Mint is still King - At least from my own experiences

[smifffy]

Been using Mint for around two years. Thought I'd give MX Linux a try to see what all the fuss was about. I went bare metal as I intended to go for a fresh install with Mint if things didn't work out.

I thought I'd post my experiences here in case anybody else is interested. I can only speak from my own experience and in relation to my own hardware but on an i7 with 16GB of RAM, Mint still wins hands down for me.

I thought MX was an excellent distro but it gave me a few problems after installation that I have never experienced with Mint. My issues were as follows:-

1. The master volume was completely disconnected and refused to work after much effort to fix it up.

2. Poor quality graphic performance even after adding drivers and making suggested compositor changes. Some embedded videos refused to play on Facebook and I got flickering when scrolling down a long page of text in Chromium and Firefox. Video generally not as good as in Mint.

3. After frequent tweaking, I was unable to find any theme settings that I felt entirely comfortable with but then, to be fair, I am used to Cinnamon.

4. Thunar felt highly unwieldy and awkward to use when compared with Nemo - at least it did to me. I use the file manager frequently and heavily for work and I found it very hard to cope with the differences in functionality. I had to perform a lot of configuration to get anywhere near what I needed. Worthy of mention that Thunar is an XCFE thing, rather than purely of MX Linux, but still relevant when comparing two distros.

5. Two or three applications that I installed were very buggy and caused me to finally lose patience. These same apps work fine on Mint using the same versions.

Don't get me wrong, overall I really liked the concept of MX Linux and it's generally an excellent distro with a following of very fine people. I'd still be inclined to install it on older hardware as it is most certainly very lightweight and fast. However, after trialling MX-18 for a week, coming back to Mint was a huge relief and I will be unlikely to trial hop again in regard to my higher-end hardware without very good reason.

I ended up upgrading to the latest version of Mint Cinnamon and the performance is really excellent. I have had none of the above-mentioned issues since reinstalling Linux Mint. I'm always happy to tinker to get things right but there were two many deal breakers for me this time around with MX Linux that I was unable to fully resolve on the forums where, by the way, the users were extremely friendly and helpful.

I might give MX-19 a go on another drive when it comes out, see how much has been improved but, for the foreseeable future at least, my daily driver will most definitely continue to be the amazing Linux Mint with the Cinnamon Desktop.

These are just personal experiences and I don't profess to be an expert. Maybe others have not had the same problems. I can only repeat what I found to be the case with my own specific setup.

[BigEasy]

Mint is still King - no one doubts.

Maybe others have not had the same problems. I can only repeat what I found to be the case with my own specific setup.

Undoubtedly too.

[Pjotr]

Mint is still king for me, as well.... Reliable, stable, long term supported, polished, nifty tools, looking good: what's not to like?

All that distro hopping is well and good for people who start out with their Linux adventure, but soon you learn: all those distro's are much more alike than they differ. They all have a Linux kernel, they all have Firefox or Chromium as default web browser, same with Libre Office, Grub, etc. etc. All those major components come from upstream.

A distro, any distro, is essentially made according to this recipe: pick some upstream software, glue it together, do some appearance tweaks and hey presto: your new baby distro is born. Now Mint happens to have some very good glue...

[Pierre]

that MX-Linux is still an Nice System & it does have it's place.

it is installed on a couple of my Laptops.

most of my 'surfing is done on LinuxMint, though.

[Sir Charles]

that MX-Linux is still an Nice System & it does have it's place.

it is installed on a couple of my Laptops.

most of my 'surfing is done on LinuxMint, though.

Nice that the Linux Planet consists of many Kingdoms!

[Pjotr]

Nice that the Linux Planet consists of many Kingdoms!

Agreed. With one imperial upstream to rule them all.

[Sir Charles]

Nice that the Linux Planet consists of many Kingdoms!

Agreed. With one imperial upstream to rule them all.

