I tried installing it 2 times, fucked it up the first time because I didn't read it well enough, then fucked it up when trying to encrypt an USB drive. I've found its installer really not user-friendly. Any tips on the installation?
F-that! Take pride... Mint is ridiculously good. Well managed, stable, "just works" and yet has all the capabilities you want, including auto-running near the edge for current kernels (backed down to stable) without doing jack. You can run at the bleeding edge if you want to manage it yourself.
And for any haters - here's my take: I've been working with Unix for 30+ years, I installed Slackware off of floppies when 16MB of RAM was god-like. I have built, compiled and managed nearly every distro at some point certainly the upstream giants. I've been there for the birth of all of them. I've also professionally worked on AIX, SunOS/Solaris, HPUX. Yes there's a lot of fun in maintaining and running things to your satisfaction, but when you hit a certain inflection point of balancing your real life and maintaining distros across multiple machines and decide "This is the way" - Mint just fits the bill on so many levels.
Mint is the bomb and I'm done pretending. Fight me (not you, OP, you're cool)
I've got to admit, I do love Mint. I've thought about hopping, but I've never had a serious problem with Mint (that wasn't my own fault) so I've never really had the motivation.
Mint works pretty well! I've never been much of a power user so using its GUI (Cinnamon 'cause I failed miserably at running KDE) to update and install certain programs is pretty convenient.
Mint is the basic bitch of distros. Sure she shows up in fugly ugs, leggings, gripping a pumpkin spice drank. But she shows up! Works hard. That girl fucks! Make no mistake, basic bitches make the world go round.
the only objective problem mint has is that it's so good I struggle to get people I convinced to install it to be interested in other distros and stuff. And that's fine.
Mint is a solid choice and the one I recommend to anyone who just wants something that works or doesn't care about having several choices, and even when someone wants to explore more options I always include Mint. It just works, it's easy to install that even my non-tech savvy mother on a phone call with me managed to install it and Cinnamon has just enough customization options ootb to make it yours without being overwhelming to a noob like KDE.
I personally don't use it cause I am not the biggest fan of using GUIs, debian derivatives and I prefer KDE plasma so I just go with other options (currently Fedora 40, been using Arch and NixOS a lot before this), however even in my case I could most likely turn LM into what I want with some effort (I just don't see the point in doing that), and my father who has been using Linux since Kernel 1.0 and is definitely a power user swears by it.
Maaaaaaan I’ve wanted to try Asahi since its development took shape. I know I’m probably not that far off with my PBP running Fedora, but it’s just not the same…
Apple supposedly makes good hardware, and my '23 mbp in 14' has excellent battery, great trackpad, very good sound and a beast of a screen. Now I don't like whatever material these machines are made of, they are downright unpleasant to grab or touch, and the keyboard is abismal shit. I hate it, I am seriously not using it as much as I could not because Asahi, or Fedora, or bugs, or the availability of certain software for Arm64, but because of that shit keyboard. Asahi runs great, the full Pipewire sound stack developed for it is a pleasure to work on. Switch monitoring every which way, plug Firefox into Ardour and rip youtube, it all works, period.
To me M2 with 16g of ram is about on par with an intel i12 in everyday life. Sure it will win on rendering movies or some specific stuff, but day-to-day it's like my friend' Carbon X1 on Mint really.
Manjaro (Stable) with Plasma 6 (and broken Oxygen icons).
I plan to merge those icons with GNOME icons... which are also partial, but I am too lazy. I like their early 2010s 3D look, but currently nearly half my icons are just missing.
I should be able to just rsync them together I hope and name it something else. Then also rsync the default Breeze icons as a last resort. I should be able to do that with --ignore-existing I think.
Time to shoot the newbie. First used Ubuntu 20.04 in 2022. It was a necessity at the time on that shitty laptop and I had never used Linux before. Wouldn't go back to using that distro or laptop ever again since I have upgraded.
