this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Mint is great and is absolutely enough for most people using computers, still as of now. It comes with its limitations though:
All of the above can easily be irrelevant to you and Mint is just perfect for what you need. It’s important to point out limitations of that choice, but crapping on it because you don’t like it is just pointless fuss
On your last point, there's also Flatpak which is available right from the baked in software center... That's not without its issues too, but they've been an overall smooth experience for me so far
Yes, Flatpak fixed a lot of the old shenanigans we used to have when everything was either native package, or a binary to hope for the best and install libraries manually, or source code to collect everything that’s needed for building and again, hope for the best. It is however designed to provide a way to install graphical apps, but can’t handle everything native package does (like out-of-tree kernel modules, CLI utils, system services)
I believe it can do CLI, but that's not always been the case and not a lot of CLI apps adopted it as a result
But for most of what the typical user, or even a lot of what a technical user, needs, it does a good job
Do you have an recommendation for a distro? I wanted to use mint, but i probably need wayland for a multiscreen setup with different scalings.
ubuntu
Mint should have Waylant support if you don't use Cinnamon; I know Xfce has Wayland support (though I don't use it, they can pry X11 from my cold dead hands)
Neither Cinnamon, XFCE or Mate have stable Wayland support. You need GNOME or Plasma for that if you want a desktop (or wait for the new Cosmic desktop and new PopOS)
atm Mint only has experimental wayland support, i tried it an got instant graphical issues on the desktop. :(
I keep hearing people say this. But I've got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I've had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn't new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.
... Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I'd prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so ... I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don't expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!
Yeah, Flatpak installing user-space driver for itself is unfortunately not solvable until there’s open source driver that is part of the Mesa project. Every time you update the driver in your system, Flatpak must update its nvidia-utils too, because their versions must match exactly. For Mesa drivers, Flatpak also installs the drivers as Flatpak, but they’re compatible back and forth and it only updates when it ships new version.
The cleanup should be more automatic, but try
Because it always worked on X11 and Mint Cinnamon is just that. I used NVIDIA graphics on X11 in 2007 and, apart from the extra dkms driver that could break at times, it was fine, and much better anyway than ATI/AMD with proprietary fglrx driver. Rest in piss son of a bitch.
The question was what would I recommend for Wayland. Only the brand new 555 driver combined with most recent compositors (and other packages like mesa, xwayland,…) offers decent NVIDIA experience. It’s a matter of new distro releases around this fall.
Cinnamon can run Wayland in experimental mode. It's just an extra click during login. Mint also has direct support for flatpaks repositories, with flathub by default directly on the software center.
Any experience you can share on how complete and stable is that experimental session? I probably wouldn’t throw newbie on that
There's a bug where flatpaks seemingly disappear from the system the first time you run Wayland. But it resolves with a reboot. It happens too if you change back from Wayland to X11. Other than some minor glitches from very old software that hasn't seen an update in decades, it runs perfectly fine.