Sadly both versions of Linux Mint, with multiple different versions of proton including custom, run significantly laggier on my favorite games. Some physical devices aren't as well supported. Some games just don't work at all. Very unfortunate but I think I'm gonna switch back to windows. Anyone else have similar experience?
It's ironic because I'm stopping linux mint because games/some hardware don't support Linux but they don't support linux because not as much people use Linux.
I see the back and forth in many Linux forums and spent some time trying to break down what I think the issues are, I am curious if anyone else have opinions on the matter as it's starting to feel like groundhog day seeing the same posts multiple times a day, anyway here's my reply to the original claim that Linux users/support are toxic:
It's not hostile. It's just that a large portion of Linux users are autistic and are very direct with their answers, no have a nice day, how's the weather or any of the fluff you normals feel is needed. Autistic people also over share to save back and forth answers and they are generalised so others can learn from the answers given, not just the one user who asked the question, which makes you feel weirded out and uneasy.
I think what you'll find is there is 4 types of responses.
Direct response, someone who has had the same problem and sorts it out for you.
incorrect response, the information you've given is brief or explained in a way that can't be clearly understood by others, or you might be the first user to find the bug and need to contact the maintainer not some random thread on Reddit.
You haven't searched at all for the answer and it was just asked and answered 3 posts earlier. This is seen as laziness and triggers a lot of negativity as it's frustrating for both sides as the new user usually had been spoon fed by the Microsoft/Mac train, which is based in America which declare the customer is always right. But the fact in the rest of the world, the customer is almost always wrong and we don't tolerate entitlement from anybody. It's just a fact many people find hard to accept once they get used to people pandering to them.
The 100% truth is we don't care if you use Linux or not. We only care about the progression of Linux development and if you can't figure out a search engine, chances are we won't miss having you using Linux.
4. You've found a troll, it's not just Linux users, you get people all over the internet who enjoy messing with people, sometimes it's fun and games, but others can be more serious and enjoy causing others distress. But a majority of the time we have troll slayers who come in with facts and call out the offenders with logic and admins of the forums ban and delete the crap. You need to learn to not care what you see on the internet. Because it's mostly anonymous, the trolls think it's consequence free. Sorry you have suffered.
So my advice. Always search for answers before asking it, chances are it's been answered before. Plus you'll find out the correct name and terminology to ask your questions better if there is no answer for your problems.
If ANY of what I've said offends you. Linux isn't for you, it just isn't. You need to be able to give time to attempt to solve your own problems, that's the cost of using a free OS, nobody is paid to help you like other OS's. So it costs you time.
We enjoy the challenge of troubleshooting problems, it teaches us even more about how things work. Which is why we reply to Reddit for free. It is nice to be helpful to others and sometimes we all have a bad day, it comes through in our responses. Don't take it personally, it's about them, not you.
Ubuntu was once the gateway to open-source freedom, but today Canonical has literally turned into Microsoft. When most of us switched to Linux, we were seeking control, transparency, and freedom from proprietary lock-ins. However, Canonical's recent direction with Ubuntu mirrors the exact corporate behavior many of us fled from in the Windows ecosystem.
Here is why Ubuntu no longer feels like true Linux:
Canonical is literally Microsoft: From forcing Snap down users' throats with proprietary backends to pushing forced auto-updates, default telemetry tracking, and terminal ads (motd) for Ubuntu Pro—Canonical is copying the exact Microsoft playbook. They prioritize WSL and corporate Azure deals over the desktop user experience, treating Ubuntu as a Windows CLI subsystem rather than an independent Linux OS.
The Linux Mint Paradox: While Canonical goes full corporate, distros like Linux Mint feel like an attempt to merge the user-friendly interface of Windows with the pure, rolling-release philosophy of Arch Linux. They try to keep the familiar, polished UI while fighting back against Canonical's forced Snap ecosystem—trying to balance ultimate user control with out-of-the-box convenience.
