#Is mint only for beginners?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

stuck raft
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I have a bit of a dumb question 🤣

When I look up info about distros, pretty much everywhere says mint is a distro that is amazing for beginners and lists others for more advanced users or those that want more customization.

Can't you still do advanced stuff with mint though and pretty much do anything you like to it? Is there something I'm missing that limits what you can do to/with it? I figured you could pretty much remove/replace/add anything you wanted to.

(Btw I love mint so far and toying around with it, just looking into things more and am curious.)

naive arrow
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Your question comes down to this: what kind of complex tasks can you perform on LM, or even just linux in general? That is a very broad topic, so it's quite difficult to answer.

I can think of three types of advanced users:

  • the programmer
  • the system administrator
  • the cyber security dude / pentester
  • the hardcore tinkerer

Linux Mint is a very good option for the first three categories. Linux Mint has all the tools you may need for programming and system administration.
There is a huge number of things you can do with the GNU coreutils alone. GNU is standard on almost every linux distro. And just mastering the GNU coreutils will make you a very advanced user. There is of course much much more software that you can use in linux mint to accomplish complex tasks. The standard edition of LM is based on Ubuntu LTS repositories, so while its packages are kind of old, they're very extensive.

An advanced system admin might want to create users, manage permissions for their users and maybe even disable sudo for them, which in turn forces them to make sure they have access to the functionalities that they may need. You can of course do this in LM. In fact, once you become a bit more advanced, you start to see that the differences between distros are actually quite superficial. The linux desktop is quite standardised (notably thanks to the freedesktop project). The concepts from one distro applies to other distros just as well.

Some of these standards include: the gnu coreutils, the freedesktop project, xorg, wayland, .desktop entries, D-Bus, XDG basedirs, XDG variable environments, XDG mime types, POSIX, the UNIX architecture: such as the file system hierarchy /etc, /usr/, /tmp, etc.

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The problem starts with the hardcore tinkerer. The hardcore tinkerer wants to customize the desktop experience and fit it exactly to their needs. While you can customize LM quite extensively, and do some unusual stuff, the question is, should you, and why?

One of the things a tinkerer might want to do is use a tiling window manager, or maybe use another desktop environment like KDE Plasma. You can theoretically install KDE Plasma on LM and it works fine. However, it is not recommended. Why? Because LM applications are GTK applications, whereas KDE uses QT applications. So while LM applications will work on KDE plasma, they probably won't look good, and they won't match with the rest of the desktop environment. Ok, the hardcore tinkerer will think, "I don't mind, I wanted to use some other software anyways, I'll just uninstall the preinstalled Linux Mint applications". That's easy to do. But now, you've done something weird.

Linux Mint, in a nutshell, can be defined as: [Ubuntu LTS + Linux Mint software]. If you remove the linux mint software, you're left with Ubuntu LTS. So why not just use Ubuntu? You've removed all of the things that makes Linux Mint unique. So if you do not intend to use linux mint software, I argue there is no point in using Linux Mint, you'll be better served by other distros.

Packages on linux mint tend to be somewhat old, so if you want more up-to-date software, you would be better served by another distro with more recent packages, such as mainline (interim) ubuntu, fedora, or a rolling release distro such as opensuse tumbleweed, Arch, or NixOS.

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This brings us to the elephant in the room, Arch. Why is arch considered to be an advanced distro? First of all, it has a higher barrier of entry because it takes more effort to just set it up and even have it installed. Secondly, it's somewhat unusual, it has its own package manager called pacman that will be completely foreign to any apt user. It also has an unintuitive syntax: apt install reads just like english, you know what it does, whereas pacman -Syu looks like random garbage written by a 2 year old who just discovered a keyboard. Thirdly, it is rolling-release, so it's a lot more unstable, and will break more often than a point-release distro. Arch is an excellent distro for tinkerers, because it is minimal, so you can build it from the bottom up. You get only what you choose in it, because nothing is included by default. Arch has another big advantage: the existence of the AUR (arch user repository). Anybody can publish what they want to the AUR. So if anything is missing in the Arch repositories, just put it in the AUR instead. For these reasons, Arch is very popular in the ricing community. They get to build their own desktop experience and they can then publish their tools on the AUR.

Arch isn't necessarily better for all advanced users, it's good for the tinkerer. There are actually many reasons why you wouldn't want to use it as an advanced user, because maybe you want a workplace, and not a playground.

stuck raft
# naive arrow . This brings us to the elephant in the room, Arch. Why is arch considered to be...

Thank you for your detailed response. I really appreciate it a lot.

I would call myself a tinkerer more than the others I believe, but I don't think anything I want to do would be considered extensive? Then again I guess that is relative to the customizability of LM.

I personally really like the mint software (from what I understand of it so far).

I'll have to look into all the options I have available to me for customization that work with the mint software.

When you say that the packages are "old" I'm not sure if my mental scale is accurate to judge what that means. Is it a sense of things being so old that it becomes a problem and software is like years behind? Or is it just things might be a version or two behind for a bit?

naive arrow
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it varies, some packages are quite recent. Firefox on Mint I believe is the latest version, Firefox 124. Some random packages are a few years old.

stuck raft
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But overall it shouldn't really be an issue?

naive arrow
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it only becomes an issue when you start to want a more recent version of a piece of software.

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When something is too outdated, you will know.

stuck raft
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Gotcha, I appreciate it! Also, do you by chance know of any good resources to look into when it comes to learning how to customize things LM?

naive arrow
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You can customise the gtk theme, the icon theme, and the cursor theme. And then you have applets.

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So you can google best (gtk)/(icon) theme for linux and see if you find something interesting.

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You can also check out the unixporn subreddit

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although cinnamon isn't all that popular in there

stuck raft
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Oh sweet thank you! I was most interested in trying to make the windows and dock transparent and stuff. Hopefully I can find a cool theme.

magic knoll
stuck raft
stuck raft
magic knoll
naive arrow
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Themes are installed in /usr/share/themes or ~/.local/share/themes

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fonts in /usr/share/fonts and ~/.local/share/fonts

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etc