If this question was asked before, I apologize in advance for the redundancy.
I recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu on my laptop. Still getting the hang of Ubuntu, but I see a lot of comments on different posts in which a majority of them point to using Mint instead.
Would the best recommendation, be to switch to Mint from Ubuntu?
The big thing to consider is how much are you going to customize it and how many external apps are you going to install, because with Mint when the next release you are more likely than not going to have to re-install, with Ubuntu you will be able to upgrade in place. Snap is trivially easy to get rid of, I’m typing this from a Ubuntu-Mate 24.04 system with NO snap.
First time hearing this. Got anything to back that up?
@lancalot Only that I’ve run just about every debian derived distro there is and Ubuntu is the only one that has reliably upgraded in place.
Fair. Even if some may dismiss it as anecdotal (N=1), I do think it’s valuable. Thank you.
@lancalot I run an ISP so quite a few servers thus though anacdotal, not a super tiny sample. And again I think it’s an important point to consider but a lot has to do with how much effort you are going to put into customization. If your use is very generic, install and go, then no big deal, but if you spend a lot of time fine tuning and installing apps you have to get from third parties and compile yourself then a re-install is a big deal. I find myself often in the latter situation so it is important to me, to someone else perhaps not. For me windows is like the former situation, all I do with Windows is play games, and it takes me maybe 1/2 hour to install the games so do I care about a re-install of Windows? Not really.
Important elaboration. Much appreciated.
I’m mostly oblivious of what’s required to run an ISP. But you mentioned servers yourself. Do you install Linux Mint on your servers?
@lancalot Consider things like setting up mail servers and web hosting configuration, when you’ve got hundreds of virtual domains, when you’ve highly optimized apache compiled from scratch and modified to your needs, that is the kind of thing I’m talking about that is time consuming and I don’t wish to do from scratch more often than is necessary.
@lancalot And for the record, I don’t have anything against Mint as an OS, it’s Ubuntu with some pretty GUI admin apps thrown on top. I rarely use the GUI’s so updates aside it’s six of one or half dozen of the other. From a command line perspective, except when things break,they are identical and admittedly the aesthetics of Mint are in my view superior.
I have reliably upgraded Mint in place the last, dunno, 5-6 major releases or so, works exactly as well as Ubuntu’s
@jherazob That’s great, my experience has not gone as smoothly, I’ve ended up with dependency loops that in spite of my best efforts, I could just not readily resolve. Things like there is a new version of python required by the new apt, but it installed the apt before the python, so now I’m stuck with a system that has a new version of apt but old version of python, thus apt won’t work to install the new python manually. I’ve not encountered this with Ubuntu but more than once with Mint, like I said my success rate with Mint has been around 50/50.