Mint Has Restored My Faith In Linux

cybereality

cybereality

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So I've been dual booting Win10 and Ubuntu for about 2 years, and switched over almost exclusively on Ubuntu for 6 months. At first, things seemed great but I have consistently found little problems with Ubuntu that made me question using Linux at all.

Namely, I could not get smooth desktop performance for my 166Hz monitor. Dragging windows around was choppy, overall not a great experience. There were also smaller problems like USB drives not unmounting correctly, wifi dropping randomly, freezing on the login screen, etc. Overall I was not happy with the glitches and thought I should just switch back to Windows, which I did but I remember why I wanted to switch.

So, I just installed Linux Mint and it is so much better. I know it is based on Ubuntu, but everything seems to be much more solid. My 166Hz monitor is finally at it's full speed, desktop performance is perfect. It has been 2 days and no freezes or wifi drops. Removable drives seem to work fine. I wish I would have tried this earlier, not sure if it was GNOME or what, but Mint is like 100x better than vanilla Ubuntu. I can see now why it is popular. Happy with the switch.
 
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I'm using the standard Cinnamon edition (so I guess based on Ubuntu). I thought that would be good because I'm already familiar with Ubuntu.

I tried Ubuntu MATE and that was nice too (desktop was smooth), but I kind of messed up the install so I decided to just go with Mint if I had to reinstall anyhow.

I've also used Debian a few years ago and it felt pretty bare-bones but it did work well.
 
I use Mint as daily machine for work and it is great. It support everything I needs and it is smooth.
 
cybereality said:
So I've been dual booting Win10 and Ubuntu for about 2 years, and switched over almost exclusively on Ubuntu for 6 months. At first, things seemed great but I have consistently found little problems with Ubuntu that made me question using Linux at all.

Namely, I could not get smooth desktop performance for my 166Hz monitor. Dragging windows around was choppy, overall not a great experience. There were also smaller problems like USB drives not unmounting correctly, wifi dropping randomly, freezing on the login screen, etc. Overall I was not happy with the glitches and thought I should just switch back to Windows, which I did but I remember why I wanted to switch.

So, I just installed Linux Mint and it is so much better. I know it is based on Ubuntu, but everything seems to be much more solid. My 166Hz monitor is finally at it's full speed, desktop performance is perfect. It has been 2 days and no freezes or wifi drops. Removable drives seem to work fine. I wish I would have tried this earlier, not sure if it was GNOME or what, but Mint is like 100x better than vanilla Ubuntu. I can see now why it is popular. Happy with the switch.
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That's very interesting considering Mint underneath is the same as Ubuntu. Makes me think it was more of a DE issue instead of a distro issue, especially when you say Ubuntu MATE was smooth. I'm not a fan of Gnome so for Gnome to be causing you grief honestly wouldn't surprise me. I find Gnome to be a garbage DE.
 
Vermillion said:
That's very interesting considering Mint underneath is the same as Ubuntu. Makes me think it was more of a DE issue instead of a distro issue, especially when you say Ubuntu MATE was smooth. I'm not a fan of Gnome so for Gnome to be causing you grief honestly wouldn't surprise me. I find Gnome to be a garbage DE.
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This. I don't exactly hate gnome, but I don't really like it either. I really wish Fedora would move away from it. OFC I wish nvidia would pull its head from its rear and support wayland too.
 
Right, I know Mint is Ubuntu based and MATE worked as well, so I'm thinking maybe it was GNOME, at least for the refresh rate issue.

And my Ubuntu was tweaked over the last year or so, it's possible I messed something up because Mint feels faster in other ways (I was getting some stalls and slowness on the desktop, aside from the refresh).

Still not sure about the USB problems, but I do have like 15 USB devices in use (all mobo ports and 2 hubs) so maybe that was too much. But so far Mint has been working.
 
cybereality said:
Right, I know Mint is Ubuntu based and MATE worked as well, so I'm thinking maybe it was GNOME, at least for the refresh rate issue.

And my Ubuntu was tweaked over the last year or so, it's possible I messed something up because Mint feels faster in other ways (I was getting some stalls and slowness on the desktop, aside from the refresh).

Still not sure about the USB problems, but I do have like 15 USB devices in use (all mobo ports and 2 hubs) so maybe that was too much. But so far Mint has been working.
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The primary problem I had with Mint was NEMO would prevent you from using thumb drives. It's been a problem with Mint since Mint 15 if I remember correctly. It's essentially locking the drive after you use it. Since nobody really uses thumb drives anymore it's basically been ignored.
 
