There are tons of Linux distros, some might say way too many Linux distros and if I'm being honest you shouldn't be recommending most of those distros, not b...
  • Everythingispenguins@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    Really. Most people just want their computer to do Internety things. Some officey things, and then show them a film.

    If someone doesn’t get those pretty easy the first try they are going to head back to their corporate masters.

    Honestly most of us really just need the same thing. I have run a number of different distros, and yeah Arch is really fun. The thing is I realized I just need the basics and I want free time. So I came full circle and went back to Mint. Is it one of the most vanilla flavors of Linux? Absolutely, but it usually just works and I appreciate that now in my life.

    • Emerald@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      Is it one of the most vanilla flavors of Linux? Absolutely

      it’s really not though. Distros like Debian, Fedora, and Slackware are a lot more vanilla. Linux Mint develops a lot of their own tools and rices the desktop a lot.

      • Everythingispenguins@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        I have always used the Xfce DE so mine is pretty vanilla. I have no idea what cinnamon is like.

        I don’t know if maybe it is a difference in definitions. I would say those are simpler and very stable. But they are harder to use as a daily driver’s personal computer. I have never used slackware or Fedora, but Debian is so held back to keep it stable Often you have to go find software that is newer to get it to be able to deal with everybody else. It seems much more of a server than a daily. But IDK it has been a while since I looked at it.

        Mint has good moderation updates, tends to play better with proprietary codec, Nvidia, etc. without having to mess around with it too much. At the same time at least for me it’s very stable.

        • Emerald@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          When I think of a vanilla distros I think of the ones that ship packages straight from upstream with no or minimal changes. Mint is a good distro, but I wouldn’t call it vanilla. Also Mint would have to be mint flavored not vanilla :P

          • Everythingispenguins@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 months ago

            I get what you’re saying. I guess I’m using vanilla in a slightly different context. I was more talking about the end user experience and how much you needed to know first how much it did itself. To me it is the changes to packets that makes mint vanilla it is somebody else doing the work for you.

            As for the flavoring I think you got me there

  • bigredcar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    7 months ago

    As someone who started in the deep end back in 2001 (My first distro was a Slackware derivative) I actually enjoyed the satisfaction of trying to get XFree86 to work and seeing all the available command line tools. Of course this was back in the Windows 98 days so I was already used to going into MS-DOS mode. My first computer was a Commodore 64 as well so didn’t get mollycoddled at all when learning to use a computer.