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Why Goodbye Mint 2020-10-03


A non-local friend told me they just installed mint, which made me muse on why I don't and how I choose distros.


I did use mint for years - until I couldn't anymore. I did distro-hop for the first few years in the mid nineties, but when I started supporting other people on linux I stuck to a distro until I had to move. I don't like change for change's sake and neither do my friends! Plus, I can't support more than one distro and one desktop - there are too many for me to learn.


All my peeps are used to kde and so am I. It has more knobs and dials than an A380, but I can adjust it for anyone's tastes. Besides, something dumbed down like gnome even has more prefs than my friends use. All they do is run programs and use it 'as is' unless there is something in their way. Then they don't dig in, they just call me.


We've been using kde since there was a kde to use, so switching all us old farts and their kids is not an option. When mint dropped support for kde I had to drop mint. Simple.


My original 94-95 slackware was merely a learning experience; I couldn't use it as a daily driver - far from it! I kept using my amigas. 96-98 debian was ok for a hobbyist. 99 or so redhat was very close! However, it was missing a bunch of very useful desktop programs, because it was focused on enterprise. Mandrake was basically redhat + desktop use, so I chose that and it became the first distro I could actually install for others to use on their family computer.

At some point mandrake went corporate and forced out the founder. They stopped accepting packages from Bill R and merged with a brazilian distro to become mandriva. It was a mess! I bailed and moved to PC-Linux OS, a rolling release distro founded by the above mentioned Bill.


Pclos was great for years until bill got sick. All the little mice who were left soon created an ego-filled rubbish skip and lit it on fire :-(

So I installed mint and we were all very happy there until mint dropped kde. Strictly speaking, of course you can install as many desktop environments as you like, but why not use a distro that supports your preference out of the gate?


I tried to go back to pclos. Nope. I reasoned that kubuntu should be perfect as mint was downstream of ubuntu anyhow. I was ok with it, but I live in xterms and editors half the time. The first friend I tried it out on absolutely Hated it! Oops.


Finally I went to the kde peeps themselves: they have KDE Neon. Everyone is happy with this. Its downside (only to me, not my users) is that it comes very barebones for added software, but apt-clone-state smooths things after the first install. The other thing is that it updates pretty much daily and my families soon ignore doing them. I myself can't be arsed and have this line in my bash history, which I run, probably, weekly:


apt update -y && apt list --upgradable && pkcon update -y && apt autoremove -y #up2date


Recently I was very happy to use 'do-release-upgrade' instead of having to do a full re-install of everyone. Saves heaps of time and bother and takes almost exactly 3 hours to run from end to end. There were a few problems upgrading my own box, because of all the ppa's and other 'interesting' things I do, but it was a breeze on all of my user's boxen.

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