masochist, I refuse to let MS on my machines).
Debian has implemented inclusion of "non-free" hardware and software support (drivers, codecs, etc) in their "Live" versions, available in all major desktops. This "non-free" support is also no problem with LMDE, which includes everything needed.
NVIDIA is just loaded with proprietary junk anyway, that causes problems in every OS, whether Linux, Fruit Company, or Small-and-Limp, so why waste money on it?
For non-gamers the usual on-board graphics are just fine, even for flight sims, and AMD has great graphics, since they bought ATI, which was always the least fussy GPU system anyway.
Hardware manufacturers also often provide Ubuntu drivers. Not just hardware, Ubuntu also has more software support. Often, Windows programmes will have an Ubuntu version as their only Linux version. Things like VPN clients and some games. Still, as Ubuntu moves towards using only snaps, it's advantage over Debian may wane. Snaps run slow and waste storage space. As it is, LM22 has to package some software packages as apt/deb because Ubuntu 24.04 uses snap versions of them. If this gets worse Mint may have to drop Ubuntu and go with LMDE.
@@BengYongTang Normal Debian is outdated, but Debian-Testing (Trixie) is actually pretty good. It's not unstable like Debian Sid is, so it could be an option. In fact, Trixie is what Google uses internally too, it's stable enough. But yeah, the default Debian is too old.