People doing the 30 days linux Challenge are having several problems because of Mint's old packages and technology. Why people still recommend it when there is Fedora and Opensuse with KDE and Gnome?

Magnolia_@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 266 points –
351

You are viewing a single comment

Cinnamons compositor doesn't turn off for games (it's supposed to but has been bugged for years) which costs you fps.

Playing Alan Wake 2 at launch was only possible with the latest Mesa drivers compiled from the AUR due to some graphics features that it required.

It doesn't just cost FPS. It straight up breaks some games that run fine on other distros.

Does it still have that feature that kills and restarts cinnamon when memory leaks start getting to be too much? I honestly had to laugh at that when that was introduced.

No clue. Haven't used it in years. I was done when I went looking for a fix for the compositor thing and found a years-old open bug report.

wait is THAT why my mint edge iso randomly fucking sends me back to login screen??

I assume compiling Mesa is rather difficult to set up? For reference I've not bothered to try and compile Lutris or Wine.

With AUR it's as easy as installing any other package, actually.

You just install the git version from AUR.

Installing Arch appears to be more complex than Mint's Click Yes x4 GUI. Should I expect almost everything to just work after install?

Not even close, if you actually install barebones arch, then barebones arch is exactly that, barebones. You wont even have a DE.

Endeavour is what you want. It's just straight up arch, but with all the stuff you'd want to set up anyway done for you.

And if you want an "app-store" style app to browse packages with, and not fiddle with the command line to manage packages, install pamac. It can be expanded with AUR and flatpak support.

If I knew what parts I most wanted then maybe I could do bare arch but I guess Endeaver is the way to ho.

Well, Endeavour is just arch. If you want, you can achieve the same install that has only the things you need, by removing things instead of just adding.

IMO it starts off closer to the config most people want, so it's less work to take it the rest of the way.

What should I use to install a program on Endeavour? Yay? Aur?

Pacman is the actual system package manager.

Yay is an AUR helper, a program that automates all the steps of installing something from the AUR.

The AUR or Arch User Repository is a way for individuals in the community to easily distribute software, or create software installers, without going though the work of getting something into the official repos.

Here's the first thing I do on a new system, yay -S pamac. This will install pamac, a GUI for browsing, installing and uninstalling packages. (Both normal repos and AUR)

Generally, packages from the AUR get compiled by your system and then installed. This can be really slow, hence there is often a "-bin" version of packages that installs a pre-compiled binary.

You can also find "-git" versions of packages, these install the very latest version directly from the development repo.

Looks like mid-to-high-level difficulty if you really want to build from source, due to multiple complex interdependent configuration flags that have to match your hardware, and the need to check a kernel option or two. (Based on the Gentoo ebuild for mesa 24.1.2).