Why Mint and not ubuntu?

[ne0h]

I wanted to do some kind of survey.
Why did you prefer Mint over Ubuntu from which it is derived?
thanks for the replies!

[iliketrains]

I read somewhere that Mint is like Ubuntu but better looking and even easier as a starter distro.
Having no Linux experience I chose to believe it.
For a one word answer: reputation.

[smurphos]

• Update manager
• apt rather than sudo apt
• Developers you can interact with
• Community
• Cinnamon
• Latterly snap apps only if you really want them

[Moem]

When I was using Windows, and looking for a distro to try out as a first Linux experiment, I looked at screenshots from different distros and Mint looked more understandable and instantly usable to me than any of the others. Ubuntu had Unity back then, and that just looked scary. So I went with Mint and I've never been sorry.

[BenTrabetere]

I considered several distros at the beginning of my transition to Linux - the two finalists were Ubuntu and Linux Mint. The main reason I went with LM was the Linux Mint Forums - it seemed better organized, easier to navigate, and friendlier to a newbie than Ubuntu Forums and Ask Ubuntu.

I have other distros on one of my severance package machines, and I have grown fond of Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora. I do not use this machine frequently enough for a rolling release distro. I stick with LM on my main driver because it works, it is familiar, and because it has never given me a reason to move to something else.

[MurphCID]

• Update manager
• apt rather than sudo apt
• Developers you can interact with
• Community
• Cinnamon
• Latterly snap apps only if you really want them

Add Right click to uninstall
When mouse is detected disable trackpad! A deal breaker for me on other distros.

My only complaints: I want a prettier Mint (fonts, icons, etc). But you can pry Mint out of my cold dead fingers before I will give it up.

[majpooper]

My very last assignment was S2 at a brigade HQ - we had to use Windows and I had Windows on my personal PC as well - I hated it. I cannot tell you how many times I came to work and the machine was still updating. The S6 (IT guy) told me about linux but I was leary that I could install it and maintain it because he would use a lot of jargon I was not familiar with. When I retired (Jan 2011) I took a linux course at the local community college where we used Suse. That gave me confidence and I started with Suse. A friend of the family who does data mining (I kind of understand what that is) recommended Ubuntu. I liked Ubuntu much better than Suse but was still learning using the "monkey with a machine gun" approach breaking things right and left then fresh install. At a wedding reception I happened to meet a guy who was IT security for a BIG bank and he recommended Mint - tried it and loved it mostly because Cinnamon is soooo much better IMHO than Unity ever was/is. I still use Mint when I install linux for others but have be experimenting lately with Cinnamon on Debian and on Bodhi and on Ubuntu - starting with a base (no apps) OS.

As an aside; LMF is head and shoulders above any other linux form - I belong to several. Bodhi is a very friendly forum as well with great devs but very small. I was warned on the Ubuntu form early on that if I used the term "Windows" I would be banned.

• Update manager
• apt rather than sudo apt
• Developers you can interact with
• Community
• Cinnamon
• Latterly snap apps only if you really want them

+1

Add Right click to uninstall
When mouse is detected disable trackpad! A deal breaker for me on other distros.

My only complaints: I want a prettier Mint (fonts, icons, etc). But you can pry Mint out of my cold dead fingers before I will give it up.

+1 What I don't understand is why the default theme/icons/background is not something more attractive. It is pretty common to be given a choice between light or dark theme in almost everything these days and there are some pretty nice modern themes available in the theme downloads. For sure that would make a better first impression.
THIS:

Or THIS:


EDIT: It literally took less than a minute to change the background, desktop theme and icon theme. I chose the Una background only because it is Window 11ish - the idea being attracting Windows migrants but I get the Mint would want some sort of branding.

[MurphCID]

I agree, and I like the first one you have showing.

[Agentl074]

Well, Mint IS Ubuntu -- but with a different flavor. I personally like it a lot! Ubuntu seems constricted in customization. Also, you can install Windows fonts as well. I put the Windows fonts in the word processing app, but I could easily apply any new Windows font across the board.

[icefrost]

I used to use Ubuntu (and a few other distros) before i switched to Mint, and right click uninstall from the menu is a good feature. Cinnamon is also a desktop environment i like.

[tezza]

When I started to explore Linux distros around 2018 , I initially landed on Ubuntu. I was coming from Windows and all I'd read had suggested Ubuntu was best when moving from that platform. Articles suggested Ubuntu was stable, well supported and installed with a GUI which wasn't too hard to navigate around.

I found this was all true but while still settling on a Linux OS I read an article or two on Mint. I tried it. What sold me initially was it had all the features of Ubuntu BUT with a default interface similar to Windows 7. It felt familiar.

