@@Kanbei11 There's confusion about this. putting tor through a VPN (VPN -> TOR -> Internet) is fine. The VPN hides your usage of TOR from your ISP but still allows Tor to change circuits as needed. Putting a VPN through tor (Tor -> VPN -> Internet) is what breaks tor. Because it prevents tor from properly changing circuits as it's supposed to. As for what protonVPN does, they basically automate VPN -> TOR -> internet for you. I personally don't use it and much prefer to just run whonix on my local machine behind a VPN but it's there for simplicity.
@@DriftingMonkeyx And their Linux support is still quite lacking. They keep chasing shiny new things instead of working on the half-baked services they already have.
The plight of Ubuntu derivatives When a distro doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from Ubuntu: "Does this distro have a reason to exist?" When a distro does too much to differentiate itself from Ubuntu: "Is this distro trying to do too much?"
i installed mint 22 yesterday. it was already unofficially released for a little while as it was in the "stable" folder of the linux mint mirrors. some news articles were written about this too.
I agree that the removal of star ratings for unverified apps is weird You have to enable it, so the user should be awear of apps not being verified. Showing a tick next to verified apps, and a warning on unverified apps also reminds them of this. These are then clearly separated from the user reviews, using different symbols (ticks compared to stars), so the user won't confuse them. If it was enabled by default, I would understand, but otherwise it makes it more difficult to tell if you can trust the unverified app.
They R deliberately killing Mint. iWonder who's paying them 2 ruin it? Firefox was bought out by Google 2 switch the rendering engine 2 chrome 2 kill all their addons, etc.
it's okay for open source bloatware to hide ratings 😅 I'm not scared, even if someone installs an open source malware on my machine my windows defender immediately detects and removes it 😅 good luck mint users😂
I think linux mint team is gonna be fine. I really love their distro a lot. I just donated a small amount to help the team. Also i donated to other free and open software. I think a lot of people kind of forget that even a small donation means a lot.
Yep. I signed up for their Patreon. I've used Mint myself off and on for years. But where its really shined is keeping my parents computer problem free for the last 10+ years. I'd say $5/month is a small price to pay for that extra little bit of sanity.
Yeah, I wish Nick would've mentioned and encouraged people to donate and help the team, they're clearly doing their best for the larger Linux community and can certainly use all the support they get.
@@cameronbosch1213 my biggest thing with my linux philosophy is as far as the aesthetics and function of the desktop i don't want to touch it, i want to just leave as much default as possible, mint just happens to have essentially all my preferences how i want by default.
@hxnter56 Not right now. I'd recommend Tuxedo OS over Kubuntu because it has flatpaks over snaps, it has much newer KDE Plasma versions (6.1 versus 5.27), and it seems to be overall much smoother than Kubuntu.
@@cameronbosch1213 thank you, mint seems to be heading the wrong direction so i _might_ switch 🤷♂️ plus i've also been wanting to switch to kde for a while because of how modern it looks
The fact that people look for ways to avoid GTK4 is probably great. This is what I was already kind of hoping. I am a long time Xfce user on Arch, but I see no good future for it with it if they are not going to do something. GTK4 has really become GNOME only toolkit, which I think is really bad. It's super strange that the developers of it suffer from so much tunnel vision, even though they do amazing work too (yes I also like their work and I don't want to sound to negative). I really think the actual GTK toolkit itself should be forked and developed under a different name, with some kind mix of 3 and 4 into it and then move in a new direction.
Canonical should have stuck with Unity, continued to improve it, and worked hard to promote it to other distros. I find it odd they thought their resources were spread too thin supporting a DE, yet, the Mint team must be smaller and has done a stellar job with their in-house Cinnamon which has been ported to practically every major distro.
I think the natural progression here is them switching to Debian as the base. Ubuntu *will* eventually turn most debs into snaps, so at least there will be some burden off their shoulders.
@@e002840 They already have it. It's called LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and it's been available for years. I don't think continuing to support Mate and XFCE takes much effort since they're just pulling them off the Ubuntu repo and applying a few customizations. The vast majority of their energy has gone into Cinnamon ever since it was first introduced. As far as I'm concerned, they could drop Mate and XFCE, but I think they would lose a lot of people to other distros if they did that. Also, they need to keep at least one other desktop that is tested regularly just in case Cinnamon ever runs into problems with specific hardware, there is something else for their users to fall back on that fits the Mint theming.
I was wondering about this; I'm not technical, so I have to ask how much would this help them? Specifically, would it make it easier in any way to fork the Gnome apps? I find that for the apps I use a lot (like a PDF reader and a photo mangler) I prefer KDE apps to the Gnome offerings, but I guess they wouldn't be any easier to theme consistently?
@@Chr0n0s38 That's the kind of opinionated view I'd expect from a different distro, not Mint. Also, flatpak is extremely important. Mint's developers seem to basically have a vendetta against them. I don't know why though!
My dad uses Cinnamon on one of his laptops and it is a beautiful, cohesive DE. Also their idea of a generalist toolkit is genuinely commendable. I wish the Mint team all the best!
Programs like Transmission and LibreOffice have their core program and a gui as a separate entity so we can change between gtk/qt or whatever, maybe this is what we should move towards, that way the main program is kept up-to-date and users can select whichever gui suits their desktop.
Maintenance is an issue. Otherwise, it's great to have such apps. The main problem is with this CSD and SSD wars between QT apps from KDE and GTK apps from gnome
Adding Flatpaks in an ISO is a royal pain! There are very difficult technical reasons for being able to ship Flatpaks on an ISO. Three or four flatpaks can push an ISO into an excessively large size download.
@@catto-from-heaven Fedora workstation ships very few apps by default, and a lot of the the ones it does ship aren't flatpaks. Does it actually ship any flatpaks? IDK been a while since I've done a fresh install.
@@spartanbeef9491 You're correct. Fedora ships flatpak(1) but not _flatpak applications_ in their Workstation ISO (or any other spin for that matter) and it doesn't install flatpaks during or after the installation.
Hope they will go further with LMDE and make it their main distrib, so they will gain time by not having to remove/changing snap from ubuntu. And they should focus on Cinnamon spin, their is a lot of other XFCE or Mate distrib...
@@pyepye-io4vu Here's the thing. If people want Ubuntu then they can install Ubuntu! How hard is that to understand? Some of us do not want Ubuntu! The key word is choice.
I really hope they do. I don’t see a reason to maintain an Ubuntu and a Debian version when they are already unubuntuifying the Ubuntu version (Snaps). They could just focus their energy on one Debian base.
Completely agree here. Either embrace the snaps and go all in on Ubuntu or get rid of it altogether. Since LMDE exists in a working fashion already (and has to maintanined anyway), it would be the logical move.
Maybe Cinnamon XFCE and MATE can make their own "libadwaita" or rather, libxappui to be that third (if we count elementary as the 2nd) way of GTK platform that focuses on theme support etc.
They should all just combine efforts with Zorin and PopOS. It can be a debian based distro with each team being responsible for a different part of the development. I personally don't feel we need 5 different DE's trying to do the same thing eg fix gnome.
Mint, Zorin, Pop, Mate, XFCE, are all too small to do anything on their own, for sure they need to come together. idk if XApps and Cosmic are competing, they should work well enough together, but the more they can share resources, the better. i'm excited for these to all work well from Flathub and native packages. honestly i think KDE and Qt should also be better integrated with GTK based DEs, they seem to have a much closer philosophy now than GNOME does, but thats a hot take i know.
I think the Mint team would benefit if they could somehow stop maintaining a snap-free Ubuntu base, and move upstream to mainline LMDE. It'd be far simpler, both for the user and the developers. The only thing in the way right now from what I can tell is the lack of the Driver Manager, which Ubuntu does appear to do a good job of maintaining.
Happy to see they start working on their own apps, most of them will not change much so they will probably be fine and if xfce and mate also agree in helping this is going to be awesome.
I just downloaded Mint 22... I will try it later...Linux Mint 21 on my 10 year old Laptop runs great... 16 gigs of ram, a quad core cpu and A solid state hard drive. Runs like A Porshe.
It sounds like Ubuntu, and by extension Mint, are going for a more or less rolling release for the kernel instead of just critical updates. This is good, especially for Mint since their policy of only basing off LTS releases meant no major kernel updates for two whole years. It sounds unintuitive to update what is essentially the core of the OS while keeping the stuff on top of it months or even years behind, but Linus and his team have a policy of "never break userspace" which means if any component of the OS can get away with rolling releases and remain stable, it's the kernel.
You've been able to update to newer kernels for a while now. If you open the update manager and go to view and choose show kernels you can pick your version. I'm still on 21.3 and have been running version 6.8.0-38 for a week now.
