verassol

It’s a thing!

I think you have a point there, but the reasons why Mint does not ship a streamlined version may be simply because the maintainers don’t want to bother with a whole different context to build, document and support.

I do think there would be value in a less “batteries included” Mint. I disagree with people in this thread who claim the “whole purpose” of Mint is all the stuff it packs, because it goes far beyond the essentials. Mint develops a lot of GUIs for the user to be able to configure the system. I think just these plus the in-house Mint core apps would make for a sweet, lightweight and less bloated system that would have real appeal, but that would also mean more work for the Linux Mint team and perhaps it wouldn’t really mean much for their audience.

Your mileage may vary for performance. It really depends what OS and what hardware. In my experience saying all BSDs are slower at rendering would be too broad a statement.

If you’ve done Arch and Debian server installs, you’ll be fine installing a major BSD. Just answer prompts and you are done, particularly if you are using the default disk partitioning scheme. Consider NetBSD. It’s known for its wide hardware compatibility. X is pre-installed, just “startx”.

Consider antiX. It’s very lightweight, supports 32 bit and you’ll have access to the Debian Repos.

Recently did something similar and yeah it seems Mint, specially LMDE in my case, is a great fit for such cases. It’s on that sweet spot between being too bare and too bloated.

I understand that and it is indeed a good thing to publicly license your work rather than keep that to yourself. Still, no matter how virtuous one’s actions are, that does not mean the people who come to deposit their time and work for a project should accept everything that person does simply because they started it.

People are entitled to argue about the project they participate in, and that is even more true for open source software, where the contributions of the community eventually become much greater than any single human can accomplish. I really do not understand this mentality of “this person created it, therefore if you don’t like any of their decision suck it up or go make your own fork”, it is very narrow and a horrible way to conduct anything, really anything, much less a collaborative project.

I’d just like to remind the passing reader that creating an open source project does not entitle you to do whatever you want and tell people to “make their own thing” if they don’t like it. Open source projects are the result of a massive collaborative effort and the resulting work is the product of a whole community laboring to make it happen. Signed: someone with a major mental illness.