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Comment by kijinbear | Hacker News Reader

This guy has a point. Ubuntu's constant meddling with the Desktop and adoption of immature software as default is why I left it for Linux Mint. LM 10 has "just worked" for me so far, and LM Debian Edition also look spromising. By contrast, Ubuntu breaks a few important things every time they release a new version.

I don't plan to consider returning until Ubuntu Desktop Edition "stabilizes" a bit. But that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon, what with the impending switch to Unity, and the rumored switch to Wayland, and ever tighter integration with Canonical's proprietary offerings...

GNU/Linux is already rock solid at the base system level, but some distros just ruin the Desktop experience.

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They have an interesting problem on their hands. Their current user base is nerds who have a bunch of power user use cases, but they want to attract non-nerds. How do they do the latter while keeping the former happy? It's like republicans trying to sound reasonable while also making their base happy. It's like tight rope walking on a strand of floss.

I have used Ubuntu Desktop (Lucid & Maverick) everyday for years now and certainly don't have any stability issues, I don't see how changing to Mint (based heavily on Ubuntu) would affect stability.

I also have to ask what is this immature software as default you talk about?

It's usually not the base system that causes issues. Most instabilities I've come across have to do with distro-specific UI customizations and proprietary add-ons such as Flash.

For example, Ubuntu Natty Desktop Edition will come with Unity as the default UI, which is a relatively immature platform that Canonical is trying to push hard. Linux Mint will probably stick with GNOME and KDE though.

Of course it's always possible to switch to something that is more stable, but that's not exactly "It works out of the box."

Ubuntu is unstable precisely because it's a close fork from Debian unstable ;)

If you want an environment with long term stability, you might want to move to Debian Stable, which exists for this very purpose, and these days is typically as easy to install as Ubuntu.

Linux Mint is awesome, though I use the KDE version instead of GNOME, it's a very polished distro.

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