Loss of Core Philosophy: Linux is defined by user sovereignty and open standards. By building walled gardens, mandating closed backends, and taking away update controls, Canonical is creating a mini-monopoly within the ecosystem.
If a distro takes away user control and forces proprietary infrastructure, is it still embodying the spirit of Linux? Or is it just Windows built on a Linux kernel?
This is the desktop layout I wish was default in most distros. A mix of mac OS, gnome and pop-os cosmic
Only possible via cinnamon DE. I tried 10+ distro and some distro was close e.g manjaro gnome and pop-os
Task bar at top, Workspace Switch top Left, Date/Time Top Middle, System Tray Top Right. User icon Top Right
Dock at bottom middle with start menu and most used applications. Corner bar bottom right
Nemo file manager, Rhythmbox music player, qbittorent (not transmission), vivaldi web browser (not firefox), vlc media player are the best default apps in linux for each job. I can't find other apps that do better
I left windows about one and a half years ago when I started to take Linux command line classes as part of my electrical engineering degree. I had tried to make the switch 2 years prior to that (Ubuntu) but failed to setup my system properly and gave up. Since I've become quite the hardware nerd and have multiple homemade desktops, Servers and laptops all of witch all run Linux mint cinnamon (except the servers, they are on Ubuntu server)
My review of Linux Mint:
Mint is a good all purpose beginner distro and an amazing office/browsing distro. (For all the YouTube machines out there)
And cinnamon is still the most user friendly and easy to use desktop environment I have ever tried.
But it lately I feel like Mint has been a limiting factor in my Linux journey and I will move on. I will miss the easy updates without restarts, but I think the outdated packages have become too much of a hassle. I will probably switch to one of the "not quite arch but close enough" distros like open-suse or fedora.
I mostly use my PC for gaming, "sharing games" and youtube watching. And all of those have been a lackluster experience on mint.
Apps like Lutris need fast pace updates to keep up with the newest games, mint package are way out of date and the flatpacks looks way out of place.
I don't blame mint for this one but Firefox needs constant restarting (every 3-5h) even with just a few tabs open.
My review of Cineamon:
Even my beloved cinnamon is providing to be too outdated for me. I love all the new possibilities Wayland offers but the Wayland cinnamon experience is just not ready yet and will not be for the foreseeable future.
I ran into weird issues with extensions, gtile for example. It will work for 1 hour before I need to manually go into extensions and remove then add it back in order for it to work. and that's ignoring the general lack of extensions to begin with + all of them are really out of date.
I ever tried the fedora cinnamon version but no one must have ever used it, it's a mess.
Issues I ran into:
I ran into issues I was not able to fix with the help of the community:
1- https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=17465 and https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=341263 (not mine but I only found discussions like this one where the issue is described but never a fix) it's not a keyboard issue and not a DE issue the issue affects the virtual keyboard as well and all languages and I had to restart the system every-time. (now that I think of it maybe I should make a bug report)
2- DE constantly crashing into fallback mode. I don't blame the distro and fallback mode is quite cool actually, but still annoying.
Issues I was able to fix:
1- I use "free Download Manager" and it's Linux mint package is broken so every-time I update the package would break itself. It's an easy fix, but still annoying.
My conclusion on the experience:
I will recommend Mint to people who don't like to mess with computers, mostly the kind of people that aren't familiar enough with PC's to tell the difference between cinnamon and the windows DE. Because that's what mint is good at browsing, printing, scanning, document editing etc.
If someone asks me for a distro recommendation however, I will recommend Ubuntu like in the olden days. Not because I like it, but because people who are willing to try another OS deserve the best the open source community has to offer. I'm acutely aware that Gnome isn't for everyone but first impressions count and quite frankly Cinnamon looks outdated and gnome is different it has an identity and a modern look and feel. I don't like snap packages but that's for the person I'm helping to figure out for themselves.
As for myself I will keep running Mint on my laptop because it is a browsing/office machine I use for occasional gaming (native Linux games only). exactly what Mint is good at.
as for my desktop I will probably switch one of the over to tumbleweed with KDE or even gnome.
