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Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

Consider Linux Mint. It's based on Ubuntu, but doesn't use the Snap Store. (And from my experience, works like a charm and is well polished.) From the Mint description of the Snap Store:

> The Snap Store, also known as the Ubuntu Store, is a commercial centralized software store operated by Canonical.

and

> This is a store we can’t audit, which contains software nobody can patch. If we can’t fix or modify software, open-source or not, it provides the same limitations as proprietary software.

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/snap.h... https://linuxmint.com/

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Another vote for Linux Mint. Run it on my trusty X220 (main driver), a Fujitsu (mainly for media and browsing), an HP (media + browsing), and my mom's ancient Dell laptop. Works flawlessly, leaves me in control, gets out of my way, and has, for my taste, wonderfully sane and reasonable defaults.

Hats off to the fine people behind Linux Mint.

Debian is another option too, and is used heavily in industry unlike Mint. I'm disliking Ubuntu more and more but it'll be a lot of work to migrate my fleet over, all managed via Landscape (which is Ubuntu-only). While I'm currently trialing 22 LTS in a limited environment I'm not sure if this is a distro I want continue sticking with in the future.

I guess I could say the same for GNOME, but that's what my users are familiar with. The Ubuntu and GNOME setup works well - for now.

> Debian is another option too, and is used heavily in industry unlike Mint

RHEL is probably also used more in the industry than Mint, that doesn't mean you should prefer it as desktop OS. Debian is solid, no question, but its derivatives became successful for a reason.

RHEL is not a bad choice for desktop these days. The desktop is reasonably fresh, basic tasks are well-supported (office, browsing, etc.), and it has even better short-term and long-term hardware and software compatibility.

The RHEL desktop is quite a bit better with RHEL 9 than it was in its predecessors.

I just use Debian Testing... my install is 13 years old, after many dist-upgrades

> many dist-upgrades

They go so smoothly that I always think I must have forgotten something. The only things I've learned to watch out for are networking changes, like the semi-recent interface name changes, network shares (samba protocol changes), and updates on stuff relating to encryption standards (ssh/ssl.)

I had a Debian 11 upgrade fail, apparently because of a bad script in the Bakula package.

I avoided that by accident because I migrated to bareos and used bareos package repo.

But in those case I think problems are plainly that the upstream doesn't really want to support distro packaging, we had some mess because the just one version decided... to start changing the name of packages and services for no good reason.

Most of the "bad script complained on uninstall" I got from 3rd party packages, which is funny as we have people in this thread complaining its "too hard" to get the package in the distro and the exact reason for that is to have as little problems like that as possible.

Can confirm. Debian + desktop of choice, and everything generally works the way I want.

Less known is LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition). Based on Debian instead of Ubuntu; UX mostly identical otherwise.

https://linuxmint.com/rel_elsie.php

Do package updates to Linux Mint soon after they come to Ubuntu?

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