Linux Mint as been in development for over 15 years. Its good for them to get some press coverage and positive attention.

As far as I can tell most people switching to Linux Mint are fairly happy with the experience beside some minor Linux quarks.

  • They really need to update Mint though. Sure it is good… on old computers. Anything made the last couple of years will have issues due to an ancient kernel and mesa. We should stop calling it stable/lts and unstable, because users will always pick the one called stable, even if the ‘unstable’ one is the one that would in most cases work the best for desktop linux. Or at least we should separate the kernel and mesa away from the rest of the ‘stable’ packages, and include recent versions of that by default, to not scare away people with driver issues.

    • They always make sure to be on the latest version of a supported LTS kernel. It’s not old or outdated, it prefers a tried and tested, more stable kernel, over the newest but possibly not well supported kernel.

      That said, you can simply switch kernels, even from mintupdate’s GUI. This is what I did for my recent AMD graphics card.

      Also, they offer up-to-date drivers from the same channels Debian/Ubuntu does, and even make proprietary Nvidea drivers much easier than the Debian or Ubuntu they’re based on. So any driver issues in Mint are going to be worse in those two. Maybe you’re comparing it with Arch or Fedora, which are different experiences altogether.

      • I’m only saying this because I’ve seen a few videos about windows users switching to linux mint lately. Having to update the kernel for the computer to work is a common occurrance. IMO the newest available one should be the default one. We should strive towards giving new users the best possible first impression of linux.