Yeah it's because of upstream changes in the kernel, so Ubuntu/Mint are just adapting. Kernel reduced LTS from 6 to 2 years... I remember living happily for many years on the 4.15 kernel on Mint. Those were the good days...
Flatpack are much better than snaps that attempt to virtualize everything from the base OS, instead of containerizing with stronger security. Flatpacks does a job that should be done in the kernel (and that the kernel already allows and supports, as it is used for "live kernel updates"). We don't need snaps in user space, separate problems in virtualized kernel and containerized flatpacks). But let's remember why we need flatpacks or snaps: it's just to avoid having to maintain multiple native apps for apps developer, and avoid to transfer this work to maintainers of distribs Giben all the work that has been done in the Linux kernel, Flatpaks are clearly no longer needed. Ubuntu insistance on snaps is a dead end. It will abandoned once the kernel virtualization support will be fully instegrated and will support many abstraction levels for containers, allowing efficient use of resources. What Mint does with its thin UI adaptation layer in the user space is the good solution (and it should continue to evolve to work as well for webapps, for even further isolation and cross -platform compatibility, thanks to W3C normalizations)
You don't necessarily need to upgrade. Linux Mint 21.3 will still have support until 2026. So it's your choice to upgrade or just stay in the current version.
I'm particularly happy that the Mint team are maintaining the Thunderbird deb package. The flatpak version never opened file attachments correctly for me but the deb is fine. Also very happy with making Software Manager open more snappily and get away from that click-pause-2-3-4-5 behaviour.
Kind of. Adding quality of life updates like being able to interact with the task bar when alt-tabbing or having auto-scroll on Mid click instead of copy+paste would enhance the overall work experience with the OS. Also, Wayland is kind of important as well so we can finally have HDR support and other modern PC features, so there's that. :P
If Mint does add comments/ratings for unverified Flatpak apps, then, won't some scammer just pay for fake reviews/comments to make the apps seem legit?
5:47 you can absolutely customize the right click menus in KDE. Some distros ship modified contet menus out of the box with extra functionality (I think it was Garuda with image resize and conversion options out of the box in context menu). Also, you can just customize them in Dolphin settings if I'm not mistaken.
I use Cinnamon on my main rig and XFCE on my older MacBook Pro. I'm going to maintain using 21.3 on my main rig because it's running perfectly. No issues or problems to speak of. The push I see to 22 doesn't seem needed. Stick with the LTS until the next version is flushed out and running with no issues. 22 has a ton of issues with Wayland among hardware issues because of the newer kernel. On my MacBook Pro, it is running XFCE and is 22. It is have no issues like it did with 21.3 so it really is a use case/hardware dependent situation.
I must say that mint and their cinnamon is creme de la creme. I always come back to mint. They make great improvements every release. It is only distro I feel made purely for users. I installed mint years ago on my girlfriend's pc. She does not know anything about computers yet she never had a single problem on mint and she also sometimes uses it wor work. Amazing distro.
I switched to arch based distros and then arch and haven't felt a need to change in over a year now(longest I have gone with hopping) and if it wasn't for the fact that I like to game, Arch has been the best experience for gaming for me, I would 100% be on Mint. Probably LMDE but Mint is arguably the best all around distro available out of the box. Thank you for the content and have a blessed day!
Hardly disagree. One of the main uses of Mint is reviving old laptops and those DEs are a way better option for such older hardware. Unless they make something like Cinamon lite for weaker hardware, it'll cut a big point of entry to the distro and linux in general for a lot of people.
@@lussor1 Yes,we know there are other countries in North and South America than the United States but we call ourselves Americans as United Staters is an awkward construction in English and the habit carries over to our name for ourselves.
@@eliphillips877 Except it doesn't. Malicious verified flatpaks can be a thing too (not saying there are any, but it is absolutely possible). An app developer's account could be compromised or the developer themselves could have ill intent, and it'd have the verified checkmark all the same. Granted in that case the reviews would be there to call it out, but that just makes the reason they're important and all flatpaks should have them all the more pronounced.
After 2 years of Linux usage I summaries : I love the Linux Experiment channel I hate Gnome, KDE and XFCE I love Mint & Ubuntu but hate snap I am waiting for Cosmic OS to finally stop Distro hopping I tried Arch, Fedora but finally settled for Debian Linux is now my official daily driver I still play games on Windows
I owned TWO laptops from Tuxedo and had many issues with them both!! I ended up returning both of them and purchased a Lenovo X-Carbon laptop which runs Linux, just fine.
Couple of things: First, you don't need to include star ratings on unsupported packages. What you really want to do is definitely include the reviews from users so that they have to be read to figure out whether a package is good or not. The stars make it too easy to just skip over actual information and are too easy to artificially inflate, making them both worthless and dangerous. Second, they haven't, as of this writing, pushed the 22 update out yet, at least to my machine. But what _did_ happen was those kernel updates you were talking about. I'm going to presume in good faith that the problems with my second monitor and hilarious screen tearing they introduced will be corrected once 22 pushes. It's a fun "snowfall" effect whenever I switch workspaces or load a new program to the monitor, but I'd like less of it and to have updates properly timed. Third, I get that there's a lot of interesting stuff in 22 for Linux commandos to go ga-ga over. What I don't get, and what no one really seems to discuss, is how these great behind the scenes changes are going to effect Joe Average Mint User. To me it seems like the practical end effect is going to be "not much" or at least certainly not enough for anyone to bother mentioning. Granted, I'm only a little over a month in to my usage of both Mint and Linux, so maybe it's not clear to me how I _should_ be perceiving this, but it would be nice of someone to sort of drag us newbs along for the ride.
Therein lies the problem with the modern Linux desktop for the average home user. Seemingly unfixable, insurmountable fragmentation. It's the reason that the "Year of the Linux Desktop TM" will never happen, even with the cancer that is Windows 11/Copilot/Recall. Regarding the things he talks about in the video, I'd argue both that you're right, in that they don't affect the end user all that much (how many people are REALLY going to rearrange their right-click menu options and pfutz around with changing those icons?), and that you're wrong, as the Linux community/userbase has EXTREME preferences for even the slightest changes, and this is in large part what causes the fragmentation. Some of the stuff like the kernel update and support for Wayland and other protocols are important for our ever-more-powerful PCs and GPUs. As for the GTK vs QT vs Iced or whatever, that ends up being important for the devs who are designing these UI/UX systems and wante cohesive, seamless themeing. Are these things important for the end user? It just depends on what you want or need from your desktop. I personally don't care what the app looks like, it just needs to work efficiently, be easy to find and install, and be safe. The more the delve into the various distros, various DEs and their pros/cons, you'll start to see why the good Linux UA-camrs cover this stuff, because it affects the future of a given distro and therefore the userbase that the distro has. So while you try to find the distro/Desktop Environment that works best for you, you will no doubt go through many iterations of things that do or don't work for you. Once you decide what you need and want from a system, you may chose a distro based on that and come to find that it doesn't have the things you need. Then you'll start to peel back the layers of all of these various things like X11 vs Waylant, the GUI toolkits, musl vs glibc, and eventually when you ascend to your final form, why the init system war (systemd vs runit/openrc/S6) actually matters, even though the gatekeepers will tell you it doesn't. Things as pedantic as the init system because systemd, for instance, has become an irreversible, poorly documented behemoth that takes over more and more functions and leaves less control to the end user and to administrators working with Linux. These things matter because choice matters. That being said the fragmentation about the toolkits, x-window layer, libraries, Pipewire vs PulseAudio audio servers, package managers, etc, all take their huge tolls on the developers of the systems we use and on use, the users that need to make decisions. I am in favor of, as Nick was saying, for these smaller teams to work together to make a competitive 2nd or 3rd option, but that just means more fragmentation. If GNOME and Canonical, or KDE and RedHat steered all of the GNU/Linux development, we wouldnt be left with many choices, but things like finding, installing and updating simple apps would be far easier, as there would likely be one standard. It would allow the app developers to concentrate on one format and one update structure as well. Choice is good, choice is necessary, but too much choice is crippling.
It's just me or do you guys think QT ecosystem is more healthy than GTK? Sure GTK ecosystem is way bigger since developing apps using C language and GTK is easier than C++ with QT (which is a very extensive framework with tons of features that GTK can't even imagine having). But overall situation of QT has less drama than the controversy of Gnome trying to change industry standards.
@@pyepye-io4vu That licencing issue has long been solved. What sells GTK and LibAdwaita to developers is the simpler experience and extensive language support.
Mate, cinnamon and xfce (also budgie) offer the same in general terms (being trully honest, are actually the same for the end users), those should unite or will fall in oblivion. Sorry for the hard take
Mostly agree. Mate and XFCE are much lighter than Cinnamon and Budgie but offer less features and an overall more frugal experience. I wish MATE and XFCE would merge together, and Budgie and Cinnamon would merge together, yes. On the apps side, they all have the same kind of apps, so they could realistically all share the same set of core apps, though.
