Does Linux Mint get made fun of?

[Crewp]

Linux Mint is a great distro ! Making fun of it, is just childish. Everyone has there own preferences, if you don't like it, there are plenty of other choices. Does that make one distro better than another? No, of course not. I don't like Ubuntu, but that's me, I don't make fun of people who like it or use it. Grow Up !

[farmwife]

Mint Cinnamon is actually an excellent distribution and desktop for a savvy Windows veteran to start with. Mint runs smoothly and automates nearly everything. The KDE desktop is the closest Linux has to Windows 7, but KDE is infrastructure-heavy and less responsive than Cinnamon, which isn't that different from Windows, either; plus Cinnamon and MATE desktops are the self-confessed focus of the Mint development team and are therefore going to be better maintained than the KDE or Xfce versions. For someone who wants a trouble-free computer-using experience, Mint Cinnamon is pretty excellent for everything except gaming (and pretty much every Linux distro is bad at the most recent games).

But there is a valid reason that Linux veterans sneer at Mint: Mint is hostile to people who want to learn to use the command line. The guts of Mint appear to be much different from those of its parent and grandparent distributions, Ubuntu and Debian, but finding out what those differences are is next to impossible because the Mint team does not offer a command-line user guide or even support a Mint User Wiki the way Ubuntu at least does. Finding out what the command line, filesystem and other peculiarities of Mint are, is mostly a matter of blind trial and error. For this reason, I ocnsider Mint to be a de-facto proprietary distribution; sure, it's covered by the GPL, but the information needed to learn about its guts and/or start doing independent development work on it is well-hidden.

[res0r9lm]

you shouldn't need a wiki to run commands in a terminal that is what manpages are for.

[farmwife]

Heh. As if three quarters of the manpages aren't missing from a Mint install. And as if the way terminal commands work in Mint weren't sometimes radically different from how the Man pages describe them. Face it, the Mint Team just doesn't want people doing anything on the command line.

[TNFrank]

Let me put it this way, Darren Kitchens of Hak5 has switched over to Mint(MATE from the looks of it) so if a World Renowned Hacker like him can use it then it must be a dang cool Distro. Case Closed, LOL.

[ajgreeny]

As several people have mentioned, the fact that a distro is easy to install and does everything users want without having to add or edit masses of configuration files does not mean that it is incapable of also carrying out the complex command line activities that some linux gurus seem to think are an essential part of being a linux user or is less able than the diffecult distros such as Gentoo, Arch or Linux From Scratch.

I started many years ago (2005) using linux and at that time used Fedora Core 4, (I think it was version 4) and that worked fine. I then moved on to Open Suse, version unknown or forgotten now, and that also worked well, but both those were fairly hard to get running exactly as i wanted and needed. Next I tried PCLinuxOS for a while, which was good, but somehow did not seem as welcoming as some other distros, so I also tried Mepis, CentOS and several others.

I then found Ubuntu 5.04 and was struck by how well it worked, how easy it was to install and also to get all the codecs etc etc needed for multimedia, something that is much more time consuming and difficult in some other distros.

Next came Mint, which I used for a while, and installed on my wife's old laptop permanently. I found that I still preferred ubuntu, so went back to that, and have stayed with it ever since, though unity left me completely baffled, so when ubuntu 10.04 with gnome 2 lost support in April this year, I moved to Xubuntu, which I am now completely satisfied with. I may try Mint again soon, possibly when Xubuntu 12.04 loses support.

As you can see, I have looked at many distros, and have been using linux now exclusively for over 8 years, so I think I know enough about thm to express my opinions.

Ignore any stupid comments about a distro, or Mint being ridiculed and made fun of; it is just as capable as any of the other distros available, so if it works for you, use it and gloat about getting it installed and fully usable in maybe half an hour or less

[InkKnife]

A year ago when I wanted to dump Apple and OSX I was not looking for a new hobby, I was looking for a good desktop OS that would let me do what I wanted to get done. I tried many distros and chose Mint/Cinnamon because Mint delivered what I was looking for. Ease of install, great hardware support and very, very little fiddling required.
The MATE and XFCE editions of Mint came in a close 2nd and third.
The Linux world is about choice, there should be distros aimed at all levels of users and there is a place for a distro like LM for regular, end user desktop users and distros like Arch for the guys who want to control things down to the bare metal.
The Mint team should be proud of offering the sort of polished, detail oriented distro that they do. A distro a life long Mac user could switch to and feel at home on rather quickly.
Mint really is the operating system for the rest of us.