Heyas!

I’m a bit late to the party but hopefully not too late. I guess most of you Minty users have read it in the LM blog and watched the one or other YT video about the Mint devs team’s decison to force updates on users’ computers. 😮

I gotta admit I don’t care nearly enough about Mint and its community and development and politics. It’s recomended by me, ffs! So I should care more about any extraordinary going-ons in the most Minty community, no? From Clem’s latest blog entries I can’t see any planned unduly provisions of overriding users’ decisions.

Of course it’s very stupid by nearly a third of Mint users to be still on Mint 17 or to never do any updates but I don’t think the devs are planning to inflict any fascist measures on the dummies. This ain’t Microsoft Windows ffs!

Let’s have a look at the two blog entries in question:

Please read the full article before weighing in, and tell me if you’ve seen any threats about forcing anything on the lazy fecks. I might be blind but I didn’t see anything.

Then 8 days later:

We have key principles at Linux Mint. One of them is that this is your computer, not ours. We also have many use cases in mind and don’t want to make Linux Mint harder to use for any of them.

We notice Clem’s slowly losing his patience with the dumbest assholes but again no threat of forcing anything on you. At least not yet. Otoh he knows some numbers he could only get thru telemetry or by asking people who know these things.

My technical know-how has already left the building at this point, and as freedom-loving housewife Linux user I’m developing doubts if Linux Mint is still a good home base for me. Of course it’ll never be as bad and anti-freedom as Microsoft but the seed of doubt has been sown.

A quick peek at the comments … oh there it is already in the first one …

Yes, the commentor is a drama queen but Clem shows a severe lack of diplomacy at the same time. Do we, as normy users, wanna deal with butthurt devs?

Please don’t get me wrong, I love and comment Linux Mint for reasons I told you often enough. And I will recommend it further until a better distro with the same appeal comes around or Clem and his gang really pull a nazi on you!

But you also noticed I never recommended Mint for advanced housewifes, but mostly as a first point of contact with the Linuxverse. It was Clem’s own free decision to base his clever creation on stupid Ubuntu code, now he mustn’t complain about stupid users. He didn’t set all his energy into his Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) but treated it like a sideshow, an unloved stepdaughter. Eventhough, by his own accounts LMDE is more stable and faster than the mainline edition. Mint could by now sit on MX’s #1 position in the DistroWatch charts, universally beloved and faaaar above all competitors. He’s fuked that up … and he can’t blame his lazy users for it.

Okay, what will I recommend for you? Oh so many options (this is Linux after all) so let’s look at a couple of them:

• You’re really new and must come to terms with Linux in the first place? Stay on Mint!
• You’re cool with Mint and Linux? Stay. There’s no shame in that. I know many very knowledegeable, no-nonsense users who are happy on Mint since, like, forever.
• You’re cool with Mint and feel ready to venture out? Come on, there’s LMDE, MX and Orca’s favourite, Sparky waiting for you in the Debian family.
• And of course, highly recommended comes ArchLinux and its various variations, like Orca’s daily rider, EndeavourOS.
• One path I wouldn’t follow at all would be other Ubuntu based distros. They all might look different and have their own clever detail solutions here and there, but not one of them comes even close to Mint’s out-of-the-box usability and completeness.

All four abovementioned options are just that, optional alternatives. They are by no means escape routes you have to follow. Linux Mint always was, is and will continue to be a damn fine Linux distro. They all struggle sometimes, and many are betraying their core principles. Not so Mint. Clem and his people are literal saints in the community!

Yes, I know on my Endeavour machines I could just ignore all updates for weeks, months and even years and nobody will ever notice or complain, and nobody will ever notice when my computer bursts into flames and killls me along the way. Of course my freedom from telemetry on Arch is even greater than on Mint. But Arch, and its forks, isn’t made for First-contact housewifes!

Your path should be clear now: Stay on Mint if you like it, at least until we have prove of Mint doing something wrong –> switch to one of the three recommended Debian distros –> fuk it all and switch to Endavour. 😉 And ffs do your updates!!!

What YouTube has to say about it: