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A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.

I hope they don’t feel pressured to change just because there’s more users. They’ve reached their success by being deliberate and streamlined, it’s what makes Mint great. Long live boring and reliable.

If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy

That’s a terrible recommendation for new users…

Seconding Artyom, Arch-based distros are virtually never a good idea for newbies. I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.

But I’d also wager very few new Linux users would have any idea of what Wayland or X11 even are, let alone why they would pick one over the other. For them, Mint is still ideal.

Agree. There are dozens if not hundreds of Linux distros, I’d they want different, try another. Just keep it simple, secure, and windows can fuck off. I have bazzite on a gaming laptop for games with the kiddo, Zorin on my main laptop and desktop.

And before I get shit for having so many devices, I save devices the clients were going to trash because it was “old” and not reliable enough for professional business environments. Which I do agree a bit. Most of my devices are 8th or 10th gen Intel, I replaced the nvme with my own and canibilize memory, I’m not rolling in several thousand dollar systems. And I give away SO many to neighbors, full systems, laptop, monitors, etc, ready to go. Wasting tech us against my religion.

Honestly i wouldn’t hold it against them if they take some time off and relax, they have done so much over the years without asking for anything in return they are finally getting some appreciation they deserve and of course donations help a lot but donations can’t help with burnout.

You have seriously misread Lemmy as a whole if you think having three devices is going to make people angry. What an odd thing to get defensive about.

Very true about the Wayland vs X11 knowledge. I didn’t learn about that until quite a while after startint to use Mint. Even know I don’t really umderstand what it does (something rendering and windows?), it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in day to day use anyways.

There’s many more, those are the main. I don’t like taking about all the shit I’ve accumulated over the years.

Do I understand it right that when it comes down to it, this is a different implementation of the same thing (rendering)? I assume that this is mostly relevant for software engineers and that the end user only notices some differences in speed, if at all?

I mean, if you are recycling devices that others would have thrown away, I’d say you are not wasteful at all.

There is an experimental Wayland for Mint… on the login screen there is an icon in the upper right. Clicking that allows you to select the experimental Wayland version or X11… there’s one other but I forget what it is at the moment. So it is possible to run Mint and Wayland, just not recommended.

The more Ubuntu enshittifies, the more work Mint has to do to work against it. That’s why my personal recommendation is against Mint. Ubuntu just isn’t a good foundation to build on, IMO.

If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.

If you want Wayland and stability, use Bazzite.

I’d much sooner suggest Fedora if Wayland is needed.

Bazzite is Fedora Silverblue with a bunch of quality of life additions.

For awhile there, PPAs were the reason to stick with Ubuntu as a base, because the .deb package format was (and still is) very popular, and PPAs allowed fairly easy distribution of software without dealing with the standard repository. Flatpak has kind of solved that problem by now, and so like you say defuckulating Ubuntu is just getting to be a bigger and bigger chore.

Which is why LMDE exists.

Which is why LMDE exists.

Too bad LMDE is based on Sid. Some stuff can break on occasion.

I few months ago I helped an older lady at a repair café to replace her Win10 with LMDE (because that’s what she wanted). Installed just fine but didn’t boot after reboot. Installed LMDE 2 or 3 additional times, to make sure I didn’t overlook something. Same result.

Then installed Fedora and it just worked.

I have bazzite on a gaming laptop for games with the kiddo, Zorin on my main laptop and desktop.

Btw, if you want Bazzite but without the gaming stuff for work computers, there are also Aurora and Bluefin. The latter is more conservative, based on CentOS and using Gnome. They are all Universal Blue projects, so you’re not dealing with vastly different systems.

If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland.

That’s different than outright suggesting Arch.

Short version of the difference, as I’ve been given the knowledge:

X11/X Windowing System is an older system, and still basically works on the CRT paradigm with HBLANK and VBLANK being sacrosanct and real-time. It’s doing transforms from digital to analog and back to digital in today’s world.

Wayland is built for more modern setups, where unoptimized code and excessive memory capacity are the norm, so it renders the whole frame to the GPU at a time and pushes it out, so there’s no concept of scanlines. It’s all just pixels.

If all they want a computer for is Steam, they’re going to get a better experience on Wayland. Cinnamon is built on X.

Basically yes, as far as I know. But some software only works with one or the other (WayDroid only works with Wayland, Cinnamon DE and Hypnotix use X) due to available features.

Oh, right. I never see the login screen, so I keep forgetting it.

But SteamOS is Arch?

No, it’s an immutable OS based on Arch. Also not rolling release.

So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?

You were also suggesting regular Arch and that’s irresponsible.

I like Zorin, I was going to try cachy next. Bazzite I use specifically for games.

But SteamOS is Arch? So why not suggest CachyOS, which is in a similar space?

I learned recently that cinnamon was a fork of gnome from when gnome went shitty. I personally jumped to xfce without knowing about cinnamon until recently.

And I switched from xubuntu to mint when snap took over, because mint explicitly said they wouldn’t use snap.

It seems like mint is a refuge for the people who run away from shitty decisions made by other Linux projects. Keep up the good work.

Cinnamon is not a “fork” of GNOME. MATE is a fork of GNOME as MATE started from GNOME source code.

Cinnamon was a reaction to GNOME 3. But Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

In the days of GTK 3, Cinnamon shipped quite a few of the default GNOME apps. Later, when GTK4/ libadwaita appeared, Cinnamon stayed with GTK3 and formed the XApps project which did fork many GNOME apps to stay on GTK3. XApps was meant to be a cross-desktop project serving all the GTK desktop environments.

These days, Cinnamon is trying to fork libadwaita to make GTK4 apps look better on their desktop.

In general, Cinnamon is fairly conservative. They are the last major desktop environment to default to X11 for example (though you will disagree with that view if you count XFCE as one of the major DEs).

I have never had a problem with LMDE. My mother has been using it for about a year now. I used to have to come solve Windows problems for her a couple times a year but she had never asked me for any help with LMDE.

I have well over a dozen Linux machines running in my home. More than half of them would be considered garbage by most people. Clearly, I disagree.

I hope they do not take their foot too far off the gas before completely their Wayland transition.

Once KDE, GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, and Cinnamon are all Wayland, 90% of all Linux desktops will be Wayland. With XFCE, it could be 95%.

I am liking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen. I am looking forward to putting it behind us and we are so close.

At the same time, I have a lot of respect for conservative desktops like Cinnamon and XFCE that, while acknowledging that Wayland is the future, are taking great pains to minimize disruption for their current users and even to allow users to keep X11 as a fully supported platform. I am all for that.

I do not expect Cinnamon to maintain X11 as an option very long after they switch to Wayland as the default. First while many distros ship Cinnamon, it is really a product of the Mint project and Mint is very much a Linux Desktop. Second, Mint does not have the resources as they point out in this article. Of course, I could be wrong.

XFCE will probably keep X11 around much longer. First, XFCE is very popular in non-Linux settings. But mostly I say this because xfwm4 itself takes very little dev effort and it is the only XFCE component really tied to x11. Xorg is essentially in features freeze. As long as XLibre does not break everything, xfwm4 will just continue to work. The other components of XFCE work fine in both environments already. The goal of xfwl4 (the XFCE Wayland compositor) is to mirror the xfwm4 experience. And xfwl4 is deferring to other components to define behaviour (eg. xfsession and xfdesktop). So, it should be easy to keep the overall XFCE experience in sync on both display servers without much wasted effort.

It’s unlikely that an already properly installed bootloader just breaks. The base is Sid, Debian Unstable.

Just because breakage doesn’t happen all the time, there is still a higher than average chance. Sid is Debian’s beta test branch, not a rolling release distribution. It just wasn’t the right choice for the lady at the repair cafe.

Some of mine too lmao.

You do not need to understand anything about X11 vs Wayland. Use whatever your distro of choice defaults to.

Wayland is the future. Every Linux desktop user not fighting hard to avoid it will be using Wayland in 2 years. The majority are already.

Wayland and X11 are both protocols. They are a way for graphical applications to talk to a “display server” (your graphical desktop).

X11 was invented in the 80’s. Until recently, there was essentially only one surviving implementation on Linux—something called Xorg. While Xorg was the display server, you had to add something called a “window manager” to control what your desktop would look like and how windows would behave.

While Wayland essentially does the same thing as X11, it was built to quite a different set of design criteria. If you have not been part of the history, it is not worth knowing about. Security is one of the big improvements.

Perhaps the only detail worth mentioning is that the display server and window manager functions have been combined in Wayland into something called a “compositor”. So while everybody was using Xorg back in the X11 days, there are many competing compositor implementations in Wayland. They differ not just in how they manage windows but also in how them implement many other details like how to take screenshots, manage multiple monitors, or handle scaling. There are a set of standards that define this behaviour. It is a bit like the web where you have different web browsers and web servers but the same web applications work on all of turn (which perhaps some small differences).

The two systems both “do the same thing” and are quite different at the same time. If you use one, switching to the other may seem painful as things that worked may not anymore and even things that still work may be done differently or require quite different knowledge. Not many people switch from Wayland to X11 but anybody that used Linux 5 years ago has had to switch from X11 to Wayland (or feel pressured to). Not all of them are happy about it. Some of them rely on workflows that Wayland does not yet or many never support. These people consider the switch to Wayland a really big deal which is why you hear about it so much.

But, if you already use Wayland, ignore it. Everybody will stop talking about it soon as almost everybody has switched. The majority that have not switched are using popular desktops like Cinnamon or XFCE that have also not switched. They have not switched as they want to make the transition very seem-less for their users. Which also means you do not have to think about it. One day they will move you and hopefully you will not notice. Or, even better, it will seem like a bunch of new features in a new release.

hey accumulating stuff that you still find use for is better than throwing them away. And you said you give away stuff to other people for their use.. which probably saves even more devices from a landfill.

Cinnamon was written from scratch to reflect a more traditional desktop metaphor. It was not created from existing GNOME code.

Many parts of Cinnamon were forked from Gnome 3 and Gnome 2 (Mate). apps and the compositor are forks of Gnome 3’s apps and compositor.

• XPlayer was forked from Gnome Videos (Totem)
• Xviewer was forked from Eye of Gnome
• Xreader was forked from Atril from MATE (itself a fork of Envince from Gnome 2)
• Xed is a fork of Pluma (itself a fork of Gedit 2)
• Cinnamon’s compositor, Muffin, was forked from Gnome 3’s Mutter compositor

Many other parts of Cinnamon are made from scratch, but it is not wrong the say it’s also a Gnome 3 fork in many ways.

LMDE is not based on Sid, it’s based on Debian Stable (currently it’s based on Trixie), you sure you had the right ISO?

Only Bluefin LTS is based on CentOS. Standard Bluefin is based on Fedora.

Clem, the lead dev of the Cinnamon project, wrote in the last blog post, that they only need to migrate the cinnamon screensaver from X11 to Wayland and that this is the last piece for full Wayland support. See https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4991

Seems like the upcoming Mint release will fully support Cinnamon with Wayland, even if X11 might still be the default.

LMDE is not based on Sid, it’s based on Debian Stable

Oh wow, you’re right. Did that change at some point and I just didn’t pay attention? My bad!

You sure you had the right ISO?

I had the correct ISO and the experience with the lady’s notebook was as described. Maybe the notebook needed newer kernel code?

Standard Bluefin is based on Fedora.

I don’t get Universal Blue’s desire to give slightly different flavors and entirely new name. With the non-LTS option, what is the difference between Bazzite Gnome and Bluefin? Preinstalled code editors instead of Steam and Lutris?

It’s always been based on stable, AFAIK.

Maybe the notebook needed newer kernel code?

If it was able to boot the Live USB to install it, I figure that means the kernel is new enough to actually run the laptop properly. I can only guess something in the installer itself was messing up somehow? Or perhaps it wasn’t making an entry in the boot table? That’s an odd one.

You’re hitting a problem I have with Ublue as well. I wanted to experiment with immutable distros last year, but Ublue provided extremely little information on how their different flavors actually differed under the hood. I ended up having to search through their forums for like an hour to find snippets of how their different when some people asked, but it was never comprehensive.

From what I recall, Bazzite had a few kernel optimizations for gaming, and received updates at a faster frequency than Bluefin, with one of the devs saying that Bazzite would be more likely to experience regressions due to it being more bleeding edge.

Looking at Bazzite’s front page now, they actually seem to be doing a better job of mentioning what’s unique about it than when I last tried it. But Bluefin and Aurora are still ambiguous.

I started suggesting Bazzite to Linux first timers, simply because there is more stuff to find, should people hit trouble. Sure, they might not be that interested in gaming stuff but at least they can enter that name into YouTube and get video tutorials.

Agree!
I’ve managed to convert three friends this last year. Two to Mint, one to Bazzite because he mostly games.

Immutable distro is perfect for him, just working out of the box.

Next «level» for him would probably be Fedora KDE Plasma, for sure not Arch.

IMO using a distribution within Distrobox is an alright choice to keep options open for stuff from outside Flatpak. I keep my SteamOS immutable.

Not a bad idea :)

At some point, though, you have to come to terms with the power usage.

One or two modern machines could do everything a dozen shitty old ones do (even if you have to emulates some of them as VMs), and with a lot less power usage than running a dozen shitty old computers.

I am looking forward to essentially all Linux desktop users being on Wayland so we can stop acting like it is not already the norm or even pretending that it is not going to happen.

Yeah … about that…

As long as X11 still works and does what I want it to, I’ll keep using it.

(And hopefully, by the time I’m dragged to a new system, kicking and screaming the whole way, Wayland will be fully mature and complete and it will be a painless transition.)

What would you like to know about them? It shouldn’t take an hour(!) to find something.

I don’t generally recommend Silverblue or Bazzite to newbies, as there’s generally much less documentation and help if they run into problems, and if they ever need an app that isn’t flatpak’ed, it’d be very daunting and offputting for them to then figure out Distrobox or Toolbox to install it. Fine for more experienced folk, but at least until they become the default, I personally think it best to stick with regular Fedora or Mint, depending on the hardware requirements.

YouTube is full of Bazzite tutorials. Whatever is out there at documentation is also quite recent. When people ask ChatGPT about how to do something on Ubuntu or Mint, the answers are generated from 15 years old forum posts. Often not only unusable but also damaging. My expectationnis that for immutable distributions LLM answers in 15 years will not break the OS. At worst it’ll recommend some tool deleted from Flathub and it’ll merely not work instead of breaking everything.