I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable” packages.
I had a negative bias on Mint as I disliked the idea of a newbie’s distro and was two steps away from Debian so for some time I left it aside.
A couple of weeks after that I decided to dust off an old 2013 iMac for my wife to be using as desktop machine and, she being a windows gal, I thought a safe bet would have been Mint that doesn’t feel alien for those coming from that OS.
Again, mind blown by the performance.
I decide to play it risky and so I reimagine it with LMDE: everything works out of the box. I just install the NVIDIA driver from Synaptics and then the computer is set.
This was the drop that made me go on the rabbit hole. I went on a spree to install LDME on an old gaming laptop that was hidden in the dust for now 5 years and then to a few other machines. (Yeah I have a bit of spare hardware lying around)
The last few days I have been thinking to put mint on the main desktop but was afraid of letting GNOME go… and so I decided to test GNOME on one of those LDME machines…
Omg…. Mind blown again. Essentially we can now have Debian with all the delicious little Mint tools. This kinda feels like how Debian is supposed to be! But it is Mint! Even GNOME contains all the little things that, on Fedora for example, I used to have to install manually but now they were there already! Like Gnome Tweaks, or extensions like the Places indicator or other small ones…
I am not sure I am managing to convey how this feels… I have always wanted to have Debian but Debian has made it, one way or another, impossible for me to stay. Mint is making it possible today. What a blessing of a distro.
Rant over.
Side note: I think I have fallen in love with Cinnamon, oups!
The main issue with Debian, i feel, is if you have modern hardware, the distro at the end of its life cycle will be quite outdated, with very old packages (namely at both the driver level, and also the desktop environment). However, I am yet to test the testing branch which may solve for this sort of use case, while still being decently stable.
Is the problem of outdated packages still a thing now that you can get them all via Flatpacks?
Concerning the kernel, again, can you always benefit from the latest one? Personally I am starting to appreciate not having to constantly update the OS while at the same time enjoying the latest software. Concerning apt packages, those in the Debian repo will just work like clockwork
It’s really only an issue with newer hardware and even then, there are usually backports available.
Flatpak isn’t going to have every library, cli tool, or even every GUI tool. I think in the end out of date just isn’t worth it.
Isn’t that one of the benefits of LMDE? I think that the DE related packages and maybe things like browsers get updated more often.
For applications these days, there is Flatpak for anything you want to keep more current.
Sure a lot of the rest of the distro will get old. Does that really matter to most users though? If the DE is up to date, the system will feel current. If your key apps are up to date, you are productive. An up to date browser keeps the web working well ( perhaps the main criteria for most people these days). Having the rest of the system be stable could be a good thing.
Devs would probably want more up to date versions of some things. Most regular users are probably just fine though.
Debian backports kernel can be used, it is pretty up to date.
In LMDE they continue to update the DE, that is one of the benefits of using it over stock Debian + Cinnamon or SpiralLinux. Most but not all other packages follow Debian stable. Regular Mint has similar experiences with old packages since they use Ubuntu LTS.
You might be interested in Nitrux, it’s an immutable distro based on Debian Unstable and the latest Liquorix kernel. If has the most recent but stable Mesa, pipewire and other drivers, but most of the userland packages are pulled from Ubuntu LTS (IIRC) - so it’s an interesting mix of having the latest base that makes it compatible with newer hardware, but has a stable userland without any of the issues that you’d see from normal packages on Debian Unstable.
What even is modern hardware? If your hardware is more than 2 years old you a never going to have a problem.
Not if it’s really old. My dinosaur is over 12 years old and Debian stable (on which LMDE is based) no longer officially supports my graphics card.
If I want the graphics to work properly, I have to install the proprietary driver the hard way, and reinstall it every time Xorg updates.
There are alternatives but all of them require more work or giving up features.
(And no, I can’t just buy a new computer.)
Really? It should be built into the kernel.
The card’s Nvidia. Mint comes with the Nouveau driver which doesn’t quite cut it, at least not for me. Maybe some of that’s baked into the kernel these days, I’m not sure.
Earlier Mints (LMDE included) provided an installable package of the OEM legacy driver for cards as old as mine, but Debian 12 (which LMDE 6 is based on) doesn’t.
I should point out that graphics works without the OEM driver, but it doesn’t work well. Work is offloaded to the CPU that the card is perfectly capable of doing.
Install the backport kernel. Use flatpak for gaming (latest mesa) and the applications you want the latest version. Perfect combination between stable and latest updates.
Actually in my very very very very specific case, that is impossible. (Although for most users with modern hardware, I’d still want something a bit more dynamic, even if just from a DE standpoint)
It is impossible for me because I am on a Mac, and since the drivers are still being written :P. The kernel is custom as well as the mesa implementation, so for now, not really an option
woops, jep not an option
And currently flatpaks really are an annoyance, because since I am on arm, they are one of the largest collections of applications, which would be great, if they didn’t ship their own outdated mesa, which means I don’t have hardware acceleration in a lot of cases
I’m ok with that for how I use Debian, and is its kind of intended purpose. Outdated but stable is fine for a server being that the latter is my main concern. I wouldn’t use it for my daily driver (tried that and wound up back in Windows). IMHO, Debian has no GUI.