I tried my best to even the audio out a bit, so I hope that it is at least listenable.

Linux Mint is my favorite distro

Linux Mint is hands down the best distro for new users.

Hi guys Matteo here from far Italy 🇮🇹.... Really enjoyed this conversation. What I like the most of our french cousins of Mint is the philosophy which is behind the distro. They really want to give you the moust usable and secure and privacy respecting OS. Not saying it is the best. Probably none of the infinite list of distros is the best. But to me it's like being best friends with those guys who built your house, with those who built your car. I don't know if you get what I mean. There's a big attention on what the OS should be and I'm really thinking of making a donation to help those guys. On the two versions... I do agree that the future will be the debian based one. Quite sure. Especially because Ubuntu will keep moving most of its parts to snap. Critical parts too, Libraries etc etc. Hope did not waste your time with my thoughts 😅 Ciao to everyone!!! 👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻

Used mint for 3 years, no problem at all on any of my 6 pcs. Went over to LMDE 6 months ago, no problems here either.

Mint just works and my computer is a tool not a toy to play with, and I am not a new Linux user. I don’t care about the under the hood stuff, and the development of it. I just care about the front end.

I’m not a new user of Linux but LM is great because I can just set it up on any machine so quickly and I don’t have to nurse maid it. Great when setting it up for friends and family.

I don't use Mint, but yes, it's actually good.

I have been on Mint for 2 years now. It is by far the best overall Linux experience I have had. Everything just works. It is simple, consistent. Whatever they are doing, they are doing it right.

Linux mint just works. That's why people can stay by it.

I consider myself an early-intermediate Linux user. I have been using Mint since I switched in 2022 and have never had a serious problem with my system. Mint is considered a "beginner" distro, but the nice thing about Mint is that you can ignore the desktop, install a tiling window manager, do most of your work on the terminal and functionally not be that much different than the "I use Arch, btw" folks. There really is no such thing as a "beginner" distro.

i dont really mind them blocking unverified apps when you can just go to flat hub and get them anyways via the terminal

Linux Mint is a no-nonsense Distro. I have recently switched from Windows 11. I did lot of research which distro to switch to and finally zeroed in on Fedora and Mint. I tried Fedora for a few days before I switched to Mint. The point is I use Linux (Oracle/RH) at work and used Ubuntu for a while 6-7 years ago but had to discontinue due to Wifi issue.

LMDE Rocks

I really should have participated in this instead of preparing for the disaster of a political debate last night.

Linux mint it's just Great

Linux Mint just works and works damn good on every machine I've installed it on.

I was going to throw away my 11 year old hp pavillion g6 ,with 3 gb of ram ,a 2 core i3 M380 cpu and the original hdd ,but then just for fun i took an 11year old kingston 4gb flash drive and used it to install LMDE 6 on it ! When i tell you it had no issues out of the box and became like at least 5 times faster ,when with windows 10 it was suffocating and taking up to 2 minutes to open a broswer page ! Linux is truly a great way of making less e-waste ♻️

I swear by Linux Mint and have for years. I have a drive that I use to distro hopping and have used many distros. I always go back to Linux Mint! It's reliable and I can find what I need when I need it. Things did just work without any mods!

What a title

Great discussion, thanks Matt for going beyound "let's just look at some distro", liked to hear many points here. Comparison of Nix with Pythoin was accurate. When I'm asking what's best language for beginners, I always tell Javascript because it's both popular and used C-like syntax, which always provides familarity with all lanugages with curly braces.

been using LM since the 'Carissa', tried hopping to many other distros but still get back to LM.

I don't think I've ever watched as many videos of a man who's takes I completely disagree with as Matt's lol

My biggest issue with Mint is one with formatting USB sticks. After attempting formating it [you know right click on mounted USB/Format] USB stick gets totally unresponsive. It's so bad that everytime I need to switch to Windows 7 just to format damn thing. When pluggin in USB stick in Windows after attempt on Linux it says that this USB stick isn't formatted lol

my issue with nix os is i need to use a wifi dongle and it has to use dkms and nix does not work with it same with every other immutable distro

One of the best distro around

One thing we have to rember its Linux. Mint has been around a long time and I cant say that about most distros. Mint makes small changes to its desktop. I like Linux Mint because it works (stable) and it's squared away.

part2......later in the show you guys are talking about mismatched refresh rates. I am running a 12GB 3080 and 144Hz Gen1 Gsync ultrawide 2560x1080 and my 2nd monitor is a 60hz 1920x1080. Anyway I am running Linux Mint XFCE with the proprietary driver and its works flawlessly.

