I tested an early version of Suse back in~1994 that came on a CD Rom on the cover of a PC magazine, but didn’t really understand it or like it particularly much, so my Linux story doesn’t really start there.
I then ignored Linux for many years, until testing out Redhat 7.3 (pre Fedora/RHEL split) in 2002. I needed a linux server to run one of my public Counter-Strike servers on, but in the end I didn’t wind up going with Red Hat.
I had started using Gentoo Linux on my desktop, back when it didn’t come with any binary installer or pre-compiled packages. To install it you had to boot strap the OS manually and compile all of the packages.
I liked how you could customize it and only install what you needed, which made it perfect for my game servers.
I continued to use Gentoo for many years until 2005-2006 some time (not sure) when I got tired of things breaking all the time with Gentoo updates, and needing to spend hours troubleshooting. So I switched to Ubuntu because it “just worked”.
While using Ubuntu I came to really like the apt package manager.
All was good, until Ubuntu decided to move away from the beautiful Gnome2-like desktop and go to the Unity interface by default in 2011. That’s when I got annoyed and looked for options.
I was looking around for options I liked, when I found Mint. It already used Apt which I liked, and the default UI was really well configured and I liked it, so I decided to switch to Linux Mint.
At about the same time in 2011 I started adding servers into the mix, and since I was already familiar with apt, my main gripe with Ubuntu had been the UI, and I didn’t use a desktop environment for my servers, Ubuntu Server edition was an easy choice for that.
For the first year or two Mint continued to use Gnome like I was used to, and I was happy. What I didn’t realize was that the final release of Gnome 2 had come in 2010, and they had been planning something big, not one but two (sortof) desktop environments of their own.
With the Mint 13 release in 2013 they no longer used Gnome. (sortof)
They had forked Gnome 2 into a project called Mate, and continued to develop it on their own. There was an option to continue using this (and there still is).
But more interestingly, they had decided to do a from scratch release of a new Desktop called Cinnamon, which essentially was a Gnome 2 work-a-like, but built with a new code base using more modern technology and features.
I tested both to see what I wanted to use going forward. Mate felt familiar like a well worn super comfortable glove. Everything was where I was used to, and it continued to just work, but Cinnamon… 90% of everything was where I expected it to be, and it was just so darn pretty. It was difficult to not to like it.
So I selected Linux Mint Cinnamon edition, and I have continued to use it ever since.
For my productivity work it is excellent, just works, and everything continues to work the way I expect it to.
I like how it is stable, built on top of Ubuntu LTS releases, but with all of the bad shit Ubuntu sticks in there removed.
If I needed something more bleeding edge (like for running games under Linux) I’d probably go for something else, but for what I do (mostly general desktop stuff, web, some VM’s etc.) Linux Mint and Cinnamon are both near perfect.
I haven’t always been a super happy camper though.
I find it frustrating that they try to include every package anyone might want to use in the standard install. I very much wish there was a “clean” version that set you up with a fully configured desktop, but no installed programs. A blank slate into which you can install what you want and only what you want. I find it frustrating that I have to go through and remove package after package of stuff I will never use after a new install. I don’t want an “ecosystem”. I want an operating system onto which I can install only the software I want to use.
Also, when it comes to Linux I’m a little bit old school. I like setting things up on the command line, and I like having all of my configuration in searchable text files under /etc instead of in some annoying GUI.
The Mint team has - over the last 14 years since I have been using the OS sought to make the experience more beginner friendly, adding more GUI configurations, and making lots of changes in that direction. I remember being very frustrated when they moved away from if up/down and I could no longer manage everything network related in my /etc/network/interfaces configuration file.
I do like that the project has rejected Ubuntu and their snaps, but I don’t like that they have been pushing Flatpak in its place. I’m a firm believer in the concept of no libraries ever being statically compiled or included, and that 100% of everything on a system should utilize that systems dependency tree, installed via that systems one package manager. I am also not a fan of bloat. Using any kind of distribution model like Snaps, Flatpak or even AppImage is very much counter to my philosophy.
I want every last package to be a .deb, and managed via the main package repository utilizing the systems main dependency tree for libraries, and never statically compile or include any library of its own, or require any library that is not in the systems main dependency tree.
So because of these frustrations and others, I have occasionally considered switching to something else, but that line of thought never goes very far, because while some of what Mint does annoys me, I honestly have no idea what I would switch to instead. Maybe I’d just go old school upstream and give Debian a try? I don’t know.
Meanwhile on the server side, I have really started getting tired of Ubuntu’s crap. I want out, but I ahve so many servers and little VM’s all aover the place that this will be a long term project. On the server side I very well might just go to Debian instead of Ubuntu.
After all, that works really well for Proxmox, so why not?
