this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2025
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Mint is pretty... Uhh... Mint.
Im not sure why eveyone keeps blindly recommending mint, yeah it works great if you only do document editing and web browsing but it kinda undersells Linux.
It's very easy to jump into (coming from Windows), and it comes with a lot of game compatibility.
The only reason I switched to SteamOS was because Yad was very outdated on Mint and every attempt I made failed. The dependency list to attempt to upgrade it was also pretty substantial.
Wait, is SteamOS officially a thing you can install on otger devices than the Steamdeck?
Although it's not considered officially supported, you can absolutely install it on your PC. It's been working great for me. The only hangup was disabling read-only mode for editing the OS and changing the default boot up behavior (start in desktop, not big screen mode). Other than those two things, it's pretty much been plug and play.
Ohhh, interesting!
Yeah I also dont get that either, what exactly makes it so easy to switch over? If anything having a UI so close to Windows just makes it frustrating when not everything is identical.
Honest question: I've been using mint relatively pain-free for a little while now. What am I missing out on?
There are a few key things I would argue you're missing out on:
For people dipping their toes into Linux, mint still has everyone beat. No other distro has such a polished onboarding experience, which already experienced Linux users tend to overlook.
All of those things are critical to not burning a new user, and so far nothing has approached Mint's mastery of onboarding, IMHO.
You're looking at it from the perspective of 'is this the distro that has things I want' which is, not to be rude, completely useless to the person actually migrating from windows.
All those things are nice for people who care about them. For people who just want their computer to work with minimal hassle, Mint is a great option.
Exactly.
Quite frankly if Wayland isnt good enough now it never will be, also Gnome and KDE both objectively have more GUI apps than Cinnamon.
I still have daily issues with Wayland on Bazzite, so yikes.
Also, that's my point- Cinnamon has one way to do it, and the doco all reflects that. GNOME/KDE each have 50, and the documentation tells you to use one app for this, another app for that, a third app for the other- it's all kind of a mess for a new user that just wants their OS to stop being a barrier for whatever they want to do.
I was a long time mint user. And I loved it for a couple of years.
But cinnamon just doesn't really do it for me anymore. I've been using fedora kde for a bit and while it's alright, I had issues with really shitty frame rates in like every game with my nvidia card. I think kubuntu may be my new seeet spot soon.
Although opensuse does seem very interesting too. I should give that a go.
I can personally confirm OpenSuse is absolutely amazing, you get the advantage of bleeding edge with a reasonable amount of stability. Granted the themeing is a bit opinionated (if you love green you'll love it) but you can always change that. Also lots of amazing GUI and TUI tools, they look kinda outdated but function very well.
Here I go installing distros again. Sigh.
One thing I've always disliked about linux as a consumer are the countless versions and the new flavors that seem to come out every few years. I don't want to rediscover the wheel constantly or find my version has been abandoned by developers.
i've used mint for a few years, my first daily driver distro, mostly gaming, i've played through hl:alyx, for example, yes, in vr, on linux, without much linux knowledge
now im on pop, i did a bunch of things to mint i didn't understand, and it kind of broke, well, the gaming performance degraded, so i tried pop after, and i like it slightly better, so i've been using it since, 3-4 years i think.
just to say, hard disagree on the "only docs and browsings" comment
I would never recommend it, but I won’t begrudge anyone Mint. As much as I loathe Cinnamon, it’s still a better choice than Ubuntu. Newcomers could do much worse.
I still recommend Bazzite first and Fedora second. They always “just work” and even Mint has hardware support problems sometimes, especially on newer hardware.
And happy cake day!