Edit: My bad guys,Image wasn’t visible, I uploaded the image as URL thumbnail rather than post.
Mint veteran here. You aren’t safe. Nvidia will come for all of us.
Meme aside, they have been pretty stable lately. But 2023-2024 had some pretty iffy drivers for my laptop GPU.
Kernel is on the older side, but safe. You don’t really need to have the latest kernel all the time though. All those 1% performance improvements can wait.
I mean I’m on rolling releaase and tbh it was a stable experience, like I was expecting it to break but I have been having a blast, Linux is an awesome experience.
Use Debian and install the NVIDIA driver yourself, doesn’t Mint include non-free software by default? If this is your average Joe, they probably don’t care. In my honest opinion, it should be a mandatory task for every new GNU/Linux user to learn about Free Software, the GNU Project, and libre software. I am not a fan of Mint at all.
Actually mint ship free software by default! Although there’s nothing preventing you from downloading more (no please add non free software checkbox)
Nvidia drivers are actually opt-in (it’s actually nouveau by default), so for the average person that should be fine… Personally I need the proprietary drivers for blender so I 'm stuck with it.
Although I don’t see how going to debian would help with anything…
when I first switched to linux I used mint for all of two weeks, was an awful experience and almost made me go back to windows until someone told me to try cachyos instead.
I haven’t used Mint since but I might install it on my VM to give it another crack since likely it was personal user error that made it awful for me. Just had constant issues with my nvidia gpu.
Honestly, more than a year ago nVidia drivers were absolutely nightmarish. It used to be such a frequent issue that I stopped updates for nVidia drivers until I could take a full system backup. Btrfs has been a game changer, allowing backups to automatically happen on updates and allowing you to boot into a previous state. And given the level of Linux growth through Steam/Valve pushing it nVidia seems to have been trying harder. Only one update issue this year so far and it was a simple roll back, make a change, apply updates again.
I mean… Linux is about freedom to choose. If thrill is what you seek, you can write a custom post-hook script that has one out of six chance of removing all your important system files.
I had a friend tell me, a linux veteran, that I should “try linux mint, it’s a great experience out of the box”, meanwhile I’m running Nobara + arch linux in a dual boot configuration, and have debian running on a headless server.
The older you get, the less you want the headache, but man, I’m not old yet, I still like tinkering here and there. I hate when things break, but with experience you learn how to tinker safely, and still can have fun without staring at black screens due to some driver misconfiguration.
Went Mint > Nobara > Mint. I totally understand your take. It was fun tinkering a bit on mint, but I wanted more by going to Nobara.
I had to reinstall it 3 times. There have been some breakage due to KDE updates and Nvidia drivers, and when you go back from a long day at work and you just want to do some chill gaming, coming back to a non functional setup is a pain, even more when you just wanted to update and it wasn’t your tinkering.
So yeah, not for me. I do still think both have their own place in the world
Where da meme?
/dev/null
found it funny and couldn’t recall any other non-serious sub, so I shared it here.
You didn’t share anything tho’
fixed
