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> (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns) FWIW people said the same thi

by dijit 3y ago

> (NOT mint, it's Linux with guide rails, but you've taken away most of the power user focus and still have most of the footguns) FWIW people said the same thing about Ubuntu. To be perfectly honest. Mint is a decent enough way to get started. Yes, it's easy to use, yes, that's a good thing. One very unfortunate thing with "easy to use" distros is that when it fails it's much harder to fix than ones with a steeper learning curve for some reason. But most people have this issue with Windows already. All things being equal: I would not suggest someone who wants to "get things done" immediately with a linux OS & coming from Windows: to use Arch or Debian. Most likely I would recommend something like Mint, because it just "gets out of the way" most of the time for the majority of users. This isn't a holy war, this is pragmatism, and giving people choice is not actually helping them adopt a linux that's best for them. Just use Mint until you find it has limitations you can't bear, then you'll have enough buy-in and understanding to jump to something that suits your needs. But making the jump in the first place is the most important part. Not what you jump to. Easy to use is valid.

tovej 3y ago
Yes, easy to use is valid, but Debian, openSUSE, or Manjaro are not difficult to use. They also have the additional benefit of trying to be actually useful operating systems. As you said, the issue with Mint is that they go out of their way to hide the way things work, and this means that getting an intuition for the system is slower. Much slower than just investing a little time in learning to use the command line interface to the package manager of your chosen flavor of Linux. I recall when I was first getting into linux some 12 years ago. I also got the advice to use Mint, and I did. I was completely useless on Mint. I had no shortage of trouble getting device drivers to work --- and this was still true at least three years ago when a colleague tried Mint. It took me forever to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do, and the visual package manager was confusing. Contrast to when I tried arch next, I used one week to properly understand the system using the extensive documentation at archwiki, and I used that laptop install until the laptop died (two years ago). I was immediately a lot more productive than I had been on Mint. I've since also helped acquaintances by installing Linux on their computers, but have had much more issues with distros designed to be "easy to use", like Mint or ElementaryOS, than I have had with the baseline distros that everyone uses. There are mature sleek desktop environments that are easy to use for beginners: KDE, Gnome, Awesome; and they can be installed on any distro. The only thing you really need as a beginner is an installation wizard that takes care of the nitty gritty when setting up the system, the rest you can learn while doing, and the excellent quality of the archwiki is what IMO sets that distro apart from the rest.

by dijit 3y ago

tovej 3y ago

Yes, easy to use is valid, but Debian, openSUSE, or Manjaro are not difficult to use. They also have the additional benefit of trying to be actually useful operating systems. As you said, the issue with Mint is that they go out of their way to hide the way things work, and this means that getting an intuition for the system is slower. Much slower than just investing a little time in learning to use the command line interface to the package manager of your chosen flavor of Linux. I recall when I was first getting into linux some 12 years ago. I also got the advice to use Mint, and I did. I was completely useless on Mint. I had no shortage of trouble getting device drivers to work --- and this was still true at least three years ago when a colleague tried Mint. It took me forever to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do, and the visual package manager was confusing. Contrast to when I tried arch next, I used one week to properly understand the system using the extensive documentation at archwiki, and I used that laptop install until the laptop died (two years ago). I was immediately a lot more productive than I had been on Mint. I've since also helped acquaintances by installing Linux on their computers, but have had much more issues with distros designed to be "easy to use", like Mint or ElementaryOS, than I have had with the baseline distros that everyone uses. There are mature sleek desktop environments that are easy to use for beginners: KDE, Gnome, Awesome; and they can be installed on any distro. The only thing you really need as a beginner is an installation wizard that takes care of the nitty gritty when setting up the system, the rest you can learn while doing, and the excellent quality of the archwiki is what IMO sets that distro apart from the rest.