Mint was a reaction to Gnome 3, the unique workflow upset a lot of people and the people behind Mint decided to build Cinnamon desktop (its Gnome 3 made to look/work like Gnome 2). They needed a distribution to build/test their work and so based a distribution off of Ubuntu and called it Mint.

As a bit of explanation, there are only a few projects which attempt to build an entire linux distribution from scratch. This involves finding code from thousands of sources, work out packaging, etc… We call these ‘base’ distributions, Debian is the base distribution for Ubuntu, Ubuntu is the base distribution for Mint.

Ubuntu tends to be slightly ahead of Debian in the software versions it uses and automatically enables the ‘non-free’ repositories. Ubuntu tends to push some Canonical specific things like Snaps (which everyone hates)

I believe Mint rolls the Canonical specific things out of Ubuntu and you get the latest version of Cinnamon.

Its all a bit…

If its for work I would suggest picking a “stable” distribution like Debian, Kubuntu or OpenSuse.

A lot of people recommend Arch or Fedora but the focus of those is getting the very latest releases, which increases your chance of stuff breaking.

A lot of people will suggest niche distributions, those can be great for specific needs but generally you will always find Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL support for commercial apps.

I would also suggest looking at the KDE Desktop, many distributions default to Gnome but it is unique in how it works, KDE (or XFCE) will provide a desktop similar to Windows 11.

Lastly I would suggest looking at Crossover Linux by Codeweavers.

Linux has something called WINE, its an attempt to implement the Windows 95 - 11 API’s so windows applications can run on linux.

WINE is how the Steam Deck/Linux is able to play Windows games. Valve embedded it into Steam and called it “Proton”.

WINE is primarily developed by Codeweavers and they provide the Crossover application that makes setting up and running a Windows application really easy.

People will mention Lutris but that has a far higher learning curve.

There is an application database so you can see in advance if your applications would work: https://appdb.winehq.org/

Engineering is tradeoffs.

A command shell is focused on file operations and starting/stopping applications. So it makes it easy to do those things.

You can use scripting languages (e.g. Node.js/Python) to do everything bash does but they are for general purpose computing and so what and how you perform a task becomes more complicated.

This is why its important to know multiple languages, since each one will make specific tasks easier and a community forms around them as a result.

If I want to mess with the file system/configuration I will use Bash, if I want to build a website I will use Typescript, if I want to train a machine learning model I will use Python, if I am data engineering I will use Java, etc .

You’ve just moved the packaging problem from distributions to app developers.

The reason you have issues is historically app developers weren’t interested in packaging their application so distributions would figure it out.

If app developers want to package deb, rpm, etc… packages it would also solve the problem.

Nice out of date dependencies with those lovely security vulnerabilities!

Just to add.

Look at any hobby in your life and break out the money spent vs the enjoyment you got out of it.

For example the Cinema costs me £10 and a film is 2 hours long, meaning my fun time costs £5 per hour.

A £100 console would have to provide me 20 hours entertainment for it to be comparable to going to the cinema.

These days any PS4 game will have 10-40 hours content, but buying them costs money. Popping on CEX website the most expensive PS4 games are £12. Assuning you only get 10 hours of fun from a game…

The question you should ask yourself is are there 3 games on the PS4 you are interested in playing?

Its a really immature and niave response from Kev. Information is power, he’s chosen to operate without knowledge for internet points.

Meta think there is potential to enlarge their market and make money, Kev’s response won’t impact their business making decisions.

Kev should have gone to the meeting to understand what Meta are planning. That would help him figure out how to deal with Meta entering the space.

I don’t expect he could shape their approach but knowing they want to do X, Y or Z might make certain features/fixes a priority so it doesn’t impact everyone else