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Comment by lbruder | Hacker News Reader

I'd go for Mint. The only system that never disappointed me and always just worked. Second place would go to Debian "stable", old (== problems with Wifi) but rock solid.

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I loved mint until I switched to Mint 18, now I have weird problems with the wifi stopping working randomly, the webcam and the audio. Besides the new desktop theme Mint-Y dont work well with some software I use like Repetier and Sli3r

I'm considering changing to Ubuntu :(

I love cinnamon so that's a big plus on Mint but I didn't love being stuck on an old version of Ubuntu and all the associated core packages/drivers. I had some hardware issues that were fixed by using a more recent version (now on Fedora).

I'm by no means a seasoned Linux veteran though so just explaining that YMMV.

Doesn't Mint stay in-sync with the latest Ubuntu versions? It's literally Ubuntu with Cinnamon/MATE and different branding. Everything version-wise should be identical with Ubuntu, since it uses the same packages.

Think it's pegged at least to the LTS ones so when I was on Rosa it was still 14.04 when 15.11(?)/16.xx were already out

That is correct.

If you want that, there is an official mate version of ubuntu now which works extremely well. Not sure about cinnamon. Definitely much less update-related headaches than mint.

Another vote for Ubuntu MATE! (with redmond panel theme) Has just enough polish without trying to redesign a work flow that I'm perfectly happy with. Glad it's an official Ubuntu dist now.

I have moved fully to having my panel on the left side which used to be one of the things that kept me off Unity though. Resisted for a long time, but it turns out that this is the correct placement, ah well.

Mint used to stick to the latest Ubuntu till Linux mint 16. Starting from version 17 they only track the long term support versions of Ubuntu. Mint 17 - 17.3 were based on Ubuntu 14.04. Mint 18-18.3 will be based on Ubuntu 16.04.

They do have another version that is based on Debian directly, but I have never used it so can't say much about its upgrade paths.

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