Mint's team is responsive, I really think we should reach them about the review issue. I understand their intention but it doesn't work that way. Otherwise amazing distro still.
@@CleetusGlobinNo it isn’t. It’s got ancient packages and is an awful experience on modern hardware as a consequence. If someone swaps to Mint to try out Linux as a gaming desktop they’re in for a bad time, whereas something like CachyOS is flawless.
Short answer to the title no they are not trying to do too much, they are trying to regain control and make things easier and more curated to their vision
Good to see that Mint is still Mint. Just a rock solid stable desktop experience. Good to see them slowly moving towards their own apps that they'll be able to keep in a way that fits with Cinnamon. All this pushing towards coherency on the desktop makes me happy. It is a lot of work indeed. Hopefully coders in the community and beyond it are able to step up and shoulder the added burden.
I installed 22 alongside the older version, it's a good way to transition. Next time I'll create a home partition. The first thing I noticed is how fast the booting up is now.
JMHO but I think they are getting close to switching entirely to the Debian based version.......Ubuntu is going head-first into snaps and de-snapifying ubuntu just to have to maintain their own .deb packages is about played out.
I used Linux Mint a lot in the past but the fact of using a distro as a base that has another as a base I noticed that the changes arrive late. I prefer to use a distro with its own base that brings everything in a vanilla way. Changes arrive faster and with less chance of having bugs. Fedora does this very well.
I used Mint 21 and they have configurable gestures for 2 fingers, 3 fingers and 4 fingers, also touch and hot corners. It worked fine. Never tried the wayland session, though. I moved to gnome a couple of months ago, so I don't know how it is now in Mint 22, but I guess it is probably the same.
I'm missing something. I've looked at most of your videos (subscribed) but can't find where you say which linux distro is your daily driver??? Also, I am running mint 21 on an old (OLD!) mac mini but when I upgraded to mint 22 I noticed, even though I installed the proper driver... I cannot use WIFI... no problem using the same driver on mint 21.
Same case. The kernel is updated and that's the problem, at least in my case. Mint 22 does not support the 5.x kernel that I used on Mint 21, but supports the 6.x kernel, on which the wifi on my laptop does not work. After the upgrade there is no option to go back to the old kernel, and even when the old kernel manages to be reinstalled, not a single driver works on it.. The solution is to either go back to Mint 21, or change the linux distro.
It doesn't surprise me Linux Mint is so popular. A clean nice custamizable desktop experience, very solid, lots of apps, and no SNAPs. Ill look to upgrade some of my ststems very soon.
Accept that many distros still use IRC for their support chat rooms. So if you want to get support for anything other than Mint, you still need an IRC client.
Seeing what you said about porting Gnome apps to Cinnamon, if i were the Mint team i would probably consider switching Cinnamon to the Qt framework, seeing that KDE lets a lot of customisation open. It may also be better to base Cinnamon on the Qt framework especially for those who use Steam or other big apps that tend to be built with Qt not with Gtk. Well, this is just a thought.
GTK runs through the whole Mint DE.. 'switching it out' is an even more gargantuan task than what they have to do to stay in control of their 'core' apps with Ubuntu/etc. having changed their tech-path in that area. Might as well just run KDE Plasma or similar.
As a contributor to an OS myself I can relate to the Mint devs not having a release schedule. You can aim to have the OS released on a particular day, you can do your best to make sure all the code is up to scratch and give yourself plenty of additional time from the feature freeze date to the release date, but then a global security threat is discovered and now every system has to update to it before they can be released, or a major component gets upgraded that becomes a requirement to use its service, so you add in the fix but then oh no, it causes a package to now fail to function so then you have to go and fix that, but then there's another package that depends on it etc. etc. etc. x100 XD So you have to delay the release by a few days, and everyone gets unreasonably mad at you for things outside your control. Better to just not promise a certain date in the first place. Using their own dev packages for system components seems reasonable to me; because even with using flatpak's provided packages, you still can have the same issues and burdens you would get from maintaining the package yourself, like components not functioning and background services failing to be communicated with. It's just that with a flatpak, you have no access as a developer to the application's internal workings yourself so it may be impossible to even determine why anapp is behaving a particular way, but if you have your own dev package of it you can see that and then make the corrections to your operating system quicker. I'm not saying this is 100% the right decision, but I can understand it. One thing I can't relate to is hiding flatpaks by default. Like yeah, it's a security risk to install "unverified" software on your PC. It's a security risk to install ANY software made by anyone other than you on your PC. The only real way to stay secure in this regard is to not install any software at all. At some point, you have to put your trust in a stranger that they are delivering the correct software to you. Hiding arbitrary flatpaks will just encourage everyone to flick that setting to unverified, defying the point.
I should check whether that applies to Flatpak but even AppImage applications take an eternity to launch on my 2010 era Atom Netbook, about 30 seconds of overhead, while deb package ones launch instantly. I think it's good that they're keeping the basics like browser and mail client as "native". Of course on my main PC i can't tell the difference, it's tens of milliseconds one way or another, but not everyone runs Mint on a 2022 spec PC. Mint XFCE, not Mint Cinnamon.
I'm currently giving Manjaro a spin. Gonna have to try and do some music production on it. I didn't even get to that with Ubuntu Studio as I couldn't get most of the things I wanted done in the customisation front. The root thing was so badly nerfed.
The one thing I'd like Mint to change is that the preinstalled software is uninstallable through the Software Manager or make them optional during install. If you want to uninstall them now you have to go through Synaptic and search for the name and hope you uninstall not too many packages and bork your system. The beta still had issues on the XFCE4 version with icon sizes in your panel if you resized it, tried to file a bug report but they set it to read only a day just before, haha, so I knew the main release couldn't be far off. Sadly XFCE4 still hasn't finished Wayland support, so I'm holding off until the support is there.
I think if MATE and XFCE (and maybe System76?) all begin collaborating on sort of a common way for GTK+ apps to "fit in" to the desktop of choice and contributing to perhaps the same ones, they can be successful at it. The reason I say this is that they're all currently doing their own versions of these same apps anyway. Only, Cinnamon had been cheating a bit (since they had a whole OS to maintain with a sizable parallel fork from Ubuntu) by cribbing Gnome apps. If MATE and XFCE can be convinced to cooperate, maybe they can work their respective features into whichever codebase is the best starting point and consolidate efforts. There are maybe some reasons for bad blood between these projects, I don't know, but I think they can all agree that depending on Gnome apps is a bad plan for the future.
All packages on flathub have their build manifests, scripts, and patches on Github. It's built directly from that. So you quite literally can see what's happening.
Glad that Mint kept the .deb package for Thunderbird. Flatpak could potentially bring some old apps I'd like to see again from the Ubuntu 10.04 days but for the few flatpaks I have installed where there are no native deb alternatives, they really take up a tonne of space in multiple display driver installs and desktop environment installs. Not great where data is both slow and expensive.
When doing an upgrade from 21.3 to 22 was so many steps. It left me with a broken system where Steam wouldn't launch anymore even after upgrading video drivers for my nvidia card. There was other issues. I just ended up installing it from a USB flash drive and start over. The driver manager needs work. You have to use command line to install the Nvidia 555 driver instead of a obsolete driver which was 535 series. The nvidia settings doesn't keep settings it ignores the xconfig file have to use the Mint screen tool to set the display up. I did try the wayland on 21.3 and it was super slow for me. L4d2 was running at 14FPS. This is on a Ryzen 3900x and 1660 ti card with 32GB ram.
Mint needs to consolidate all this projects. I appreciate how much they want to do for the community but I am concerned they will neglect the distro stability. And right now there is stable in the desktop environment as mint.
Ubuntu will eventually be all snaps. Mint is going to need to jump to LMDE as default eventually. BUT that takes away some user friendliness for newer users to Linux. Either that or switch to snaps in mint. But a lot of people myself included use Mint to avoid snaps.
I do it to avoid flat packs as well. Flat packs take too much space to download, and then they load to slowly. My computer is almost entirely for production. I don't want those bloated things taking up space and loading slowly.
The problem with Flatpaks is that their vendor, especially in the case of Mozilla, set the privacy settings to "You're dumb and won't notice we have every telemetry enabled by default" and sneak in new things all the time (f.ex. Firefox 128). non-Flatpaks from distributions often disable these by default.
Will be waiting for the Mint 22 update for my Mint 21.3 install. Though I may consider switching entirely to LMDE once I finish my testing, research for apps I use, and modifying my install script for Debian base and not Ubuntu and having to add a bunch of PPAs.
From a very new Linux user, I installed my first Linux this week. And I got Resilio sync working to backup my stuff from windows 7, that will probably take a weak :-) Please make a video on how to upgrade from 21.3 to 22 and see what stop working before committing.
