you must’ve not seen Mint in a long time if you think it looks like Windows 95, I’m using it right now and it looks much nicer.
Further, that’s really not the cutting dig you think it is. Windows 95, for all its boxy, gray 90s aesthetic, was a very clean UI with minimal bullshit. If you like ricing your desktop/want it to look fancy, great, I’m happy for you. Most normal users, on the other hand, really don’t care how their OS looks as long as they can find what they need to. For normal users, the OS should be an invisible plinth that other programs you actually give a fuck about sit on top of. Mint stays the fuck out of my way to that end impeccably well.
I think it makes some sense once you take a look at the big picture. Mint has been around for a very long time and has become one of the most popular distributions on its own. On top of that, it is designed to be an easy turnkey system for inexperienced linux users.
That alone would gain it plenty of recommendations, but ubuntu would probably still be the top recommendation. However, the same thing that made it good — Canonical and its resources — is also the thing that drove away the Linux enthusiasts that recommend distros to new users.
So you take Ubuntu, the user friendly distro built on one of the sorta OG distros (debian), strip out the proprietary stuff that annoys the Linux community (snaps etc), and make it even more user friendly while removing none of the Linux goodness, and there you have Mint as the obvious recommendation.
Hell, I’m a computer person and I happily use Mint on multiple computers daily.
Yeah, I get your reasoning – but there are other distros that match all of that as well. PopOS and ElementaryOS are two that I have personal experience with. Elementary had a rocky upgrade once so I tried PopOS and haven’t looked back. It’s great. Ubuntu minus the crap. The average user (getting recommended mint) probably wouldn’t care about being on the latest release and would likely not even run updates all that often, so even Elementary would’ve been a good choice for them. I have since installed it on my girlfriend’s slow/old laptop and it works very smoothly there compared with windows.
Probably because they’ve been building their own DE (which will replace their GNOME fork) for a while now. It’s in alpha and hopefully will roll out in the next few months. Having said that, I don’t have issues doing the things I want to do. I think it’s fine for now because 22.04 is LTS, so most app makers support it.
Pop os is easy and doesn’t look like windows 95
you must’ve not seen Mint in a long time if you think it looks like Windows 95, I’m using it right now and it looks much nicer.
Further, that’s really not the cutting dig you think it is. Windows 95, for all its boxy, gray 90s aesthetic, was a very clean UI with minimal bullshit. If you like ricing your desktop/want it to look fancy, great, I’m happy for you. Most normal users, on the other hand, really don’t care how their OS looks as long as they can find what they need to. For normal users, the OS should be an invisible plinth that other programs you actually give a fuck about sit on top of. Mint stays the fuck out of my way to that end impeccably well.
I was kind of kidding, I just think it’s wild that out of all the options, mint is recommended 9/10 times
I think it makes some sense once you take a look at the big picture. Mint has been around for a very long time and has become one of the most popular distributions on its own. On top of that, it is designed to be an easy turnkey system for inexperienced linux users.
That alone would gain it plenty of recommendations, but ubuntu would probably still be the top recommendation. However, the same thing that made it good — Canonical and its resources — is also the thing that drove away the Linux enthusiasts that recommend distros to new users.
So you take Ubuntu, the user friendly distro built on one of the sorta OG distros (debian), strip out the proprietary stuff that annoys the Linux community (snaps etc), and make it even more user friendly while removing none of the Linux goodness, and there you have Mint as the obvious recommendation.
Hell, I’m a computer person and I happily use Mint on multiple computers daily.
Yeah, I get your reasoning – but there are other distros that match all of that as well. PopOS and ElementaryOS are two that I have personal experience with. Elementary had a rocky upgrade once so I tried PopOS and haven’t looked back. It’s great. Ubuntu minus the crap. The average user (getting recommended mint) probably wouldn’t care about being on the latest release and would likely not even run updates all that often, so even Elementary would’ve been a good choice for them. I have since installed it on my girlfriend’s slow/old laptop and it works very smoothly there compared with windows.
Going directly from modern Windows to the Cinnamon desktop in Mint was a distinct improvement!
Stuck on version 22.04
Pop!_OS is more outdated than Debian
Probably because they’ve been building their own DE (which will replace their GNOME fork) for a while now. It’s in alpha and hopefully will roll out in the next few months. Having said that, I don’t have issues doing the things I want to do. I think it’s fine for now because 22.04 is LTS, so most app makers support it.