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Comment by ewoodrich | Hacker News Reader

Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux.

I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup.

Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+.

Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.

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What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe.

If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.

Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot.

In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.

That's basically what I heard ten years ago from individuals (and even universities) for why they switched to Mint.. but even now, if you ask Perplexity for a "debian-based distro thats not ubuntu" Mint is the second option.

What other options are there?

SolydXK. There's others, like Siduction and whatnot, but Solyd is pretty solid.

I did a bunch of distro hopping in the 90's but locked onto Debian (mainly testing, now largely unstable) not long after. I'm still just not sure what compels people elsewhere. Especially now: the Debian installer was vicious if you were a newbie, but I hear it's pretty ok now.

This is largely a me problem! I don't understand what the value add is of other offerings. It's unclear what else would be good or why. Debian feels like it really has what's needed now. Things work. Hardware support is good. Especially in the systemd era, so much of what used to make distros unique is just no longer a factor; there's common means for most Linux 's operation. My gut tells me we are forking and flavoring for not much at all. Aside from learning some new commands, learning Arch has been such a recent non-event for me. It feels like we are having weird popularity contests over nothing. And that amplifies my sense of: why not just use Debian?

But I also have two and a half plus decades of Linux, and my inability to differentiate and assess from beginner's eyes is absolutely key to this all. I try to ask folks, but it's still all so unclear what real motivations, and more, what real differences there are.

The real differences are things that maintainers do. Like how... OBS I think? ...had a bunch of people come in with issues that only existed in the Debian version. Debian software has a bunch of patches, Arch software has far fewer and sticks closer to upstream, other distros will vary. Derivatives also made nonfree easier to set up, which was especially important when MP3 was still encumbered. Nowadays Debian still has the reputation of having old, outdated versions of software, which is going to be hard to shake, especially considering stability is meant to be their main draw.

In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers.

And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.

EndeavourOS works really well in this regard. It also smoothes out working with Arch without being too opinionated.

It was a GUI install, defaults to KDE Plasma, auto installs and manages the graphics drivers. Very smooth, better than Windows install in most ways.

I've always been stuck on the deb/apt system because it seems to have the best support but I probably need to move on at this point. It just doesn't work that well.

>I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well

I'm pretty sure it was due to nonfree codecs and drivers not being in other distros by default. The mainstream distros only have themselves to blame.

They were one of the few distros at the time which had a sane out-of-the-box desktop experience for non-tech people, back when Ubuntu was pushing (the original) Unity and GNOME was still the the early days of 3.x. Drivers and codecs were easy to install as well, generally speaking, without having to hit the forums or ask your tech family member for help.

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