Now that I've been engaging with Mint for several years, I don't have any desire to return to Ubuntu. Mint has the stability of Ubuntu but is familiar, attractive, has a good library of pre-installed software and is well supported with a large and active community.

[Portreve]

I wanted to do some kind of survey.
Why did you prefer Mint over Ubuntu from which it is derived?
thanks for the replies!

With apologies to Gandalf the White:

“Linux Mint is Ubuntu. Or rather, Ubuntu as it should have been.”

Canonical did amazing work taking Debian and making it usable for most folk who want to run Linux on the desktop. But, not unlike Saruman (though not evil like he became) Ubuntu lost its way, the final shark-jumping having happened when they walked away from Gnome 2.x.

[MattJ86]

From my experience Mint is somehow better optimized and works better on older hardware even with the same desktop environment. Also Mint has only 3 OFFICIAL editions with same theming and desktop layout set up as close as possible to each other. All of these editions are well maintained by the team. Ubuntu flavors are kind of a mess. This makes Mint not only a better OS for everyone, but it also looks very professional with consistent design.

And Mint has LMDE with 32bit support which seems to be the most complete easy-to-install Debian you can get.

And yeah, Cinnamon is better than GNOME, lighter, far more customizable with good amount of addons/applets/desklets etc.

[majpooper]

“Linux Mint is Ubuntu."

If Linux Mint is Ubuntu . . . is Ubuntu Debian? and is so . . . . if a=b and b=c then a= . . . . .
OK never mind - just a feeble at try to be clever.

[MattJ86]

When I was using Windows, and looking for a distro to try out as a first Linux experiment, I looked at screenshots from different distros and Mint looked more understandable and instantly usable to me than any of the others. Ubuntu had Unity back then, and that just looked scary. So I went with Mint and I've never been sorry.

This is why other distros like Zorin or Solus are doing the same what Mint is famous for. You have familiar layout by default, but it possible to make it completely different. And Unity at the time when it appeared and made me switch from Ubuntu to Mint was too heavy on resources and glitching like Cyberpunk 2077. And when Canonical made Unity better they dropped it. After all that schizo freakout they did in the past I can't just trust them anymore.

[ivar]

I've spent around a year now with Mint on on several computers, for different tasks and just fiddling.
I setup one for my brother to log and display home automation data, which went surprisingly smooth. Then decided to try out the same setup for myself, only using Ubuntu this time. It just resulted in frustration, Snap applications made my notes worthless, and I found the DE to be just weird when used to Mint

[Pingu]

For me it is just more stable and lot of things work out of the box. Somehow i end up fiddling with other distros just to get small details right and in the end they are still wrong. For example, battery time remaining, i love it that way, i know it is not accurate and change based on what do you do but i like it. Gaming experience was stupid simple install stuff use Lutris etc and it worked like i expected and did not need to start terminal game to fix things. There are things that still rub me the wrong way, for example, why cant i have simple box where to write NAS address in to connect to network drive? Why cant i change how many lines mouse wheel scroll scrolls on each tick? They are small things but for me that means it still has a bit to go before it is there where i am happy as can be. I know those things are nitpicks but that is a good thing as there is nothing big to complain about

With Ubuntu (i started my linux journey on ubuntu and still administer ubuntu servers), i need somany things to do before i feel at home and lot less software works out of the box and that is bad as i want to use software not spend my time getting it to work.

[Hoser Rob]

When Mint stopped shipping all the codecs in mint-meta-codecs in their iso's, I saw a LOT of complaints form people here who said that not having to install codecs was the main reason they had chosen Mint over Ubuntu in the first place.

While I think that's a stupid reason to choose one distro over another, it does lead me to take all these 'surveys' with a big grain of salt.

[Portreve]

If Linux Mint is Ubuntu . . . is Ubuntu Debian? and is so . . . . if a=b and b=c then a= . . . . .

As the sign in a friend of mine's business used to say:

I know you think
you understood what
you thought I said,
but I'm not sure you realize:
what you heard
is not what I meant.

---

... I found the DE to be just weird when used to Mint

Unity was Ubuntu's answer to Gnome 3. I'm told it did have some interesting ideas which, over time, became better fleshed out. However, in the sense that it was their own reconstruction of what the Gnome Project had done, the UI metaphor involved was simply a solution in search of a problem.

[MurphCID]

I agree. Mint out of the box is heads and shoulders above almost any other distribution out there. You don't have to download extensions to get basic functionality, and it does things that NO OTHER Linux distribution do in terms of ease of life (i.e. right click to uninstall, and giving you the option to turn off the trackpad when a mouse is installed).