Why not just get an external SSD drive and do a backup. You can backup from Windows and hook it up to Linux to restore or copy/paste. Why use a slow cloud solution that you have to pay for. I guess people like to waste time and energy on useless things.
The only reason I still use Win 10 is for gaming. But I built a couple of other gaming PCs running Mint. Since Steam games play no problem using Proton, and Epic games play through the Heroic Games launcher, I no longer need Windows. When Win 10 gets dropped, I will go Mint on all of my machines.
you are absolutely right about unverified apps. I spent so much time trying to install opera. took me a while to find the work around really not smart. there must be a better way to verify these kind of apps. personal bug, why dont they fix the keyring password problem. every new install you need to enter a null password so apps like opera can get internet access. this has been around for so long, and yes I know the fix, but it is stupid to have this papercut persisting for years..
Recent migrator here. Tried Zorin and Mint. Currently on Mint because I like its file manager better (it's more Windows like). Pros of Zorin: can install Windows applications out of the box, no need to learn how to install it via Wine and PlayOnLinux (as a digital music hoarder I can't live without mp3tag.exe) Pros of Mint: online help pool is larger, it's a popular distro therefore more search results (how-tos etc)
Zorin OS 17 is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 despite releasing very recently, that's 2 years older than Mint 22 will be based on. As far as I can tell they also still include *both* Snap and Flatpak (including some pre-installed) in an effort to make "every app" available on the system, but the end result would just be a giant waste of space and ressources if you start mixing these formats on top of the existing debian base. Overall I really like what ZorinOS is doing apart from this "app ecosystem" problem, but they're just wayyy too out of date for me to recomend it to anyone...
Neither, go with CachyOS. Especially if you have an Nvidia GPU. You can pick Cunnamon in the CachyOS installer if you want it to look like Windows… but I’d say you left Windows for a reason and that’s best avoided.
Zorin if you’re mostly concerned about gaming and Windows app compatibility. Mint if you care more about stability, security and ease of use. I dual-boot both.
Man it's so much choice. It's an entire philosophy which distro to use for casual people. I would like to try out switching to linux but there are too much distro's and desktop environments. The worst part is that they are not even on the same version. And don't start with "you can modify them how you like" etc. I want a default good out of the box experience. If i can't even get that, why should i even care? I personally think there is huge potential in the industry to seriously establish a new OS, if just enough people would pull on one string instead of one billion. If all of that won't be streamlined at some point linux will forever stay a niche and most people are still "doomed" to use the "horrible" windows OS
I recently tried mint to set up a htpc for my parents and extremely impressed with the apps compared to ubuntu. I think i like cinnamon too and how easy it is to setup. I still wish it came with gnome, but i understand how this probably would never happen
I used to get excited for Mint releases. I used Mint for years. My Dad has been running it on his laptop for years. My Mom ran it on her workstation for years until I switched her to Mac themed Plasma running on Debian. Mint used to be fun and exciting but now it's just boring. Debian is also boring so I just switched back to Debian. Mint is feeling more and more like what started out as a great distro to one that is held together by band aids and duct tape with all of the strange choices that are made. I keep looking for greener pastures but Debian is so dependable it's hard to leave that behind.
Use a secure, encrypted, and fast VPN with Proton VPN: protonvpn.com/TheLinuxEXP
They do Crypto now what is kinda a turn off
Don't they say that using TOR over a VPN makes you more susceptible to fingerprinting as it's quite rare?
@@DriftingMonkeyx Really? I never saw anything about that.
@@Kanbei11 There's confusion about this. putting tor through a VPN (VPN -> TOR -> Internet) is fine. The VPN hides your usage of TOR from your ISP but still allows Tor to change circuits as needed.
Putting a VPN through tor (Tor -> VPN -> Internet) is what breaks tor. Because it prevents tor from properly changing circuits as it's supposed to.
As for what protonVPN does, they basically automate VPN -> TOR -> internet for you. I personally don't use it and much prefer to just run whonix on my local machine behind a VPN but it's there for simplicity.
@@DriftingMonkeyx And their Linux support is still quite lacking. They keep chasing shiny new things instead of working on the half-baked services they already have.
The plight of Ubuntu derivatives
When a distro doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from Ubuntu: "Does this distro have a reason to exist?"
When a distro does too much to differentiate itself from Ubuntu: "Is this distro trying to do too much?"
Yeah I'm sick of the "ditch Ubuntu go Debian ditch Xfce Mate" comments.
It's like an army of robots spamming the same thing...
@@pyepye-io4vu So stop reading the comments!
@@SpeccyMan What a dumb reply
People suck. Every distro that exists has a reason to. If it works and it's not made by microsoft then its fine lol
@@pyepye-io4vu fr, It's a cult lol
bro just casually guessed the exact time mint 22 released.
Haha yeah, that was a nice coincidence
i installed mint 22 yesterday. it was already unofficially released for a little while as it was in the "stable" folder of the linux mint mirrors. some news articles were written about this too.
Legend says he released the UX himself as the last step!
@@TheLinuxEXP quick, when does the hurd release?
@@TheLinuxEXP You scheduled the upload, didn't you.
I agree that the removal of star ratings for unverified apps is weird
You have to enable it, so the user should be awear of apps not being verified. Showing a tick next to verified apps, and a warning on unverified apps also reminds them of this.
These are then clearly separated from the user reviews, using different symbols (ticks compared to stars), so the user won't confuse them.
If it was enabled by default, I would understand, but otherwise it makes it more difficult to tell if you can trust the unverified app.
They R deliberately killing Mint. iWonder who's paying them 2 ruin it? Firefox was bought out by Google 2 switch the rendering engine 2 chrome 2 kill all their addons, etc.
it's okay for open source bloatware to hide ratings 😅 I'm not scared, even if someone installs an open source malware on my machine my windows defender immediately detects and removes it 😅 good luck mint users😂
@@araz911 I'm surprised windows defender works with Wine.
@@araz911 what?
@@elijah44gd79 huyat blet
I think linux mint team is gonna be fine. I really love their distro a lot. I just donated a small amount to help the team. Also i donated to other free and open software. I think a lot of people kind of forget that even a small donation means a lot.
Yep. I signed up for their Patreon. I've used Mint myself off and on for years. But where its really shined is keeping my parents computer problem free for the last 10+ years. I'd say $5/month is a small price to pay for that extra little bit of sanity.
Agree, I think the Mint team's leadership is quite thoughtful, level-headed, and committed to the end users. Mint is a project I'm happy to donate to.
Yeah, I wish Nick would've mentioned and encouraged people to donate and help the team, they're clearly doing their best for the larger Linux community and can certainly use all the support they get.
This is the right attitude! Keep calm and donate / contribute.
how much did you donate? and why
ya know. with windows 10 support coming to an end in a year or so i think its time i finally transition my main rig into mint
If you're more experienced, then I guess sure. But I would rather use KDE. Idk, I just prefer not having a gimped software store.
@@cameronbosch1213 my biggest thing with my linux philosophy is as far as the aesthetics and function of the desktop i don't want to touch it, i want to just leave as much default as possible, mint just happens to have essentially all my preferences how i want by default.
@@cameronbosch1213 would kubuntu be a good choice for a beginner?
@hxnter56 Not right now. I'd recommend Tuxedo OS over Kubuntu because it has flatpaks over snaps, it has much newer KDE Plasma versions (6.1 versus 5.27), and it seems to be overall much smoother than Kubuntu.
@@cameronbosch1213 thank you, mint seems to be heading the wrong direction so i _might_ switch 🤷♂️ plus i've also been wanting to switch to kde for a while because of how modern it looks
I really applaud the effort on Mint to unify apps on various desktops, that alone deserve making a couple donations to the project imo
The fact that people look for ways to avoid GTK4 is probably great. This is what I was already kind of hoping. I am a long time Xfce user on Arch, but I see no good future for it with it if they are not going to do something.
GTK4 has really become GNOME only toolkit, which I think is really bad. It's super strange that the developers of it suffer from so much tunnel vision, even though they do amazing work too (yes I also like their work and I don't want to sound to negative).
I really think the actual GTK toolkit itself should be forked and developed under a different name, with some kind mix of 3 and 4 into it and then move in a new direction.
"The Wayland will come for you"
- Nick Linux (2024)
The Wayland will come *to* you 😈
Over my dead body 😠
@@Pandacier The Wayland will come *on* you
@@zeta_eclipse The Wayland will come *in* you
@@Pandacier bro!!
Mint is pretty well funded. I appreciate them heading in a path they see fit rather than be lead around by Canonical and Gnome with their drama.
Canonical should have stuck with Unity, continued to improve it, and worked hard to promote it to other distros. I find it odd they thought their resources were spread too thin supporting a DE, yet, the Mint team must be smaller and has done a stellar job with their in-house Cinnamon which has been ported to practically every major distro.
