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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Linux Mint seems to take a fairly regular beating from the Linux community at large, and I'm not sure why. It became fashionable after their ISO downloads were briefly compromised in 2016, and a popular LWN post became the script for people to reiterate every time Mint is mentioned in any capacity.[0]

I think it's a terrible shame. For all the stuff I wish it did better, it does so much right that I still overwhelmingly consider it the best distro for converting friends and family away from Windows or OSX, even if I don't use it myself.

[0]https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/

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I really like the desktop environment they have developed, Cinnamon. But I agree with this LWN thread about their broken approach to packaging. Furthermore, I tend to find people commenting in LWN really respectful even if they are critical, as it was the case here.

We are currently going through a bit of a Cambrian explosion of Linux distributions, but some do have indeed shaky technical foundations. Many distributions would fare much better if they were built as a thin layer on top of something clean and reproducible like Gentoo, Arch or, ideally, GuixSD/NixOS.

In reality, we are seeing lots of distributions, like Mint, as a layer on top of Ubuntu. Which in turn is based on Debian. Seasoned users like those posting on LWN find this frustrating as it obscures things a lot.

Personally, I have not seen good technical foundations for Linux distributions aside from things that have either a very simple imperative architecture (like Arch) or purely functional (Nix/Guix).

Cambrian explosion? The main distros (Debian/Ubuntu, RH/Centos, Arch, Mint, Gentoo, Suse, Slackware) haven't changed in like ten years or more, the only relatively recent additions being the Devuan branch of Debian, and Alpine. Or have I overlooked something?

Solus and Elementary come to mind, though I agree I'd hardly call it a Cambrian Explosion.

Elementary OS, Void Linux, Deepin, Antergos and Tails are a few notable ones off the top of my head. Void has been around for a minute but has become a lot more popular recently.

Void started in 2008

Elementary is Ubuntu trying to be OSX. Deepin and tails are Debian. A Tetris is Arch.

Void is it’s own thing and xbps was really good when I used it. But since the thing where the one guy with sole control over their resources disappeared, and then losing their domain, and not having a distinct legal entity/org behind it last I checked... I dunno about longevity here despite the project being 10 years old already.

Elementary is great, I'm using it on my spare laptop and I have only one complaint and it's the removal of the wingpanel indicator without implementing a proper replacement.

I haven't switched to it as a distro, but I've been defaulting to nix's package manager on top of whatever distro I am actually running.

Check out Calculate Linux.

Totally - Mint was my bridge from OSX to Linux. Great stuff. My impression is that the "cool kids" like to dis Mint because it's popular and easy to use. I found that its ease of use allowed me to get comfortable with the Linux ecosystem at a relaxed pace and not throw my hands up in frustration.

I've actually gone the other way: started out on Debian, went through Ubuntu, and now I'm on Mint because it's least surprising of the lot of them (while being familiar enough that I don't need to relearn the world).

It was fashionable long before that. IIRC Mint had an embarrassing start being advertised as particularly secure (great for online banking!!) despite not really offering anything good in that department.

The "security" thing is deceptive, although I don't see that any worse than what's currently on ElementaryOS's frontpage[0]:

>Safe & Secure

>We’re built on GNU/Linux, one of the most secure systems in the world. It’s the same software powering the U.S Department of Defense, the Bank of China, and more.

[0] https://elementary.io/

Mint was just weird back then. Ubuntu was so young and had so much things going on, and then came Mint sipping a bit of that energy away. Some users would end up in the Ubuntu support forum I was active at the time and mention they use Mint, and we were like "why would you do that?" In my bubble it felt like a diverging amateur approach (it felt, no idea about whether that was the case) right at the wrong moment with misleading advertisement. That was still very early days for Ubuntu, when users still had to be educated not to break their system with strange and insecure tweak bash scripts downloaded from other forums. And I'd argue it was also before one could understand why you'd want to fork Ubuntu, before there were controversial decisions - especially not with "we make the desktop easier!", Ubuntu was already doing that.

Later on Mint developed its own profile, this was way before Cinnamon.

> This creates something that we in Debian call a "FrankenDebian" which results in system updates becoming unpredictable [2].

I believe this comment shows how a condescending communication style in FLOSS hurts goodwill and clogs the virtuous cycle of enthusiasm that fuels FLOSS.

Here's something that's true:

Debian Jessie ships a LTS Firefox for which it grants an exception to its strict package security update policy. That LTS Firefox version has its own support schedule, and its own arch support policy. Both of those skew from Debian's own policy and timeline.

This means that one of the two most popular browsers on Debian doesn't provide the same ARM support that Debian claims to support on its website. It also means that Debian updates Firefox on stable (as well as Chromium on stable) whole cloth. It doesn't backport security updates because Debian does not have the resources to take on such a difficult project.

That means for every Debian box set up as a user desktop, the two most popular packages cannot follow the package security guidelines that the quoted Debian fan/dev would hold up as one of Debian's strengths.

To be clear: when Firefox LTS released an update that worked perfectly fine on all of their supported archs, that release broke Firefox completely on Debian Jessie on ARM. In other words, you can install a Debian called "stable" on an arch they call "supported" and end up upgrading yourself into a state where an official Debian package no longer works.

In short-- all Debian stable packages are potentially "FrankenDebian" for this reason, and-- worse-- for really popular and important desktop packages.

Elementary logic and social skills dictate that the person I quoted should be finding common ground with Linux Mint devs. Say package maintenance is hard. Say security backports don't really scale anymore. Say random number generators are tricky to get right. Pointing out one's own failures and citing sources for the rare successes seems like a winning strategy to me. Or at least one that doesn't threaten to zap all the energy of the people one communicates with/about.

You'd think a project like Debian with its myriad guidelines and processes would have at least one sentence in there like, "Don't treat others like they're teenagers loitering outside your fast-food restaurant," or, "Don't be self-righteous." Or more pointed, "Don't talk down to other distros."

Is there a Debian dev here who agrees with my upshot? There's apparently this whole inculcation process to become a member, so maybe one of those sentences could be part of it.

Thank you for that link. The whole discussion was in my eyes (apart from the occasional derailment into vaccines) quite a good example of how to deliver criticism without resorting to personal attacks on anybody.

The background for this seems to be that the maintainer decided to stop shipping security updates for certain packages. One of the people in the discussion put in some work to help rectify these and other packaging problems only have their changes reverted by the lead maintainer.

The project then proceeded to host their downloads with an insecure Wordpress blog. After serving malware, the response was to remove the malware and return to normal. When downloads were compromised a second time, however "briefly", the above discussion happened. In the light of that the discussion is a lot more civil than could be expected.

> I still overwhelmingly consider it the best distro for converting friends and family away from Windows or OSX

Unless the situation has improved significantly in those three years, perhaps you are not doing them a service moving them to more sparse security updates. It's 2019 now and security is not optional.

Entitled users exist, and can be a problem, but the situation here seems to be a lot more complicated than what the author wants to believe.

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