Fin:
Thanks you for reading this far I don't know if this is a valuable piece of text but I hope to spark Somme interesting discussions down below. I mostly wrote this because I see Mint recommended everywhere and it was recommended to me and worked great for a while. but maybe it shouldn't be everyone's first distro.
While I do agree it is exciting that one of the largest youtuber talks about this and advices people to use Linux, can we please cool it with the posts?
At the moment of writing, the video has about 4 million views, and I think I'm over+estimating by a great deal if I say that 10% will try Linux because of the video. Of those, only a small fraction will continue to use Linux after the first bump-in with the terminal when they don't have a shiny UI to click buttons on (yes, even on Linux Mint where terminal use is minimised). This means a net increase of Linux users of >10k people. That's very nice and all, but it's hardly noticeable in a graph of numbers of users per day. It certainly won't make it "the year of Linux" or "the PewDiePie effect" as I've seen being thrown around.
I hate to denigrate a fellow Swede, but I think we're VASTLY over-estimating his influence here. I do believe, however, that more videos of this type, from "mainstream" -tubers will shift the thinking about Linux and get a more stable upwards trend over time though, but individually they're only marginal in the grand scope of things.
Just wanted to share with the help of an LLM, and some debugging of the generated code, I was able to create a simple Cinnamon Applet which connects to an online GenAI API to create an image from a prompt and save it in the photos folder. It's not a really useful feature, but it's just for fun.
I'll start my post saying that I loved my time on Linux (on my main computer), I had so much fun tinkering and playing with the terminal, but alas... My life and workload relies way too much on microsoft products that just can't be matched by Linux to this day and I'll sadly be migrating back to Windows. It was fun while it lasted, maybe I'll try it again on a secondary computer like a laptop or something else in the future. It was fun.
I have been using Mint for a while. When I learnt that there will design improvements I got happy. Linux Mint's theming consistency was one of the key things I and many people liked Mint. It is still funcitional but the looks are inconsitent. The right click menu feels out of place. The greyish color is still present in many Mint apps. Rounded corners are not properly imlpemented - like when you right click on the system tay icon that is running in background the menu/options is grey and squarish. I hope it gets better for Cinnamon as a whole and I still respect the team for the effort to still keep Mint functional.
To be clear: I do not want to discuss the merits of tariffs or of a certain political leader. That is not the point of this post.
Regardless of how a USian may feel about tariffs, the fact is, it will become more expensive to purchase new electronics made in South Korea and/or Taiwan, which is where key manufacturers are centered and/or source materials.
The point of these questions is not to answer everything all at once, or have a right vs. wrong. It's to share ideas so that we, lovers of Minty goodness, can spread the word appropriately and successfully and help people reduce eWaste by extending the life of their computers and chromebooks.
Given that many of us here have extended the useful working lives of older hardware with LM, what are some strategies/suggestions you have for how to spread the word? (Have you come up with an elevator speech?)
How would you explain how to screen hardware for comparability/get Linux Mint installed? (As an aside, Balena Etcher is the the easiest software I've ever used to make a bootable linux flash drive -- which is the only thing I will use them for given their data sharing -- and if they are going to harvest data? Let them have lots of "made a Linux Mint boot disk" stats.)
How would you manage expectations? The absence of some software/hardware support is a non-starter, and some Linux equivalent programs are not as robust at their Windows/Apple counterparts.
Where would you send a noob for tech support that isn't somebody dismissively saying RTFM? (Which, this subreddit is pretty good about not doing that, so yay, us!) What YouTube channels would you suggest?
I only use LM for my Linux computers, and have since 2013. (I also use Windows about equally).
I'm sold on LM as the Linux distro of choice.
Can't say the same about the Admin and Mods over at the LM Forum. Locked threads and banning accounts because one sneezes with wrong tissue is not the mature way to "admin" a bulletin board.
I don't know if the LM forum Mods are the same as the developers of LM. Then again, all the real brain power is on the Ubuntu/Debian end. And the Ubunto community forum seems to be more trafficked.