I think the natural progression here is them switching to Debian as the base. Ubuntu *will* eventually turn most debs into snaps, so at least there will be some burden off their shoulders.
Yea, agreed
Yeap!
A move to Debian, plus Cinnamon only by making it more stable, lighter, faster and efficient and they could ditch Mate and XFCE for good
Well, they have a life boat ready in that case.
@@e002840 They already have it. It's called LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and it's been available for years. I don't think continuing to support Mate and XFCE takes much effort since they're just pulling them off the Ubuntu repo and applying a few customizations. The vast majority of their energy has gone into Cinnamon ever since it was first introduced. As far as I'm concerned, they could drop Mate and XFCE, but I think they would lose a lot of people to other distros if they did that. Also, they need to keep at least one other desktop that is tested regularly just in case Cinnamon ever runs into problems with specific hardware, there is something else for their users to fall back on that fits the Mint theming.
I was wondering about this; I'm not technical, so I have to ask how much would this help them? Specifically, would it make it easier in any way to fork the Gnome apps? I find that for the apps I use a lot (like a PDF reader and a photo mangler) I prefer KDE apps to the Gnome offerings, but I guess they wouldn't be any easier to theme consistently?
2:32 I don't get why distros include flatpak and Flathub by default if they don't trust it enough to include apps by default.
Yeah, that’s weird!
@@TheLinuxEXPYeah, I'm starting to get a "bias" in recent versions of Mint. It's only getting worse.
It could be so people who distrust flatpak aren't left out.
@@Chr0n0s38 That's the kind of opinionated view I'd expect from a different distro, not Mint. Also, flatpak is extremely important. Mint's developers seem to basically have a vendetta against them. I don't know why though!
So weird
My dad uses Cinnamon on one of his laptops and it is a beautiful, cohesive DE. Also their idea of a generalist toolkit is genuinely commendable. I wish the Mint team all the best!
Oh wow, I just installed Mint 21 yesterday... I guess it's time to upgrade. A surprise, but a welcome one.
I recommend to just do a clean install instead of an upgrade in that case, as it won't matter that much since you only have it for a day yet.
I was waiting for Mint 22 before switching my desktop over since I saw it was so close to release.
@@axeldewater9491 Exactly what I did ten minutes after writing that comment. Worked perfectly 👍
Programs like Transmission and LibreOffice have their core program and a gui as a separate entity so we can change between gtk/qt or whatever, maybe this is what we should move towards, that way the main program is kept up-to-date and users can select whichever gui suits their desktop.
This requires the team to maintain two UIs which is a lot of extra work that smaller won't, and shouldn't, spend time and resources doing
LibreOffice hard depends on dconf, that's unbecoming of a Qt-compatible program
Maintenance is an issue. Otherwise, it's great to have such apps. The main problem is with this CSD and SSD wars between QT apps from KDE and GTK apps from gnome
@@max_im_um Not really, they would just have to have every option and variable defined in a config file instead of hard coding them.
Adding Flatpaks in an ISO is a royal pain! There are very difficult technical reasons for being able to ship Flatpaks on an ISO. Three or four flatpaks can push an ISO into an excessively large size download.
Excuses. Fedora Workstation ships most of its apps as flatpaks, and its ISO is only 2.1GB
@@catto-from-heaven As a Fedora user.... What?
@@catto-from-heaven Fedora workstation ships very few apps by default, and a lot of the the ones it does ship aren't flatpaks. Does it actually ship any flatpaks? IDK been a while since I've done a fresh install.
@@catto-from-heaven Fedora Silverblue does that - not Workstation - and it's ISO size is about 3.3 GB
@@spartanbeef9491 You're correct. Fedora ships flatpak(1) but not _flatpak applications_ in their
Workstation ISO (or any other spin for that matter) and it doesn't install flatpaks during or after the installation.
Hope they will go further with LMDE and make it their main distrib, so they will gain time by not having to remove/changing snap from ubuntu. And they should focus on Cinnamon spin, their is a lot of other XFCE or Mate distrib...
The obligatory "get rid of Ubuntu" comments never stop do they?
You guys are like a machine army.
Right!!! Best way to fix this Ubuntu situation is to have everyone forget they even exist.
up
@@pyepye-io4vu Here's the thing. If people want Ubuntu then they can install Ubuntu! How hard is that to understand? Some of us do not want Ubuntu! The key word is choice.
@@pyepye-io4vuOf course if someone doesn't like a policy you seem to have no problem with they're clearly a 'machine army'.
I've been using the beta of Linux Mint 22 for a few weeks. All my existing stuff just works. I'm happy with it.
I get the sneaky feeling that maybe, just maybe, the Mint team might drop the Ubuntu version and just go with the LMDE version.
As time goes on and Ubuntu moves more and more to snaps they won't have a choice.
@@Linux_ASMR fr
I really hope they do. I don’t see a reason to maintain an Ubuntu and a Debian version when they are already unubuntuifying the Ubuntu version (Snaps). They could just focus their energy on one Debian base.
LMDE has always been a "just in case Ubuntu goes bananas" version, so eventually we will get there
Completely agree here. Either embrace the snaps and go all in on Ubuntu or get rid of it altogether. Since LMDE exists in a working fashion already (and has to maintanined anyway), it would be the logical move.
Btw, i use Linux Mint.....
Feedback please, I'm a novice.
Btw.... Tried it, had many problems with it. Went back to pure Debian.
@@bondjovi4595 Thank you so much.
@@bondjovi4595 LMDE 6 with Xanmod kernel, best of all
@@bondjovi4595 wat problems? Base Debian is old, like really old
Maybe Cinnamon XFCE and MATE can make their own "libadwaita" or rather, libxappui to be that third (if we count elementary as the 2nd) way of GTK platform that focuses on theme support etc.
They should all just combine efforts with Zorin and PopOS. It can be a debian based distro with each team being responsible for a different part of the development. I personally don't feel we need 5 different DE's trying to do the same thing eg fix gnome.
Mint, Zorin, Pop, Mate, XFCE, are all too small to do anything on their own, for sure they need to come together. idk if XApps and Cosmic are competing, they should work well enough together, but the more they can share resources, the better. i'm excited for these to all work well from Flathub and native packages.
honestly i think KDE and Qt should also be better integrated with GTK based DEs, they seem to have a much closer philosophy now than GNOME does, but thats a hot take i know.
@chaosfenix zorin might be interested but I don't think System76 will touch GTK again, cosmic and xapps can't really collaborate.
@@xymaryai8283i think Cosmic should jointly develop XApps to support an ecosystem of apps independent from the evil RedHat corpo GNOME.
That would only allow using the Mint theme, not another theme, which Lm (and I) don't want. What they need is a new toolkit.
I think the Mint team would benefit if they could somehow stop maintaining a snap-free Ubuntu base, and move upstream to mainline LMDE. It'd be far simpler, both for the user and the developers. The only thing in the way right now from what I can tell is the lack of the Driver Manager, which Ubuntu does appear to do a good job of maintaining.
Could they just port driver manager to debian?
Happy to see they start working on their own apps, most of them will not change much so they will probably be fine and if xfce and mate also agree in helping this is going to be awesome.
I just downloaded Mint 22...
I will try it later...Linux Mint 21 on my
10 year old Laptop runs great...
16 gigs of ram, a quad core cpu and
A solid state hard drive. Runs like
A Porshe.
It sounds like Ubuntu, and by extension Mint, are going for a more or less rolling release for the kernel instead of just critical updates. This is good, especially for Mint since their policy of only basing off LTS releases meant no major kernel updates for two whole years. It sounds unintuitive to update what is essentially the core of the OS while keeping the stuff on top of it months or even years behind, but Linus and his team have a policy of "never break userspace" which means if any component of the OS can get away with rolling releases and remain stable, it's the kernel.
You've been able to update to newer kernels for a while now. If you open the update manager and go to view and choose show kernels you can pick your version. I'm still on 21.3 and have been running version 6.8.0-38 for a week now.
Yeah it's because of upstream changes in the kernel, so Ubuntu/Mint are just adapting.
Kernel reduced LTS from 6 to 2 years...
I remember living happily for many years on the 4.15 kernel on Mint. Those were the good days...
I love Mint and completely agree that they fumbled the flatpack situation.
Flatpack are much better than snaps that attempt to virtualize everything from the base OS, instead of containerizing with stronger security. Flatpacks does a job that should be done in the kernel (and that the kernel already allows and supports, as it is used for "live kernel updates"). We don't need snaps in user space, separate problems in virtualized kernel and containerized flatpacks).
