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.
with Mint when the next release you are more likely than not going to have to re-install
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.
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.
Mint has a more noob friendly approach with almost everything having a ui and it is Ubuntu under the hood so there wouldn’t be extra to learn after switching. Popularity wise mint is one of the best stable distros with Ubuntu as its base with community support as well so if you have doubts you can most probably find the answer just by searching
If you’re already using Ubuntu, I don’t think it’s worth it. They’re fairly similar. Then again, I didn’t even get to install Ubuntu in the first place, the installer kept crashing.
Unless the laptop is a potato and you don’t have a better computer, you can try Mint, or any other distro in a VM to see for yourself.
And welcome to Linux. If someone recommends you Arch Linux, Gentoo or LFS as other newbie-friendly option, it’s a joke.
Thank you for the reply. Nobody has recommended Arch Linux, Gentoo or LFS, yet lol. But Im happy I switched from Windows to Linux. However, Ubuntu is taking me a bit to get used to. It took me a few days to get Ubuntu to even work. Thankfully, I don’t have anything on my laptop. I kept it blank for a reason to fly around and try out this OS.
It’s like a favourite drink, there’s no correct choice.
I quite like xubuntu. I know that linus tech tips recommended mint to people coming from windows.
Many have a live USB option, that’s great for trying them out.