Vermillion said:
That's very interesting considering Mint underneath is the same as Ubuntu. Makes me think it was more of a DE issue instead of a distro issue, especially when you say Ubuntu MATE was smooth. I'm not a fan of Gnome so for Gnome to be causing you grief honestly wouldn't surprise me. I find Gnome to be a garbage DE.
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Ubuntu with the cinnamon DE is basically Mint.
 
It probably was Gnome. That said, Gnome in the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is much better. A lot of issues I had with it seemed to have gotten fixed.
 
x3sphere said:
It probably was Gnome. That said, Gnome in the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is much better. A lot of issues I had with it seemed to have gotten fixed.
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Bleh, I can't stand Gnome. In fact I'm fairly opposed to the Gnome devs in general and their attitude towards locking Linux down to their way of doing things.
 
Between Gnome with Fedora 32 Manjaro KDE, both freshly installed on my desktop in sig, Gnome takes the cake for smoothness.
 
I'm stuck deciding between MATE and Mint. Looking forward to Mint 20 being released in the coming weeks.
 
DeaconFrost said:
I'm stuck deciding between MATE and Mint. Looking forward to Mint 20 being released in the coming weeks.
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MATE on which distro?

I will say that I was able to get League of Legends through Lutris and Tomb Raider through Steam running on my desktop (top in sig). Don't think G-Sync was working, but I didn't check the control panel. Really just need to make more room for Pop OS ;).
 
I only tried Ubuntu MATE a couple times, seemed alright. I don't have enough experience really to say one way or the other.

Mint has been mostly good to me. After I started installing stuff, I think it messed with the video drivers because the choppiness came back.

However, I noticed Mint has options in the settings to adjust the compositor refresh. I disabled VSync and that made the desktop much smoother.

Also, I still have some issues with the USB drops, but I realize I just have too many devices (I think around 12 or 13 plugged in). I'm getting a PCIe USB card, hopefully that will fix it.

Restart seems to take a while, but lock and suspend work much better than with vanilla Ubuntu (I had issues with the computer not locking when sleeping, meaning you could turn it on and not have to type a password).

And I haven't had any crashes or freezing or anything wrong. I know it's only been a week, but the stability seems better (granted, I'm comparing a LTS release to the latest Ubuntu, but it is a concern).

My security key was not detected out-of-box, but I found a config file and was able to fix it. Also Blender in the repo was really old (2.79) so I had to install the snap instead. Not a big deal.

So everything is like I want right now. I feel pretty good about Mint. Will have to see how things go but I'm happy with it.
 
DeaconFrost said:
I was trying the official Ubuntu MATE 20.04 distro.
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Ah; I've heard of Mint MATE, and just about every distro family has MATE available. And well, they're all different too.

Personally I liked MATE quite a bit, and I think the main reason I've tilted toward Gnome is that is a) the development target for gaming on Linux and b) the default DE for most enterprise Linux usage if a DE is even available at all.
 
I used Linux Mint Debian Edition and it was great.
I would go for it anytime. It is way faster than the regular Mint and also provides better hardware support as it is based on Debian.
All in all, I am happy.
Have you tried openSUSE?
I want to know how it works on other systems. I had a bad experience with it.
 
JustinC said:
I would go for it anytime. It is way faster than the regular Mint and also provides better hardware support as it is based on Debian.
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This... doesn't make much sense. Canonical ports quite a bit of hardware support for Ubuntu, and there's quite a lot that may not be updated in the Debian branch.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
This... doesn't make much sense. Canonical ports quite a bit of hardware support for Ubuntu, and there's quite a lot that may not be updated in the Debian branch.
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It depends on which branch you're using in debian and what hardware you have. If you're on bleeding edge debian, you'll have better support of new hardware. But if you're on debian stable, then it'll be about the same, maybe Ubuntu will have a slight edge on non-lts versions.
 
Debian used to be very conservative, server oriented, distro. That changed quite a bit with Debian 9 but still, debian and 'latest support' have an odd ring to my ears. Ubuntu pulls it's code from Debian Sid as far as I know, which is why Ubuntu is generally ahead in versions compared to stable Debian.
 
Mint with Ubuntu kernel always supported my latest HW like I bough 2080ti and it worked great etc. All latest wireless Logitech products works fine etc. Though I use mainly mainstream Hw. Not sure about very specific HW rarely used by crowd.
 
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