There's a "Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)" session for that. And also, installing a new DE.

why would you recommend an experimental DE to a newbie? it breaks in 2 weeks and all you hear is "linux from shit". not even directly, but through a friend of a friend, because they won't ask for your help again.

when I was looking at the viability of installing mint for common people, one of my criteria was to have kde plasma, because it's user friendly and evolves relatively quickly, in a good way. a common theme I was reading that yeah it is possible to install it manually, but it's less stable. I think I cannot afford the burden of taking upon the yech support for people and fixing an unsupported DE when it breaks, because it is complex software, with many moving parts that if the distro does not focus on always packaging correctly, if they don't test it but only rely on users to report issues, then that won't work reliably. If I want kde, I need a distro that takes it seriously and allows it as a default DE.

No not true, dont pretend you know me lol XD

Mint was my first distro, fine but random crashes.

Then I dealt with it on some occasions, as everyone installs it. Nobody needs to advertize that small extremely overhyped distro, as everyone always uses it!

Timeshift has nothing to do with hard upgrades. It might not break, but it will not upgrade as it has complex issues with package conflicts and whatever that need to be figured out.

Try Fedora Atomic desktops please. This discussion is senseless. They are very easy to use and extremely stable.

That's why PPAs exist. Besides, the average user is NOT interested in bleeding-edge software.

What? PPAs are unofficial repos meant for developers to test their software. They shouldnt be added to your system and will introduce breakages that will then give you a pain when upgrading.

And this is not about "bleeding edge" but security fixes.

Ubuntu is not recommended anymore. Also, there's LMDE for that purpose.

What? Linux mint is based on Ubuntu because that is supposed to be the great distro. If tutorials for Ubuntu suddenly dont work, that is bad.

LMDE was reported to work way less well than regular Mint. But for sure that is a good path onwards.

Updating your computer is YOUR choice, it's YOUR computer.

First you tell me that I am tech savvy and thus have issues with mint. Then you assume everyone should evaluate if updates are needed or not? People are not distro maintainers. Distros apply updates, and users should not need to press buttons and wait all the time.

On Atomic desktops you reboot to apply an update and you are not forced to reboot. Updates are done in the background with no user interaction, as it is pointless. If you rely on users manually pressing a button, then your automatic updates are bad.

Updates should not be done

• on low battery
• maybe just on AC
• on metered connections (like phone hotspots)
• on high CPU load
• maybe at certain day times

If you detect that and include it in the system (like uBlue does for theirs!) users dont need to press buttons. There is no decision, you update or you are behind on security fixes.

Introducing decisions for things that are not in question is bad UX and leads to people randomly ignoring upgrades. Updates should not annoy you or break the system, or the system itself is not well made.

Man, please just try them, you dont know what I am talking about.

The App Store (or whatever it is called) includes BOTH OFFICIAL deb packages AND VERIFIED Flatpaks.

You dont know how Flatpak verification works or dont care to understand it.

All Ubuntu/Mint packages are "unofficial" as they are packaged by maintainers and not the devs themselves.

Only exception are external repos for things like Firefox.

Normal flathub is the same, while flatpaks are more up to date and containerized. It is a silly and harmful decision to prefer unverified .deb packages over unverified flatpaks.

Deb packages have access over EVERYTHING. Literally and deb package could be a virus, as they dont have any isolation apart from some weak Apparmor profiles.

There's XFCE and MATE editions to solve that. Even if those DEs may not be enough, you can install a new one.

LOL you call XFCE and Mate modern desktops ? XDDDD

also, we are talking about beginner friendly distros. Installing Plasma on Mint will result in an ugly frankenstein, that might also suffer from being "stable" with unfixed bugs.

There's a "Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)" session for that.

Yes. GNOME and KDE, as well as many window managers, support Wayland perfectly since years. On Mint with Wayland last time I tried it, even keyboard input and scaling were broken.

A small downstream distro using a nieche nonstandard desktop environment is not the beginner friendly distro people should use. The best experience will come with GNOME or KDE as they get the most work done.

And additionally, as I clearly separated, a package based distro is not suited or needed for most workflows.

Try an image based Distro first, then argue about them.

Half a year ago or so

To be fair I had Linux Mint installed recently and audio broke on the first update. Never could fix it. I had to reinstall. I'm a total noob on Linux but my experience doesn't seem that unusual based on the huge number of troubleshooting steps I tried from users experiencing similar issues.