Trying out Linux Mint

For the past couple months I have been giving Linux Mint a try on my T480 Thinkpad. Most of the time I use Debian or Arch. Debian is what I have installed on most of my machines (laptop, server, router, probably desktop when I build one) and I like it. I also have a laptop with Arch Linux I use pretty frequently, especially on the go. Linux Mint interests me because it aims to create a user-friendly experience that appeals to wider audience and not just power users and engineers, similar to Windows and macOS.

Overview

If you are unfamiliar with Linux Mint, it is primarily an Ubuntu-based distribution, but there is also a Debian-based version (LDME or Linux Mint Debian Edition), that aims to provide a Linux desktop experience that just works out of the box and comes with all the applications a typical user might need. It ships with the Cinnamon Desktop Environment, which is also developed by the Mint team. It started off as a fork of Gnome 2 and has a very comfortable and Windows-like UI. I have used the Cinnamon desktop environment for a bit on Debian and am a fan.

I see Linux Mint often described as the Linux distro for “noobs”, but personally I dislike describing it in that way. This is not to say is bad choice for people new to Linux; quite the contrary, especially for people coming from Windows who want a similar UI. I just feel this implies that eventually you should “grow out” of Linux Mint and graduate to a more advanced distro like Arch, which in my opinion is silly. If you’re the type of user you just wants a well thought out desktop environment / operating system that includes all the apps you might need, where most things just work and you don’t have to spend time configuring or customizing, and Mint works for you, then there is no reason to it behind for something more advanced.

That being said, for most the part I think Linux Mint is a good distro for people new to Linux, BUT I did run into some weird issues that I think would trip up the typical user just coming from Windows or macOS who may not know much about Linux. I’m not sure if I was just unlucky or if these were a common issues, but I also installed this on a T480, a laptop known for generally having good Linux support.

Issues

The first issue I had was after installing the dpkg package manager was totally broken. I could not install or update any packages using dpkg or apt. Upon further investigation it appeared that a lot of files needed by dpkg were missing, as if the installation was incomplete. The solution ended up to just be installing Mint again. I’m not sure what caused this, I did nothing different on the second installation but after I reinstalled dpkg and apt were working as expected. I am not sure if this an issue others have faced installing Linux Mint. While I am pretty familiar with apt/dpkg at this point and could diagnosis the problem, I was a little disappointed still. I tried to put myself in the shoes of a casual user from Windows who doesn’t know anything about the internals of apt or Linux, and I am sure they would be very confused why their installation was just broken and maybe even go back to Windows.

Second weird thing was just that none of my function keys and some of my other keys did not work in the first boot after the second installation, not sure why but after rebooting everything began working and I haven’t had a problem since.

Also worth noting is that if you want to try Mint because you think it might have more up to date packages than Debian, because Mint is based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu is based on Debian testing, this is not actually the case. The latest version of Linux Mint is 21.3 which is based on Ubuntu 22.04, which is based on Debian 11. So your kernel and packages will actually be more out of date than the latest version of Debian. I would assume the next version of Linux Mint will be based on Ubuntu 23, but I just wanted to point this out since I was initially unaware and I thought I would have more up to date packages on Linux Mint.

The Good

To talk about some of the good though, Cinnamon is a very pleasant desktop environment to use and Linux Mint as a whole feels like a complete desktop environment + operating system like Windows and macOS. Some might find Cinnamon a little less customizable , for example you can not change the default window manager like you can in some other desktop environments.

If you need proprietary software and drivers you will be able to get them out of the box in Mint, and not have to enable extra apt repositories like in Debian.

One big plus is that the fingerprint reader is actually reliable on Linux Mint. I have tried to get it working on ThinkPads with Debian and Arch but in both cases it has been super unreliable and I could not get it to work properly.

Conclusion

Linux Mint is definitely cool, but not really compelling enough for me to switch from Debian just because I am already so familiar with it. I also like the ability to just run the same operating system on anything I want (servers, workstations, laptops, etc), and the extra customization Debian offers. Currently I am giving Debian + Cinnamon a shot on the same laptop to see how the experience compares to Linux Mint. While I prefer just plain Debian the first immediate difference is that the fingerprint for the T480 sucks on Debian meanwhile on Mint is just works.

There is also Linux Mint Debian Edition which I have not tried yet, but in the future I could if I am interested in Mint again and compare it to regular Debian.

Those are my current thoughts on Mint. I would definitely recommend checking it out if it sounds like it would be a fit for you, but maybe cautiously just because of the weird issues I faced in the beginning.