I love how Mint seems to always, (so far), go for giving you more control, and sensible defaults.

Keep up the good work guys.

Agreed. It's my go-to distro at home.

If there's a Zero Day or "critical" patch then tell me. Otherwise, let me address the frequency and type of notifications. I'm an adult and take responsibility for my systems. I don't need nagware and have never had an issue with patching Mint as needed.

The free community version of Veeam lets me full backup my home systems to a NAS weekly, with incremental deltas each day. They go back years.

The beauty of Mint is its easy setup. Even if backups failed completely and I had to redo everything from a new ISO, it's only an hours work to get everything running the way I want it.

It was slower than Windows on the same hardware, so I went back to XP.

LMDE is not bad for a desktop operating system. Runs at a very useable speed on my Core2 Duo MacBook Pro. Never tried the Ubuntu edition.

As you said you went back to XP, that suggests you either tried Linux Mint a long time ago, or you are installing it on older hardware?

I have a 12 year old Dell Optiplex which runs Linux Mint 20 Mate at a respectable speed. Maybe XP would be quicker on the hardware, I don't know. But as XP no longer gets security patches where as Linux mint does, it makes a much more useful general purpose PC running LM, as it can be used online.

You didn't say which LM version you tried? I would not recommend the Cinnamon versions for XP era hardware, MATE or XFCE would be your better bets. Although even then it all depends on what CPU and RAM you have in the machine as there are lighter distros such as Puppy Linux which can run on machines with 512MB of RAM and single core CPUs.

OH SURE... NOW you tell us!!!! It's pure junk man... pure.

I was on the street one day back in the 90's and some dude comes up to me and says... "Hey... the first one's free". I'm thinking cool man, I'll try anything once. Well, 20+ years later and many failed attempts to stop using... I'm still wired the fuck out on this junk. I'm so bad off that I can't let the neighbors see me like this, so I removed all the Windows.

"It was slower than Windows on the same hardware, so I went back to XP."

I find that hard to believe. I have two identical NVMe boot drives, one with W10 and one with Mint 20.1 on a dual boot Threadripper system. I see a 11-15% faster compile times and much better video conversion times on Mint.

Strip all the unneeded crap out of W10, get rid of the telemetry and you'd have a decent OS. Until that happens, Windows isn't even a contender.

Go on! Pull my other one!

I agree that Linux UI systems are absolutely slower than XP.

However on your XP install, what software are you able to still run? Web browsers are out and most development tools depend on newer versions of the mingw runtime which require more recent NT kernels.

Windows XP is fast at idling! My recommendation is get comfortable with light Linux environments (possibly even a maximized xterm) and actually use software again.

>It was slower than Windows on the same hardware, so I went back to XP.

Why stop there? Go back to DOS and it'll fly.

For souped-up input try the Sinclair Spectrum word-per-key programming shortcuts.

The past is a foreign country.

"The upgrade notes also suggest running a utility called usrmerge, which simplifies the directory structure. This has been done since Linux 20."

This is something that's always been a bit variable across different Unix/Linus implementations. I'm a bit concerned about the logic of merging /sbin, though; IIRC the logic for this was that it contained stuff root might need in single user mode when /usr might not have been mounted.

If you follow the link in the article, it gives a concise reasoning behind the merge, and the pros/cons.

Stuff has moved around a lot over the years. I can remember when everything was in /bin, /lib and so forth with /usr being for users' home directories plus a few things like /usr/spool. Then it got more and more crowded so /u was set up for users and that started to get crowded and it was split with a /u2 before /home was used. All these changes had a rationale, sometimes clearer than others. I still don't get the rationale for putting www and mysql data in /var. Yes I know it's supposed to be for changeable stuff but you're liable to find you have to reformat it to do a reinstall because, certainly with apt based systems, there's a install-related files in there and the installer seems to expect it to be clean. I tried not reformatting as an experiment and got errors so those files live in /srv now with links back to where they're expected.

Since I started using ZFS (okay, on FreeBSD in this instance) I've taken to giving www and mysql etc their own filesystem with symbolic links as appropriate. I'm still not 100% sure that maintaining a couple of dozen filesystems is the right way forward but it gives me a certain degree of flexibility to tweak this and that and I guess I just like the idea of stuff being "contained". Though I have finally put / and /usr on the same filesystem as I couldn't think of a good reason not to, and certainly not one that was worth the inconvenience.

Yes. /home needs to sit where it won't be reformatted if you reinstall - which you might do, even for a version upgrade. Likewise if you have other a large data requirement. The other requirement which you might have that needs to avoid reformatting is locally installed S/W, /usr/local and/or /opt. But, yes, /usr on the root partition might not be a problem these days.

The other thing to remember is that in the Unix/Linux world we tend to have swap on its own partition.

Memory leaks are better handled, not only by fixing some bugs, but also by adding an option to limit the amount of memory Cinnamon uses.

Whaa? If Micros~1 pulled a fast one like that the amount of ridicule would break the internet.

I could sorta understand known memory leaks in v1.0 but this is v5.0! 'Ship now, fix later'?

Not a Cinnamon user, so how bad is the situation really?

Also, file manager with built-in grep for file contents and the sticky notes? That's XP/Vista era stuff, not something that should be the key selling points in 2021!

"That's XP/Vista era stuff"

Not sure how much of a negative that is, considering XP's search was the last usable search. Well, not unless you consider that weird search syntax they moved to, that nobody knows/cares to know, which most certainly is not GREP syntax (because then it would be usable).

The sticky notes thing is kind of legit, as long as Microsoft doesn't accidentally delete notepad (which BTW, WTF happen to EDIT... is that gone too? Just too many usable options I guess.)

> Not a Cinnamon user, so how bad is the situation really?

I have not noticed any significant memory leaks in Cinnamon on multiple personal systems.

Is that Mint 19 seems quite a bit slower than 18. Yes, I'm running 10 year out hardware. This _is_ Linux, after all.

The Desktop environments usually are. This is not limited to Mint, nor to recent releases... For my purposes, WindowMaker or LXDE are good enough. I'm running mint on a 6 year old AMD (under) powered notebook / netbook and a 11 year old Intel one. Apart from resource hogs like discord they work well enough to not warrant replacement right now.

I'm all for it. I think a lot of people move over from Windows to Mint (or Ubuntu), and then ignore updates because they assume that they will be a giant pain in the ass. It's a reasonable assumption to make too, if your only experience of using a PC is using Windows, because Windows updates really are just utterly, relentlessly terrible. Give people a little bit of a push to install updates, just to get rid of the notification, and they'll realise that updates on Mint are completely painless, quick, unobtrusive, and 99% of the time don't even require you to reboot.

True. The only update that caused me significant pain was systemd which... well, yeah.

easy and never had a surprise after a reboot for a new kernel.

that's something we got to give the linux os credit for. reboots are almost never required to run the newly updated software. remarkable achievement.