Linux Mint Notes

Linux Mint offers very much a Windows-adjacent experience. For people comfortable with Windows, they’ll feel right at home on Linux Mint. It features a Start-menu style design like Windows. The distro feels pretty lightweight and snappy. Other than that, there isn’t much to say about it. It works fairly well, although I will say things started crashing more frequently and it seemed to get more unstable the more I messed with the settings and experimented with it — maybe not the fault of Linux Mint.

There were some nitpicks that were specific to my laptop too. Namely, because I have two screens on my laptop it kept getting confused and defaulting virtually placing my second screen to the right instead of below it, where it actually is. This seemed to reset every time the laptop was suspended or I plugged it into a docking station. I wrote a small script to reset the display position, but I still ran into issues. Little things like that started to make the user experience just feel a little rough around the edges. The WMI keys, which control some specific things about my laptop (fan speed, toggle second screen, etc.) worked intermittently after installing some thing from github that was supposed to make them work.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with Mint, and I probably would have kept on using it longer, but I decided I really wanted to switch to a distribution that was native Gnome on Wayland instead of X11, which is what eventually drew me to Fedora Workstation 43. My reasons for that are

  1. I like the interface of GNOME better than Cinnamon. I’m personally comfortable with both Mac and Windows interfaces, but at the end of the day I’d prefer more a Mac-feeling UI. I also think the overview/search functionality in Gnome is amazing and eliminates the need for a launcher, but that is another rant.
  2. I feel that Wayland, although more restrictive in some ways, is more “smooth” than x11, if that makes any sense. It feels that Wayland is the future in a lot of ways, in fact with Workstation 43, Fedora shipped with Wayland only. The one downside to Wayland is I can’t globally remap my keys, which sucks because I like to remap my keys.