The urge to distrohop can be a distraction, but an itch that needs to be scratched now and then. I tend to always end up where I started, but when I do I feel better about it.

It makes perfect sense.

Do you know which packages and what defaults? I’ve tried to find the differences but I can’t really find what is different, except for wallpaper etc.

What is in LMDE that isn’t in plain Debian out of the box beyond branding?

It did make sense at one point. They implemented a music player with a daemon part and a client part, so from that you had the mpd server and mpc client. Someone wrote an ncurses frontend for the client, naturally called ncmpc. Iirc that person abandoned it and someone else took over with a new iteration. ncmpcpp. But it really is a bad name.

For a long time I used the music player ncmpcpp. The name makes perfect sense if you already know what it means and how it relates to other things.

I did the same thing, but with ubuntu. Now, you and I can troubleshoot issues and have patience. But someone who is sort of reluctant to begin with, it’s a hard sell if there are hurdles.

I’m actually thinking about switching from Debian to Mint. I’m thinking that if Mint is the recommended distro for people new to Linux, they will need a big community to answer questions in forums.

Well it takes like a thousand people to make Debian, so they’d need to do a lot of work.

If you only saved Mint, then Mint devs would have to do all the Debian work too?

Yes, well, such is language. What word better describes the combination of devices where you carry out typical desktop computer tasks in a desktop manner? I’m open for using a different word.

Some people include laptops in “desktop” since it’s the same paradigm of the interface, especially if you hook up an external mouse and have a regular screen and keyboard. Laptops are still widely used. Some people use the term workstation. If 90% of people used linux on laptops for browsing, writing, programming, editing media, spread sheets, etc, I’d say that was the year of Linux on the Desktop, even if they don’t have a Compaq with a CRT screen sitting on their desk.

Do you mean as opposed to using phones/tablets, or do you mean like having a tower computer and peripherals? People still use laptops and stationary computers for work, like office work and computer related hobbies and anything like it. For doomscrolling and simple games, phones are more popular though.

I hated Gnome 3 when it came out, but it got better over the years. If you want to use it as a traditional KDE-style DE, you’re going to fight it and have a bad time. If you use it as intended, and that works for you, it’s good.

I’ve had this idea a few times over the years, but I always get stuck at figuring out: what is it actually I want to happen? If I remove a local file, should it be removed from the backup too? If I edit a file, should the newer version replace the old in the backup, or be saved separately, or just the delta between the files? I could never decide what I wanted.

An hour to find a notepad? Most desktop environments come with some simple text editor. And if you’re running something minimal, there’s always nano or vim.
If some software is not found by apt search, I usually start to wonder, is it not free software? In that case I’d rather find an alternative. Some times I have to go to the softwares web site, where they have install instructions, but that’s the exception.

Is it known which distro they are using?

Sometimes I think “if debian had a flashy website and a few tweaks for user friendliness, then it would be just as attractive as linux mint or ubuntu for new users”, and other times I think “isn’t this exactly what most debian based distros are already?” Would there be a benefit if those projects worked under the debian name, something like debian workstation pure blend, or debian corporate pure blend? I don’t know.

Expanding on this, we could make it so that root must use ed(1) to edit files?

For JavaFX I ended up putting both JDK and JavaFX in my home dir and pointed vscodium to the right paths, I could get programs to compile but for some reason it would not let me open windows from inside, complaining that DISPLAY was not set or available iirc, even though I did set the env variable inside. Either way, I’m not ready for this container work-flow. Though I suspect that I could get used to better practices. Do you install git and your editor of choice separately in all dev containers? Like, how much of the tooling should be inside or on host?