I just read an alarming number of comments on a distro-inquisitive post about how evil Canonical has been. I had no idea that Canonical wants to put ads on the desktop; I saw literally no sign of even the name anywhere at all, but reading this and seeing people say that Ubuntu shouldn’t even be an option any more has got me concerned about Canonical going Microsoft-like in telemetry.
Unfortunately, I just installed Mint Cinnamon in the weeks prior on the computers of some very non-tech-savvy seniors before reading these. If all/any of this is true, how do I move people who are already settling their personal info into their current build of Linux Mint? Someone said that LMDE is behind in various ways, including NVIDIA graphics drivers, so that’s not preferred, either. I’m interested in atomic/immutable Fedora Kinoite for myself, at least.
Oh, okay; I didn’t know how interrelated the Mint devs are with anyone at Canonical. It sounds like they’re totally independent, which is great! It was just a bit of a shock to see people here say “Stop using Ubuntu” entirely, though, since it’s such a household name in the world of Linux that it sort of upended my entire perspective for a bit.
Don’t take what Linux users say as gospel. There’s a wide variety of opinions that - yes - generally have some basis in truth, but usually it comes down to personal preference. Just because a vocal minority hates on systemd doesn’t mean you now have to switch to Devuan. FOSS is full of opinionated and passionate people, but you should always use what works for you. Don’t let others dictate how you use your computer and what code you run. Free as in freedom.
Now, having said all that, Canonical is suspect, don’t use Ubuntu. Mint is fine.
Right, what I mean is that:
I didn’t realize this distinction was so massive given how Mint is built on Ubuntu, right?
A software fork doesn’t automatically say that things are being added on top. It’s less so an add-on and more so a mod, and Ubuntu being OSS means the Mint devs could just dig in and pull out whatever nasty things people don’t like. Snaps are a good example:
sudo apt install firefoxon Ubuntu started installing the Firefox Snap somewhere before 2022 (I don’t recall exactly), but Linux Mint has never had Snap support by default, and has been installing the Debian package of Firefox (Like Ubuntu used to) for a long time, and will probably continue to do so