I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable” packages.

I had a negative bias on Mint as I disliked the idea of a newbie’s distro and was two steps away from Debian so for some time I left it aside.

A couple of weeks after that I decided to dust off an old 2013 iMac for my wife to be using as desktop machine and, she being a windows gal, I thought a safe bet would have been Mint that doesn’t feel alien for those coming from that OS.

Again, mind blown by the performance.

I decide to play it risky and so I reimagine it with LMDE: everything works out of the box. I just install the NVIDIA driver from Synaptics and then the computer is set.

This was the drop that made me go on the rabbit hole. I went on a spree to install LDME on an old gaming laptop that was hidden in the dust for now 5 years and then to a few other machines. (Yeah I have a bit of spare hardware lying around)

The last few days I have been thinking to put mint on the main desktop but was afraid of letting GNOME go… and so I decided to test GNOME on one of those LDME machines…

Omg…. Mind blown again. Essentially we can now have Debian with all the delicious little Mint tools. This kinda feels like how Debian is supposed to be! But it is Mint! Even GNOME contains all the little things that, on Fedora for example, I used to have to install manually but now they were there already! Like Gnome Tweaks, or extensions like the Places indicator or other small ones…

I am not sure I am managing to convey how this feels… I have always wanted to have Debian but Debian has made it, one way or another, impossible for me to stay. Mint is making it possible today. What a blessing of a distro.

Rant over.

Side note: I think I have fallen in love with Cinnamon, oups!

  • SteveEnglish
    5•3 months ago

    I have yet to try the Debian edition, but based on my 1.5 years running the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint as my daily driver, I am not surprised to hear how amazing the Debian edition is.

    And yes, Cinnamon is a great DE! Sure, it may be a bit old-school and lacking customization options, but that’s kind of why I like it!

    • @LoucypherOP
      2•3 months ago

      Old school maybe but possibly the kind of DE even your parents can use

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
    4•3 months ago

    I started running it on my main laptop a few months ago. It’s been solid. Takes a bit to get used to Debian under the hood, some minor tuning to be done, but after that, super great.

    I had the same opinion of Mint for years, good, but a distro for newbies and that’s it. But after digging into it, it’s one of my top picks in general for anybody.

    I really like Cinnamon too, it’s been the most stable DE so far in the several years I’ve been using Linux. A little to simple for my liking on my main rig, but perfect when I want something that just works, is clean, and let’s me get my stuff done.

  • we is doomed!
    2•3 months ago

    I changed from Mint to LMDE a few months ago, working well for me. I don’t hop distros as …those are the only two haha

    For a long time Windows user (started on 3.1 and played with Ubuntu a few tines over the previous decade) Mint is great. I went with LDME as I wanted a new install (I’d been dual booting W10 and Mint on and older SSD) .

    Linux still has issues for users but geeze it’s close and most of the issues are to do with Linux but a lack of app support. Eg. Hoops for Davinci Resolve etc

    • @LoucypherOP
      1•3 months ago

      Any thing you miss from Mint Ubuntu edition?

      • we is doomed!
        2•3 months ago

        Nope and it fixed a couple little niggles I had. Not sure why they stick with the edition based.on Ubuntu but they’d be much the wiser on that then I.