But let's remember why we need flatpacks or snaps: it's just to avoid having to maintain multiple native apps for apps developer, and avoid to transfer this work to maintainers of distribs Giben all the work that has been done in the Linux kernel, Flatpaks are clearly no longer needed. Ubuntu insistance on snaps is a dead end. It will abandoned once the kernel virtualization support will be fully instegrated and will support many abstraction levels for containers, allowing efficient use of resources. What Mint does with its thin UI adaptation layer in the user space is the good solution (and it should continue to evolve to work as well for webapps, for even further isolation and cross -platform compatibility, thanks to W3C normalizations)
Very glad of the Mint team for their opinion on Gnome and GTK, it was getting out of hand for years now
same
I had no idea. I just broke my Debian install and decided to make a mint 21 install. A few days ago. Now I have to update.
You don't necessarily need to upgrade. Linux Mint 21.3 will still have support until 2026. So it's your choice to upgrade or just stay in the current version.
@@MRNandemoari ewwww outdated software, disgusting
@@HUEHUEUHEPony Because people use LTE distros for the most updated software.....
you can also do a clean install for that matter
@@MRNandemoari Not to mention that it's generally a good idea to not get something immediately as it comes out, there be bugs out there... sometimes.
Wayland will come for you sounded creepy)
That was the goal !
@@TheLinuxEXP wayland or else...
I'm particularly happy that the Mint team are maintaining the Thunderbird deb package. The flatpak version never opened file attachments correctly for me but the deb is fine. Also very happy with making Software Manager open more snappily and get away from that click-pause-2-3-4-5 behaviour.
I am running it, and it's superb! It is out right now FYI.
Cinnamon just is a finished desktop experience, except for wayland. It doesn't really need updates.
Yep!
Just need to get rid of old and broken extensions.
Kind of. Adding quality of life updates like being able to interact with the task bar when alt-tabbing or having auto-scroll on Mid click instead of copy+paste would enhance the overall work experience with the OS. Also, Wayland is kind of important as well so we can finally have HDR support and other modern PC features, so there's that. :P
I am just happy the software manager on linux mint opens faster, it used to be so slow.
If Mint does add comments/ratings for unverified Flatpak apps, then, won't some scammer just pay for fake reviews/comments to make the apps seem legit?
if that can happen, there is a bigger issue at the flathub level than the mint software manager
Who has that kind of time, for no gain? Flatpak is sandboxed so it's not even going to do much to your system
@@samuelsurfboard9887 That's not how that work
flathub is well-moderated, i dont believe there has been a single instance of malware on flathub at all.
Me: "Come to Brazil"
Wayland: "Oh, I'll come to you, alright."
Hello, so what can we do for help ? And you, could go further interviewing the MINT team ? 😇
5:47 you can absolutely customize the right click menus in KDE. Some distros ship modified contet menus out of the box with extra functionality (I think it was Garuda with image resize and conversion options out of the box in context menu). Also, you can just customize them in Dolphin settings if I'm not mistaken.
MINT LINUX 22 IS LOOKING LIKE LOVE...❤❤❤❤❤❤
AS MINT LINuX IS MY FAVouRITE O.S ❤❤❤
Yes, totally agree. Removing ratings and comments from not approved Flatpaks is mistake.
I use Cinnamon on my main rig and XFCE on my older MacBook Pro. I'm going to maintain using 21.3 on my main rig because it's running perfectly. No issues or problems to speak of. The push I see to 22 doesn't seem needed. Stick with the LTS until the next version is flushed out and running with no issues. 22 has a ton of issues with Wayland among hardware issues because of the newer kernel. On my MacBook Pro, it is running XFCE and is 22. It is have no issues like it did with 21.3 so it really is a use case/hardware dependent situation.
I must say that mint and their cinnamon is creme de la creme. I always come back to mint. They make great improvements every release. It is only distro I feel made purely for users. I installed mint years ago on my girlfriend's pc. She does not know anything about computers yet she never had a single problem on mint and she also sometimes uses it wor work. Amazing distro.
Linux 'MINT' is where Tux COINS his commands!
I switched to arch based distros and then arch and haven't felt a need to change in over a year now(longest I have gone with hopping) and if it wasn't for the fact that I like to game, Arch has been the best experience for gaming for me, I would 100% be on Mint. Probably LMDE but Mint is arguably the best all around distro available out of the box. Thank you for the content and have a blessed day!
Mint devs should drop MATE and Xfce and just focus on Cinnamon. Create one desktop, modernize it and build on that solely moving forward.
Hardly disagree. One of the main uses of Mint is reviving old laptops and those DEs are a way better option for such older hardware. Unless they make something like Cinamon lite for weaker hardware, it'll cut a big point of entry to the distro and linux in general for a lot of people.
@nimlouth You're sending mixed signals with that "hardly disagree" lol
Agree. Tons of other lightweight distros.
@@CleetusGlobin I think they meant "heartily disagree" eggcorns...
and I think they should drop cinnamon and MATE and just use XFCE4. My opinion is just as valid as yours.
8:45 I like this. Apps shouldn’t be desktop environment specific, but toolkit specific.
Some websites have issues with VPN'S. Reddit is one of them. Google is another. (I think it is intentional by the websites.)
which vpn?
4:02
France: "FBI ----->> Fausse Bonne Idée"
America:
as a french we never use the "FBI" letters to say this, we just write the entire phrase
Its USA, not america
@@lussor1 Yes,we know there are other countries in North and South America than the United States but we call ourselves Americans as United Staters is an awkward construction in English and the habit carries over to our name for ourselves.
@@PC4USE1 United Statesians
@@PC4USE1 "United Staters" 🤣😂😅😆😁😄🙂 Am gonna steal that one for sure
I installed a malicious Flatpak. They do exist! Just so people know, the few who read my comment.
What do it do?
which one?
but exactly for that reason you need the reviews
@@axeldewater9491 OR you need to only download verified flatpaks. Mint's method also solves this, just not in a way that a lot of people want it to.
@@eliphillips877 Except it doesn't. Malicious verified flatpaks can be a thing too (not saying there are any, but it is absolutely possible). An app developer's account could be compromised or the developer themselves could have ill intent, and it'd have the verified checkmark all the same. Granted in that case the reviews would be there to call it out, but that just makes the reason they're important and all flatpaks should have them all the more pronounced.
I hope Mint will update LMDE6 as well. I have installed and used both Mint21.3 and LMDE6, and in my opinion, LMDE6 is solid and faster than 21.3.
After 2 years of Linux usage I summaries :
I love the Linux Experiment channel
I hate Gnome, KDE and XFCE
I love Mint & Ubuntu but hate snap
I am waiting for Cosmic OS to finally stop Distro hopping
I tried Arch, Fedora but finally settled for Debian
Linux is now my official daily driver
I still play games on Windows
Why debian over fedora and the others?
You only like Cinnamon?
I owned TWO laptops from Tuxedo and had many issues with them both!! I ended up returning both of them and purchased a Lenovo X-Carbon laptop which runs Linux, just fine.
Couple of things:
First, you don't need to include star ratings on unsupported packages. What you really want to do is definitely include the reviews from users so that they have to be read to figure out whether a package is good or not. The stars make it too easy to just skip over actual information and are too easy to artificially inflate, making them both worthless and dangerous.
Second, they haven't, as of this writing, pushed the 22 update out yet, at least to my machine. But what _did_ happen was those kernel updates you were talking about. I'm going to presume in good faith that the problems with my second monitor and hilarious screen tearing they introduced will be corrected once 22 pushes. It's a fun "snowfall" effect whenever I switch workspaces or load a new program to the monitor, but I'd like less of it and to have updates properly timed.
Third, I get that there's a lot of interesting stuff in 22 for Linux commandos to go ga-ga over. What I don't get, and what no one really seems to discuss, is how these great behind the scenes changes are going to effect Joe Average Mint User. To me it seems like the practical end effect is going to be "not much" or at least certainly not enough for anyone to bother mentioning. Granted, I'm only a little over a month in to my usage of both Mint and Linux, so maybe it's not clear to me how I _should_ be perceiving this, but it would be nice of someone to sort of drag us newbs along for the ride.
Therein lies the problem with the modern Linux desktop for the average home user. Seemingly unfixable, insurmountable fragmentation. It's the reason that the "Year of the Linux Desktop TM" will never happen, even with the cancer that is Windows 11/Copilot/Recall. Regarding the things he talks about in the video, I'd argue both that you're right, in that they don't affect the end user all that much (how many people are REALLY going to rearrange their right-click menu options and pfutz around with changing those icons?), and that you're wrong, as the Linux community/userbase has EXTREME preferences for even the slightest changes, and this is in large part what causes the fragmentation. Some of the stuff like the kernel update and support for Wayland and other protocols are important for our ever-more-powerful PCs and GPUs.
As for the GTK vs QT vs Iced or whatever, that ends up being important for the devs who are designing these UI/UX systems and wante cohesive, seamless themeing. Are these things important for the end user? It just depends on what you want or need from your desktop. I personally don't care what the app looks like, it just needs to work efficiently, be easy to find and install, and be safe.
