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AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Thanks for the long response. I was thinking Mint maybe, had some experience with it a few years ago. But it'd replace both my private and work stuff over, so some gaming, too (mainly through steam). Stability is key to me. My current Windows install hasn't needed anything for 4 years or so, so I'm absolutely not going for Arch. I need this stuff daily, I cannot waste time trying to troubleshoot for hours or relying on backups, etc.

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captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yeah I honestly wouldn’t use Arch or indeed any rolling release distro for any machine that’s used for revenue. Go with a stable release distro. Mint is one of the very few I even bother considering, there’s a reason it’s been as popular as it has for so long.

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stevecrox@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc.. We call these 'base' distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the 'non-free' repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

I believe Mate rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

Its all a bit...

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ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I know it has a shitty “95-ish” look to it, but distrowatch.com is quite possibly your best resource in finding out at a glance which of the distros you’re interested in are stable or rolling, and how popular they are. Go down the page hit ranking on the right, and start clicking: you will see the root build of every distro, whether it’s stable or rolling, the last release date, links to reviews, etc.

It won’t get you to your final decision, but it will get you to a shortlist. And then you can start making LiveUSB sticks to test drive your distros of choice in RAM without having to install anything. There are very few distros that require a full install to try out; if you run into one you can always use old hardware or a spare disk, etc. Mint has a LiveUSB of all its DE choices, Pop!OS has a LiveUSB, you just need the USB sticks and something like Rufus to make them with, and you’re ready to test drive.

Well worth the trouble, IMO. Good luck.

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