Now that was funny! I give you that but let's not get imperialistic about it

[rjsrjs]

Tried MX-Linux 18 (I think) on a live USB drive about a year ago on an older laptop and I had problems with it. Couldn't understand all the instructions on running from a live USB drive. It worked ok, but not good enough for me so still using mint 19.1 at the present time and having no problems.

[smifffy]

that MX-Linux is still an Nice System & it does have it's place.

it is installed on a couple of my Laptops.

most of my 'surfing is done on LinuxMint, though.

I agree entirely that MX Linux is a very nice distro. I also think it's very exciting and heartwarming to have so many great teams out there working so very hard to provide us with a wealth of excellent and varied distros to suit so many different users and hardware scenarios. I will continue to retain an MX installation so that I can keep an eye on its continuing development. I believe it has an awful lot of potential. I'm particularly interested in its performance on lower-end hardware.

Although Mint is not alone in this, I do believe it is one of the most important distros in bringing new users across to Linux. One of the many reasons why I sincerely hope Mint continues to thrive.

Playing around with MX Linux, a super distro in its own right, actually confirmed for me just how great a distro Mint really is and, since very recently installing the latest version of Mint, I got a bit more adventurous with the theming. I now have it looking absolutely amazing and easy on the eye to work with by way of the following settings.

Windows borders: Mint-Y
Icons: Mint-X-Yellow
Controls: Adwaita
Mouse Pointer: DMZ-White
Desktop: Mint-X

These settings might look like a car crash to some but that's the great thing; we can suit ourselves. I also very much like the panel application grouping. Overall though, I have found that a little distro hopping can be a good thing as it broadens one's awareness of what is out there on offer in the Linux desktop ecosystem.

Not a gamer myself but now that Steam has opened the door to serious gaming, I predict a very exciting future for Linux Desktop. Mint and similar distros are very worthy contenders as daily drivers over Windows 10.

[lsemmens]

Nice that the Linux Planet consists of many Kingdoms!

Agreed. With one imperial upstream to rule them all.

And all I read was that "Nice that the Linux Planet consists of many KILNGONS", one guess as to what I am currently watching.

[Portreve]

It's not so much that I don't like to tinker, but I need a stable production system, and in my experience there are no distros like Debian-based distros. Moreover, Cinnamon is so much more polished and out-of-box-ready than most other DEs (in my experience, at least) that the combination of Mint and Cinnamon is the sweet spot for normal computing needs.

[151tom]

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[darknetmatrix]

Mint is still King here also, but in my case it is LinuxMintDebianEdition.

[Portreve]

Short story.

One of my several professional backgrounds is in desktop publishing. I cut my teeth on that in high school and I worked for a number of printshops, pre-print outfits, newspapers and magazines, etc. I've extensively used PageMaker (by both Aldus and Adobe) along with QuarkXPress and InDesign.

Anyhow, one of the features I used to use a lot was called "autoflow". Basically, if you import a text file and use the autoflow option, instead of having to manually generate page after page, linking text box after text box, it will automatically create all the requisite new pages required and a series of text boxes, all linked together in order. I've used the feature a fair amount, and so I had, at the time, a fair idea of how long it would take, relative to the size of the text file. At the time, it would typically take, for sake of this example, about a minute to a minute and a half to do this.

I imported this specific text file I'd done a layout with before, but I was this time doing it on PageMaker 6 for Windows, running on an Athalon 700 MHz CPU. It took like, I dunno, three and a half seconds. It was at that point I came to the realization that, relative to my own needs (not software's own system requirements) I would never again be a high end user of technology.

Notwithstanding various OS or user application software's needs, the above has turned out to be true to this very day.

The reason I relate that story is simply this: for the most part, regardless of what specific task I'm using it for, my system needs to be stable and it needs to be intuitively functional.

KDE is, in most cases, clearly designed more for the tinkerer. Gnome 3.x has most definitely improved since it was first released, but it is still a touch screen solution in search of a keyboard and mouse problem.