For people who don’t care about being at the cutting edge and just want something that works reliably (which is most users), that’s fine. I’ve used Mint for years and while it’s not the fanciest distro I rarely run into problems and almost everything just works.
I fully agree that Mint has the right UX for mass adoption, but I also agree with the OP that this comes at the cost of being specced for hardware made ten years ago.
I think it’s a useful reference point. If you are on a semi-modern display that does VRR and HDR with a newer Nvidia card, want to do some gaming on it, maybe have a secondary display with a different resolution that requires different scaling… you know, that type of thing, then what you need is at least the level of compatibility and functionality you get on Mint, but with official support out of the box. And you need it like four or five years ago.
Mint existing shows why Linux isn’t a mainstream daily driver.
Hah. I guess. I mean, I can tell you that on my last run of “is Linux viable now” I stepped through Mint, was frustrated about how it interacted with my hardware and did end up on a Manjaro KDE install that did pick up most of my newer hardware better.
It still was very far from perfect and definitely way more finicky, so I still would say not a mainstream daily driver (and I’m back to defaulting to Windows anyway). I genuinely don’t care how Linux gets there, but it needs to get there to be viable.
For people who don’t care about being at the cutting edge and just want something that works reliably (which is most users), that’s fine. I’ve used Mint for years and while it’s not the fanciest distro I rarely run into problems and almost everything just works.
Hard disagree on that being “most people”.
I fully agree that Mint has the right UX for mass adoption, but I also agree with the OP that this comes at the cost of being specced for hardware made ten years ago.
I think it’s a useful reference point. If you are on a semi-modern display that does VRR and HDR with a newer Nvidia card, want to do some gaming on it, maybe have a secondary display with a different resolution that requires different scaling… you know, that type of thing, then what you need is at least the level of compatibility and functionality you get on Mint, but with official support out of the box. And you need it like four or five years ago.
Mint existing shows why Linux isn’t a mainstream daily driver.
Ok Wayland shill.
Hah. I guess. I mean, I can tell you that on my last run of “is Linux viable now” I stepped through Mint, was frustrated about how it interacted with my hardware and did end up on a Manjaro KDE install that did pick up most of my newer hardware better.
It still was very far from perfect and definitely way more finicky, so I still would say not a mainstream daily driver (and I’m back to defaulting to Windows anyway). I genuinely don’t care how Linux gets there, but it needs to get there to be viable.