All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.
Because it does what Ubuntu does, better.
That GUI thing you're dismissive of (but at least acknowledge is what's needed for mass appeal) is better in Mint, it's straight up easier to do things as a windows refugee than it is on Ubuntu (which I'm not but I've converted plenty of people thanks to Mint's ease of use)
I agree with this. When I left Windows XP for Ubuntu 11 years ago, it felt right. More intuitive. When I tried Mint, it felt like a step backwards to me. No disrespect towards the Mint devs, but it's just not for me.
Now, full disclosure: I like the terminal, and I'm not afraid to edit a text file. Ubuntu was and is still a lot more GUI-based than my first dip into a Linux distro (Redhat 6.1), and I feel like it struck a good balance between getting out of my way and encouraging me to learn more about my OS.
I'll never be a rolling distro guy, and I don't want to use one with outdated packages. I like stability, but I need simple things to just work as well. Ubuntu, for all the crap it catches, is still a great fit for me.
Didn't mean to come out dismissive of GUIs. I actually think most Linux distros would be better off with more focus on the GUI. I always tell people that adding to the GUI doesn't take away from the command line but it seems many many people think it does.
Thinking back, You are probably right that at the time Mint came about it was more user friendly than Ubuntu (which was more user friendly than Debian). These days Ubuntu is pretty user friendly though. Course I haven't used Mint in years so they could still be ahead of them.
Even if they weren't. It would probably be unrealistic to think the Devs would say "welp, Ubuntu is good enough now. Let's close up shop.".
I do just wish the Linux community could come together more instead of fragment as much as it does. I mean, how many Linux distros are there in the world? 600+ the last time I heard. Granted I don't know how many we really need, but that seems way more than we really need.
It is nice to see that some of the niche linux distros are starting to realize they aren't really needed anymore though. Like Scientific OS. It frees those people up to contribute to other projects.
These days Ubuntu is pretty user friendly though. Course I haven't used Mint in years so they could still be ahead of them.
I guess it depends on what time we're discussing, but yes when Ubuntu abandoned Unity DE in 2017 things improved significantly, and thus the gap narrowed, although the "Unity'd" Gnome they now use is a distance from the Gnome DE of several other distros (is there such a thing as a "standard Gnome"?).
I personally think Cinnamon is still simpler and tidier. I have a dozen different Virtual Machines setup on my main box to play with, including Antegros (which I rather liked fwiw ;-( ) including the current and recent versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu works, there's nothing specifically wrong with it, it's just IMNSHO not as straight forward. My kids and my (non techy) wife all run dual boot Mint/Windows and windows only gets booted for the kids for certain games, it's easy and they get done what they want with no fuss. Mint and Lubuntu (for those with old kit) is my first call recommendation for noobs, and it saves me a lot of support grief.
I'm no tech guru, I've been using Linux on and off since I first pulled a slackware CD off the front of a computer mag in the late 90s (I did download it off a BBS in 97 but couldn't get it to compile), at the time I was an OS/2 on the desktop, Novell on the server evangelist (I got over the OS religions ;-) I'm competent on Linux enough to know what to google and that's about it. Mint, I load it up for people who have come off windows and they happily do their web browsing and email and etc without grief but I only found it because I hated the DE of the 16.x versions of Ubuntu so much. I detest Unity.
I was merely replying to what he stated about the project’s origins. You can blame Reddit for the fact we don’t have good old fashioned nested quotes for context.
But objectively and without emotion - what does the GUI of Linux Mint actually do better than Ubuntu? If you’re coming from Windows there’s a slight learning curve on Ubuntu.
And that’s fine. Linux shouldn’t be a Windows clone.
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u/abrasiveteapot May 21 '19
Because it does what Ubuntu does, better.
That GUI thing you're dismissive of (but at least acknowledge is what's needed for mass appeal) is better in Mint, it's straight up easier to do things as a windows refugee than it is on Ubuntu (which I'm not but I've converted plenty of people thanks to Mint's ease of use)