Distro Monday 52: Newbie Day Mint vs Ubuntu

DM 52.1 – Straight Ubuntu or Mint?

What’s the difference anyway? Isn’t Mint based on Ubuntu? Actually, there are quite a few noticeable differences. Yes, Mint is derived from Ubuntu, just as Ubuntu is derived from Debian. There is also a Debian edition of Mint (which, personally, I would point you to). Personal preferences aside, what are the big differences?
· Mint
o Has only 3 Desktop environments (all are GNOME forks from yesteryear)
§ Cinnamon (in-house development, flagship option)
· Easy to use, instantly familiar for windoesn’t users, fairly lightweight
§ Xfce for the very resource-conscious
· Extra lean, bare-bones, may remind you of windoesn’t 9x by default
§ Mate which is also relatively light and quick, based on an older version of GNOME than Cinnamon is
o Has Timeshift to allow you to undo dumb choices on the computer easily
o Update manager is very easy to use
o Flatpak rather than Snap support by default
o Community based
· Ubuntu
o Supported by Canonical, LTD.
o This is “Linux” to most people who are not familiar with Linux
o By default, ships a heavily tweaked version of GNOME, with modded dash-to-dock and a few other things as well
§ Also has numerous other desktops, from LxQt to Xfce, Budgie, KDE, Cinnamon, Unity, and a host of other options which are community supported rather than being official iterations from Canonical
o Snaps, because no one else wants them
o Easy to use, I suppose, but not as easy as Mint
o Vanilla Ubuntu is disorienting because of the tweaked GNOME they ship, but if you want a more windoesn’t feel, as I said earlier, they have several other possible flavors with different desktop environments available, which is far more extensive than Mint.
I do not put any stock in Ubuntu, personally because I do not appreciate the deals they’ve made with the Devil in order to build their business to where it is today. On one hand, I suppose it has helped to raise the profile of Linux, and Ubuntu has become a more commonly used platform for servers and other enterprise-level applications. However, they compromised deeply and are almost treating their branch of the Linux family tree like a proprietary OS. I respect the Mint team for stripping out much of that garbage, and having the foresight to start a Debian edition of Mint. Is Mint perfect? No. Due to the bases on which they build, they are slow on the uptake for updates and upgrades, but that makes them more stable and less prone to break than my personal preferences, currently.

https://linuxiac.com/linux-mint-vs-ubuntu/#main

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DM 52.2 – New ISO for OpenMandriva rolling edition out now

I talked about OpenMandriva a couple of months ago, but it is the descendant of a legendary Linux distro, Mandrake Linux. I talked about it a then because they just rolled out the first version of their rolling release edition, codenamed “Rome”. Well, this one is roughly on par with Arch in terms of being bleeding edge, so let’s find out what changes they’ve made here:

· Linux 62 kernel series
· Latest From
o KDE
o Mesa graphics stack,
o Wayland
o XOrg Server
o LLVM/Clang
o GNU Binutils
o GCC
o GNU C Library
o systemd 253
· LibreOffice 7.5.1 office suite 
· Firefox 111 
· Chromium 110
· Krita 5.1.5
· digiKam 7.9
· GIMP 2.10.34 
· Calligra Suite 3.2.1
· SMPlayer 22.7.0
· VLC 3.0.18 video players
· VirtualBox 7.0.6
· GNOME 43.3
· LxQt 1.2

https://9to5linux.com/openmandriva-lx-23-03-released-with-linux-6-2-mesa-23-and-kde-plasma-5-27

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DM 52.3 – blendOS: One Distro to Rule Them All?

I talked about this when it first came out, and even daily drove it on my Surface (not a representative sample) for about a month. The concept is cool. It is based on Arch, which gives you the rolling feel along with the excitement of being on the bleeding edge of development for the OS, but also gives you access to containerized ways to use APT and DNF package managers if you really want or need to. This, in concept, as I said, is a sweet setup, almost ideal, really. However, I do not think that it is ready for mass adoption yet, as on my system (again, not any kind of representative sample for computers in general, as it has been a thorn in my backside since I bought it about 2 years ago), it became unstable and sluggish far more quickly than it should have in my opinion. Perhaps I didn’t use it as intended, as I used the basic, standard pacman to install packages most of the time. I didn’t take advantage of the semi-immutability offered by the containerized version of pacman, though I did play with DNF and APT just a little. Which package managers are in play, here?
· apt
· dnf
· yum
· pacman
· yay
· Blend

It currently uses a distrobox implementation, and this is admittedly in the early stages of development, so my experience will not necessarily be representative in your case, either. I installed the KDE version (big shock, I know), and used it as normal for about a month, when it started to break pretty badly on me and I couldn’t get what I needed to do done easily because of instability. It also ships with the Flathub store app as an app which can fully install flatpaks, rather than simply downloading their flatref files for something else to install. I mentioned distrobox, but it will not be around in this distro for much longer, as it will be replaced with podman very soon. They will also soon be shipping a GUI config tool for the containers, rather than relying on CLI to get the job done. It is a cool option, and perhaps when it is more stable, I will try it again, and do it more properly this time. Is it the One? Not at this time, but I will keep an eye on it as it develops. I like the idea of an immutable Arch install, though that kinda messes with my head, to be honest.

https://news.itsfoss.com/blendos/

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