The more the delve into the various distros, various DEs and their pros/cons, you'll start to see why the good Linux UA-camrs cover this stuff, because it affects the future of a given distro and therefore the userbase that the distro has. So while you try to find the distro/Desktop Environment that works best for you, you will no doubt go through many iterations of things that do or don't work for you. Once you decide what you need and want from a system, you may chose a distro based on that and come to find that it doesn't have the things you need. Then you'll start to peel back the layers of all of these various things like X11 vs Waylant, the GUI toolkits, musl vs glibc, and eventually when you ascend to your final form, why the init system war (systemd vs runit/openrc/S6) actually matters, even though the gatekeepers will tell you it doesn't. Things as pedantic as the init system because systemd, for instance, has become an irreversible, poorly documented behemoth that takes over more and more functions and leaves less control to the end user and to administrators working with Linux. These things matter because choice matters.
That being said the fragmentation about the toolkits, x-window layer, libraries, Pipewire vs PulseAudio audio servers, package managers, etc, all take their huge tolls on the developers of the systems we use and on use, the users that need to make decisions. I am in favor of, as Nick was saying, for these smaller teams to work together to make a competitive 2nd or 3rd option, but that just means more fragmentation. If GNOME and Canonical, or KDE and RedHat steered all of the GNU/Linux development, we wouldnt be left with many choices, but things like finding, installing and updating simple apps would be far easier, as there would likely be one standard. It would allow the app developers to concentrate on one format and one update structure as well. Choice is good, choice is necessary, but too much choice is crippling.
@@securitron5great reply. And not just applicable to linux either.
It's just me or do you guys think QT ecosystem is more healthy than GTK? Sure GTK ecosystem is way bigger since developing apps using C language and GTK is easier than C++ with QT (which is a very extensive framework with tons of features that GTK can't even imagine having). But overall situation of QT has less drama than the controversy of Gnome trying to change industry standards.
yea i always look for qt apps first
Qt is nice but the licensing scared away or angered many die hard FOSS devs. (Not blaming Qt, it's how it is.)
@@pyepye-io4vu That licencing issue has long been solved. What sells GTK and LibAdwaita to developers is the simpler experience and extensive language support.
just installed Cinnamon 22 today on my clunker...absolutely love it...
Have you seen how few people maintain the entire Steam ecosystem?
rumor has it it's all maintained by lord gabens will power alone
* paid people
Because it's their job and they earn a hefty salary. They definitely get help enterprise wise and have unlimited resources
Your critism on the way how Mint handles unverified Flatpaks got mentioned in the c‘t (the largest computer magazine in Europe)
Mate, cinnamon and xfce (also budgie) offer the same in general terms (being trully honest, are actually the same for the end users), those should unite or will fall in oblivion. Sorry for the hard take
Mostly agree.
Mate and XFCE are much lighter than Cinnamon and Budgie but offer less features and an overall more frugal experience.
I wish MATE and XFCE would merge together, and Budgie and Cinnamon would merge together, yes.
On the apps side, they all have the same kind of apps, so they could realistically all share the same set of core apps, though.
Mint's team is responsive, I really think we should reach them about the review issue. I understand their intention but it doesn't work that way. Otherwise amazing distro still.
I installed this evening, fast and well working, I am happy.
I love my pc now because of Mint!
Linux mint is so great
Was. It could come back, bit it depends if they listen to the concerns mentioned here.
@@cameronbosch1213 it still is, far better than KDE and GNOME
@cameronbosch1213 "come back?" it's easily the best option for people switching over from Windows.
@@CleetusGlobinNo it isn’t. It’s got ancient packages and is an awful experience on modern hardware as a consequence. If someone swaps to Mint to try out Linux as a gaming desktop they’re in for a bad time, whereas something like CachyOS is flawless.
@@praetorxyn the normal user doesnt care how old a package is, and most of the time they dont care about gaming
Short answer to the title no they are not trying to do too much, they are trying to regain control and make things easier and more curated to their vision
Exactly, someone gets it!
Good to see that Mint is still Mint. Just a rock solid stable desktop experience. Good to see them slowly moving towards their own apps that they'll be able to keep in a way that fits with Cinnamon. All this pushing towards coherency on the desktop makes me happy.
It is a lot of work indeed. Hopefully coders in the community and beyond it are able to step up and shoulder the added burden.
Nice review.
I installed 22 alongside the older version, it's a good way to transition. Next time I'll create a home partition. The first thing I noticed is how fast the booting up is now.
Honestly, all I want is a custom accent color or just grayscaled.
I want that black and white look
JMHO but I think they are getting close to switching entirely to the Debian based version.......Ubuntu is going head-first into snaps and de-snapifying ubuntu just to have to maintain their own .deb packages is about played out.
I used Linux Mint a lot in the past but the fact of using a distro as a base that has another as a base I noticed that the changes arrive late. I prefer to use a distro with its own base that brings everything in a vanilla way. Changes arrive faster and with less chance of having bugs. Fedora does this very well.
How are the touchpad gestures on cinnamon wayland
@@mrbloodyhyphen-5657afaik they don't exist yet.
Cinnamon doesn't even support wayland
@@catto-from-heaven yes it does lol
I used Mint 21 and they have configurable gestures for 2 fingers, 3 fingers and 4 fingers, also touch and hot corners. It worked fine. Never tried the wayland session, though. I moved to gnome a couple of months ago, so I don't know how it is now in Mint 22, but I guess it is probably the same.
@ZoeTheBiggestRat Correct. They do. It's still in beta though and not the default.
I'm missing something. I've looked at most of your videos (subscribed) but can't find where you say which linux distro is your daily driver??? Also, I am running mint 21 on an old (OLD!) mac mini but when I upgraded to mint 22 I noticed, even though I installed the proper driver... I cannot use WIFI... no problem using the same driver on mint 21.
Same case. The kernel is updated and that's the problem, at least in my case. Mint 22 does not support the 5.x kernel that I used on Mint 21, but supports the 6.x kernel, on which the wifi on my laptop does not work. After the upgrade there is no option to go back to the old kernel, and even when the old kernel manages to be reinstalled, not a single driver works on it.. The solution is to either go back to Mint 21, or change the linux distro.
He's using Tuxedo OS, I think.
just switched my main os to xfce mint yesterday , its amazing
It doesn't surprise me Linux Mint is so popular. A clean nice custamizable desktop experience, very solid, lots of apps, and no SNAPs. Ill look to upgrade some of my ststems very soon.
Accept that many distros still use IRC for their support chat rooms. So if you want to get support for anything other than Mint, you still need an IRC client.
Seeing what you said about porting Gnome apps to Cinnamon, if i were the Mint team i would probably consider switching Cinnamon to the Qt framework, seeing that KDE lets a lot of customisation open. It may also be better to base Cinnamon on the Qt framework especially for those who use Steam or other big apps that tend to be built with Qt not with Gtk. Well, this is just a thought.
GTK runs through the whole Mint DE.. 'switching it out' is an even more gargantuan task than what they have to do to stay in control of their 'core' apps with Ubuntu/etc. having changed their tech-path in that area.
Might as well just run KDE Plasma or similar.
@@joansparky4439 it's a difficult situation like being between a rock and a hard place.
As a contributor to an OS myself I can relate to the Mint devs not having a release schedule. You can aim to have the OS released on a particular day, you can do your best to make sure all the code is up to scratch and give yourself plenty of additional time from the feature freeze date to the release date, but then a global security threat is discovered and now every system has to update to it before they can be released, or a major component gets upgraded that becomes a requirement to use its service, so you add in the fix but then oh no, it causes a package to now fail to function so then you have to go and fix that, but then there's another package that depends on it etc. etc. etc. x100 XD So you have to delay the release by a few days, and everyone gets unreasonably mad at you for things outside your control. Better to just not promise a certain date in the first place.
Using their own dev packages for system components seems reasonable to me; because even with using flatpak's provided packages, you still can have the same issues and burdens you would get from maintaining the package yourself, like components not functioning and background services failing to be communicated with. It's just that with a flatpak, you have no access as a developer to the application's internal workings yourself so it may be impossible to even determine why anapp is behaving a particular way, but if you have your own dev package of it you can see that and then make the corrections to your operating system quicker. I'm not saying this is 100% the right decision, but I can understand it.
One thing I can't relate to is hiding flatpaks by default. Like yeah, it's a security risk to install "unverified" software on your PC. It's a security risk to install ANY software made by anyone other than you on your PC. The only real way to stay secure in this regard is to not install any software at all. At some point, you have to put your trust in a stranger that they are delivering the correct software to you. Hiding arbitrary flatpaks will just encourage everyone to flick that setting to unverified, defying the point.
lol I LITTERALLY only just got round to updating my MINT v20 VM to v21, YESTERDAY. Doh. Thanks man
Here's a comment for the algo, thanks for the news, Nick!
