Should I go back to Linux Mint?

In My Humble Opinion
1

About a year ago I made the jump from Windows to Linux. Since Mint is so popular, I went with it; and since I love to be able to configure the shit out of everything, I chose the KDE version.

Of course, soon after, it was announced that Mint would be discontinuing their KDE edition starting with version 19. So around the beginning of this year, I started looking for a different distribution, and went with Maui Linux.

It’s been… ok. I’m finding that I’m getting tired of the bugginess. I can’t even think of any examples off-hand, it’s just lots of little inconsequential things that, taken together, are getting old. Whenever I’ve Googled looking into problems, it always seems to boil down to “meh, KDE is buggy.”

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about switching back to Mint. One thing I’ve realized is that while I originally chose KDE for its configurability, I pretty much did all that in the beginning, and never went back. So I’m not sure I’d miss it.

Would anyone care to champion which Mint edition they like best? Or if there is some better distribution I should check out?

2

According to their website, the KDE version of Mint 18 is supported up through 2021. So I don’t see any reason not to go back to it.

Furthermore, you can just install KDE on Mint 19, as well. So it’s just a little more work to get it running. And, well, you could try it out with KDE first to see if you like it.

Either option seems fine to me. I’d probably try then in reverse order: Mint 19 without KDE, Mint 19 with KDE, and then, Mint KDE 18.3.

3

I’ve been happy with Mint running the Cinnamon desktop. It’s a fork from GNOME, but without the recent GNOME cruft and nonsense. I was never a fan of KDE, though.

4

I may not be the hugest fan of KDE, but to me it’s better than what else is available. OpenSUSE is working very nicely for me.

ETA: I’ve used Mint before, and I like this one considerably better, but you know what they say…

5

Like Balance, my wife’s “laptop” is running Cinnamon with Mint 18 and hasn’t had any issues. Much better than the Win10 it came with. I’d say the only way to know if it’s for you is to try it out.

Laptop is in quotes because it’s a HP Stream 14 Link here. and although it came with Win10 it really doesn’t have the memory or processor power to run it. The last big update couldn’t even be installed even aftyer I completely cleaned out all the extraneous crap. I’ve had Ubuntu on my desktop for a while so it’s no biggie as far as getting it all configured, for me at least.

6

I was in the same boat. Ran Mint 18.3 w/ KDE and was disappointed when they announced there would be no KDE variant of Mint 19.

I went with Kubuntu 18.04 (KDE variant of Ubuntu) and I have to say canonical stepped up their game with 18.04. It has been a very pleasant experience. I’ve only noticed 2 bugs: The driver manager gets confused about what graphics drivers are installed (it still installs the right one but then claims they’re not installed even though they are). And second bug is the update GUI sometimes isn’t able to show the password dialog and hangs (restart the GUI and it works).

Another option is NEON which is the official KDE distro. They put their KDE repos on top of standard Ubuntu. Back in May when I switched distros NEON was still on Ubuntu 16.04 so skipped it. If NEON is up to 18.04 now I’d take a serious look at it. You’ll get all the latest KDE goodies first.

7

Well, I’ve been very satisfied with Xubuntu, which Ubuntu with the Xfce desktop, for several years now, and I’m quite happy with it. My only complaint with the current distribution (18.04) is that I can’t seem to get Wine to work with it. I suspect that’s Wine’s fault more than Xubuntu’s. Anyway, if you’re looking for a distro that installs quickly and painlessly, and can pretty much all the needs of a typical user, Xubuntu’s worth a try. Just sayin’.

8

ALL the ones that have been mentioned so far are going to work just fine for anybody, in the sense of “does this thing work”. I had never heard of NEON, but if KDE is promoting it then there’s not going to be anything significantly terrible about it.

If you have hardware that has been a compatibility problem in the past, read the help forums of distros you’re considering to see if others have had a hard time or not. If you need software that lots of people may never have heard of, use whatever all the other enthusiasts are using.

But most of all, with ANY operating system of any type, there are going to be faults, and each Linux distro has its own set of faults. Choose by the set of faults you’re willing to live with.

9

I wasn’t a huge fan of Mint w/ Cinnamon, even with a top of the line rig it felt a bit sluggish. I think elementaryOS is my favorite Linux. It’s an Ubuntu kernel with a sort of OSX-y frontend but without all the weird esoteric proprietary stuff that makes OSX really annoying to use.

10

All right, I’ve tried to keep track of a few of the things that bug (heh) me since I wrote the OP.

I installed a mouse cursor theme because I thought the default, and other stock choices, were ugly. It doesn’t always work. For example, sometimes the “wait” cursor is the default, sometimes it’s the cursor I installed.

Somewhat frequently - maybe a few times a day - the mouse is suddenly acting as if I grabbed something. I’m suddenly dragging an icon, like Dolphin or Waterfox, as if I’d clicked and held the left mouse button. I hadn’t. It’s always one of the icons I have pinned to my taskbar. I have to right click and select cancel to get rid of it.

Borders on windows go wonky. I’ll have something open, and suddenly it’s got this ugly border that’s maybe 10 pixels thick. This doesn’t happen when I open the window; it’s after it’s been open for a while, up on the screen (not minimized). Sometimes the border is black, sometimes it’s an “imprint” of whatever was behind the window - like, if I move it, a thick “border” of whatever was behind the window moves along with it. The only way to cure this is to close the window.

There is more, I just can’t think of it right now. As I said earlier, these are things that are inconsequential, that I might not even give any thought to, taken by themselves. But the sum of it all is starting to irritate me.

When I have searched online for solutions to some of these problems, I search for KDE, not for my particular distro, and I find that these are bugs other people have, across different distros, even going back a few years. This is what I meant when I said it always seems to boil down to “meh, KDE is buggy.” Sometimes those are the exact words used.

I’m not discounting that maybe my distro just sucks. But I’m under the impression that the problems I’ve experienced are problems with KDE in general. So I’m thinking maybe it’s time to give something else a try.

I suppose I could try NEON or Kubuntu… I remember reading up on them when I was shopping for a KDE distro, but I can’t remember why I chose Maui over those.

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.

11

I don’t experience any of those, but it may be a hardware thing where some machines show it and some don’t, or whatever else.

12

Update:

I went back and forth for a bit trying to decide between Kubuntu and Neon. I decided that, for the long run, having bleeding-edge KDE was less important than an up-to-date system, so I settled on Kubuntu. That was about a month ago. I then decided to wait for Cosmic Cuttlefish before making the switch.

All I can say is… holy crap. I had no idea just how sad my previous distro, Maui Linux, was. Kubuntu is screamin’. Everything about it is so much smoother and faster, and everything just works! I wish I would’ve made the switch a lot sooner.

13

I can’t say anything bad or anything good about Maui Linux, but I CAN say that there certainly are benefits to using a distribution that is well known and widely used.