On linux mint, the difference between deb and flatpacks is that: deb always comes with installer program, and cooperates smoothly with system. In other hand the look of some apps tends to be very old (The GUI of software). And the problem with flatpacks are: user GTK cannot be supported by auto, (You have to connect it manually), it tends to not work at all, or it performs worsen than deb version. In my opinion the flatpack apps are something like a cage for the app to works on multiple versions (More like virtual machines) by that they are limited to themselves without good connection to OS's utilities. The MATE version is used in "backdrop version" which is in cinnamon a anti break the system (Or anti OS crash [blue-screen] element) it disables every effect, additional applet, gives the default theme settings - as it used to warn a user that he or program had done something not right.

Any distro that runs tarkov?

debian is my fav so far but i just got a new laptop, debian 6.1 kernel missing some of my drivers plus the pref is so bad (compare to fedora 6.9) its a shame

I tried it on old hardware and it bloated up after a few program installs. Windows 10 clean install ran better (2012 laptop with HDD no ssd). The laptop came with 7 which after cleanup also was faster than Mint was on it.

I just put Linux mint on my laptop to daily drive it as a home tech support person I've already had older people asking why my laptop looks different

flatpaks in kde plasma follow themes

For now, I would say so, unfortunately, if this change with the blocking of unverified flatpaks goes through, I may have to reconsider.

It is damn good...both the standard and the LMDE ...I have used both for years...Cinnamon is a great desktop.

Can you do Linux for beginners from the start

Admit it or not, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro. It has the best hardware support and it developed its reputation of being the reliable corporate distro. Having unbloated Ubuntu is a necessity, not a luxury. The only downside of Mint is that it doesn't support two of the most popular DEs. If they decide to ditch Ubuntu completely in favor of Debian as the upstream, then they are also abandoning all the improvements.

Well depending on ones skill level on OS/software related things for Linux, that can be so hit and miss, and Im more the Hardware type and for myself on what I can afford too, I just lately had to go the no os eBay route. I would prefer to build a nice shiny new system, but I can't anytime now or soon, so went with 99 $ Dell workstation, had already a few things I could upgrade with it including a older NVIDIA V-Card. Latest releases though of LM can be tricky, 21.3 literally ate Network Manager for me, and that has happened a few times before this PC too for me. When I saw it recently I was like, Not this again. So i am just testing from then backwards to find that stability one I want and for sure to work with CUDA too as well, that's been an issue for me as well. So far though 21.2 generally has been stable minus that 470 driver only and cuda 11.4 my cards cuda capability of, but 21.x version is strange on how it won't even list in package manager cuda version 11.4, just 11.5 and higher.. So I'm now going to have to revert back a bit more I think. LM 18 or 19.... hmmmm... If I were using AMD I'm sure the latest would work. But Yea I'm more stronger in Hardware than software, But I will never use Windows. I actually come from a Mac OS background. Just wish that depreciation especially with nvidia older cards wouldn't happen, or force a driver that the card doesn't officially support so better hardware checks too, no way would I want to try right now at least the more advanced distros. especially with my experience of LM and with my current hardware. Software I have a harder time understanding too as well, logs can be helpful, and I do read them, but can't always figure it out, then the forums sometimes yes helpful, but my experience is theres always that 1 or 2 aholes, instead of helping, criticize criticize, and generally not trying to help, also forcing me to remember everything which if it happened when I tried days ago, which it did. I always do my best to find solution on my own but its just too all over the place really on all distros. I do like LM though, just NVIDIA can be damn tricky, one thought that does come to mind tho is, Perhaps I should get an AMD video card. lol That'll so have to wait tho. am yes getting sick of this nvidia headache.

If i migrate from Arch, my distro will be Mint or Suse. Also i want try Nix

As an Optimus laptop owner.... All I can say is never ever again.

Pro tip: put your mic on mute when vaping

I like Mint Linux, but yeah I'd agree that it's basically an improved Ubuntu.

Lol I just said nix because tyler isn't here to say it 😂

I wish they just go for the amazing Debian Edition 🎉

Mint should drop Ubuntu based and focus on the Debian based. Only downside of Debian is updates take to long. Thunderbird for instance already released 2 updates, but still no update for Debian🤔 Version 115.12.02 was already released more than a week ago. Why does it take so long? tarball is useless because I can't send files with it and flatpak won't use my theme and takes up to much disk space.

The nix package on Mint. :)

Current Ubuntu uses ~10 snaps.

I switched to linux after been on windows only for about 28 years since windows 3.1 I used linux mint as every new linux user is told but it felt so ... Boring and windows like and I ran into so many outdated packages and problems trying to tweak it or install thibgs or switch to pipewire. I was on mint for only 3 days and I switched to Arch using CachyOS and its 1000% far far better than mint.

should have had a new user join

I think Linux Mint is pretty good

Debian 12.5 Suse Linux😊

R u? Am I?

You need to do Linux from Scratch if you are going to call yourself The Linux Cast.

Linux Mint is a solid OS. Now if they could start working on a new GUI. They have had this same tired look for years now. The Icons look like something from Windows 3.1.

KDE neon for me. Looks better than Fischer Price Linux Mint. No Gnome for me. Anything that looks like a Mac is a no go.😊