Thanks!
I should check whether that applies to Flatpak but even AppImage applications take an eternity to launch on my 2010 era Atom Netbook, about 30 seconds of overhead, while deb package ones launch instantly. I think it's good that they're keeping the basics like browser and mail client as "native".
Of course on my main PC i can't tell the difference, it's tens of milliseconds one way or another, but not everyone runs Mint on a 2022 spec PC.
Mint XFCE, not Mint Cinnamon.
I'm currently giving Manjaro a spin. Gonna have to try and do some music production on it. I didn't even get to that with Ubuntu Studio as I couldn't get most of the things I wanted done in the customisation front. The root thing was so badly nerfed.
The one thing I'd like Mint to change is that the preinstalled software is uninstallable through the Software Manager or make them optional during install. If you want to uninstall them now you have to go through Synaptic and search for the name and hope you uninstall not too many packages and bork your system. The beta still had issues on the XFCE4 version with icon sizes in your panel if you resized it, tried to file a bug report but they set it to read only a day just before, haha, so I knew the main release couldn't be far off. Sadly XFCE4 still hasn't finished Wayland support, so I'm holding off until the support is there.
You can uninstall, for example LibreOffice, from Software Manager.
I think if MATE and XFCE (and maybe System76?) all begin collaborating on sort of a common way for GTK+ apps to "fit in" to the desktop of choice and contributing to perhaps the same ones, they can be successful at it. The reason I say this is that they're all currently doing their own versions of these same apps anyway. Only, Cinnamon had been cheating a bit (since they had a whole OS to maintain with a sizable parallel fork from Ubuntu) by cribbing Gnome apps. If MATE and XFCE can be convinced to cooperate, maybe they can work their respective features into whichever codebase is the best starting point and consolidate efforts.
There are maybe some reasons for bad blood between these projects, I don't know, but I think they can all agree that depending on Gnome apps is a bad plan for the future.
i appreciate your passion for understanding this stuff and explaining it to others.Cheers!
4:33 - Just like UA-cam removing the dislike button so viewers can't easily judge the quality/honesty of a video 🙄
All packages on flathub have their build manifests, scripts, and patches on Github. It's built directly from that. So you quite literally can see what's happening.
Glad that Mint kept the .deb package for Thunderbird. Flatpak could potentially bring some old apps I'd like to see again from the Ubuntu 10.04 days but for the few flatpaks I have installed where there are no native deb alternatives, they really take up a tonne of space in multiple display driver installs and desktop environment installs. Not great where data is both slow and expensive.
When doing an upgrade from 21.3 to 22 was so many steps. It left me with a broken system where Steam wouldn't launch anymore even after upgrading video drivers for my nvidia card. There was other issues. I just ended up installing it from a USB flash drive and start over. The driver manager needs work. You have to use command line to install the Nvidia 555 driver instead of a obsolete driver which was 535 series. The nvidia settings doesn't keep settings it ignores the xconfig file have to use the Mint screen tool to set the display up. I did try the wayland on 21.3 and it was super slow for me. L4d2 was running at 14FPS. This is on a Ryzen 3900x and 1660 ti card with 32GB ram.
Mint needs to consolidate all this projects. I appreciate how much they want to do for the community but I am concerned they will neglect the distro stability. And right now there is stable in the desktop environment as mint.
Ubuntu will eventually be all snaps. Mint is going to need to jump to LMDE as default eventually. BUT that takes away some user friendliness for newer users to Linux. Either that or switch to snaps in mint. But a lot of people myself included use Mint to avoid snaps.
I do it to avoid flat packs as well. Flat packs take too much space to download, and then they load to slowly. My computer is almost entirely for production. I don't want those bloated things taking up space and loading slowly.
The problem with Flatpaks is that their vendor, especially in the case of Mozilla, set the privacy settings to "You're dumb and won't notice we have every telemetry enabled by default" and sneak in new things all the time (f.ex. Firefox 128). non-Flatpaks from distributions often disable these by default.
Most people don't care about that
Flatpak success is about easy program delivery and about keeping things working for a long time. Not privacy.
That's why Flatseal is a mandatory if you're going to use Flatcraps to control what Flatcrap puts in to control the permissions.
@@kevinsteinman8967 You don't need that on KDE. Just go to settings
What did they sneak in with 128?
@@thrashwerk "Privacy preserving ads" -telemetry. Check settings / privacy.
They will have to open development of the GTK3 apps to the wider Linux community. That's the beauty of free and open.
Will be waiting for the Mint 22 update for my Mint 21.3 install. Though I may consider switching entirely to LMDE once I finish my testing, research for apps I use, and modifying my install script for Debian base and not Ubuntu and having to add a bunch of PPAs.
From a very new Linux user, I installed my first Linux this week. And I got Resilio sync working to backup my stuff from windows 7, that will probably take a weak :-)
Please make a video on how to upgrade from 21.3 to 22 and see what stop working before committing.
Why not just get an external SSD drive and do a backup. You can backup from Windows and hook it up to Linux to restore or copy/paste. Why use a slow cloud solution that you have to pay for. I guess people like to waste time and energy on useless things.
@@riseabove3082 Because I just got into Linux and I want to learn
@@riseabove3082 Why are you bothered how another does something that doesn't impact you?
The only reason I still use Win 10 is for gaming. But I built a couple of other gaming PCs running Mint. Since Steam games play no problem using Proton, and Epic games play through the Heroic Games launcher, I no longer need Windows. When Win 10 gets dropped, I will go Mint on all of my machines.
Once Ubuntu goes immutable, Mint will be forced to rebase onto Debian.
you are absolutely right about unverified apps. I spent so much time trying to install opera. took me a while to find the work around really not smart. there must be a better way to verify these kind of apps. personal bug, why dont they fix the keyring password problem. every new install you need to enter a null password so apps like opera can get internet access. this has been around for so long, and yes I know the fix, but it is stupid to have this papercut persisting for years..
SO question from a Windows user wanting migrate. Linux Mint Cinnamon 22 or Zorin 17 ???.
Recent migrator here. Tried Zorin and Mint. Currently on Mint because I like its file manager better (it's more Windows like).
Pros of Zorin: can install Windows applications out of the box, no need to learn how to install it via Wine and PlayOnLinux (as a digital music hoarder I can't live without mp3tag.exe)
Pros of Mint: online help pool is larger, it's a popular distro therefore more search results (how-tos etc)
Mint for sure, Zorin is not that well maintained
Zorin OS 17 is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 despite releasing very recently, that's 2 years older than Mint 22 will be based on.
As far as I can tell they also still include *both* Snap and Flatpak (including some pre-installed) in an effort to make "every app" available on the system, but the end result would just be a giant waste of space and ressources if you start mixing these formats on top of the existing debian base.
Overall I really like what ZorinOS is doing apart from this "app ecosystem" problem, but they're just wayyy too out of date for me to recomend it to anyone...
Neither, go with CachyOS. Especially if you have an Nvidia GPU. You can pick Cunnamon in the CachyOS installer if you want it to look like Windows… but I’d say you left Windows for a reason and that’s best avoided.
Zorin if you’re mostly concerned about gaming and Windows app compatibility.
Mint if you care more about stability, security and ease of use.
I dual-boot both.
Man it's so much choice. It's an entire philosophy which distro to use for casual people. I would like to try out switching to linux but there are too much distro's and desktop environments. The worst part is that they are not even on the same version. And don't start with "you can modify them how you like" etc. I want a default good out of the box experience. If i can't even get that, why should i even care?
I personally think there is huge potential in the industry to seriously establish a new OS, if just enough people would pull on one string instead of one billion. If all of that won't be streamlined at some point linux will forever stay a niche and most people are still "doomed" to use the "horrible" windows OS
I recently tried mint to set up a htpc for my parents and extremely impressed with the apps compared to ubuntu. I think i like cinnamon too and how easy it is to setup. I still wish it came with gnome, but i understand how this probably would never happen
Hiding user reviews really short sighted, I hope they can realize this and will undo such a change very soon.
I used to get excited for Mint releases. I used Mint for years. My Dad has been running it on his laptop for years. My Mom ran it on her workstation for years until I switched her to Mac themed Plasma running on Debian. Mint used to be fun and exciting but now it's just boring. Debian is also boring so I just switched back to Debian. Mint is feeling more and more like what started out as a great distro to one that is held together by band aids and duct tape with all of the strange choices that are made. I keep looking for greener pastures but Debian is so dependable it's hard to leave that behind.
I LOVE how boring Mint is, and running stable for me.
i don't know what you're describing but Mint is not that at all
Eh to use deb packages but still based on Ubuntu who is shedding deb packages
This logic is not logic-ing. Why not based on Debian itself?