Cinnamon Pursuing Visual Improvements, Linux Mint Continues Working On Aptkit

[discocat]

And the Linux Mint developers, suffering from the NIH syndrome strike again with little modifications / improvements to continue with the excuse why they are not supporting in any way the modern and very popular KDE Plasma and Gnome DEs!

And their fanboys will come to support their decision with excuses, like "They are a small team" ignoring the fact that they waste a lot of time developing this old Gnome fork, so many other forks and on top of those, also using two distro bases instead of one as they just can't decide to use Debian and call it a day.

Nice to see that at least on the DE side, more and more people are realizing which DEs offers the best amount of features, compatibility with programs and games and most bug fixes:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics/#DesktopEnvironment-top

I think Linux market share would've been higher if weren't for these traitor distros like Linux Mint and Ubuntu + its flavors making from Linux just a barely better experience than Windows and in some cases, a even worse experience, like for example the missing 10-bit colors and HDR support compared to Windows.

Traitors ? What ? Open source is all about choice. Of course you're gonna have tons of DEs and WMs, that's a strength, people can then try different options and see what they like.

That's not what keeps people away, cause that is : proprietary apps only running on windows (or mac os) that companies expect you to use.

[anda_skoa]

I think Linux market share would've been higher if weren't for these traitor distros like Linux Mint and Ubuntu + its flavors

I am not a great fan of Canonical and some of their antics but their work has ultimately always contributed to an increase in Linux market share.
Especially on desktop.

[Malsabku]

And the Linux Mint developers, suffering from the NIH syndrome strike again with little modifications / improvements to continue with the excuse why they are not supporting in any way the modern and very popular KDE Plasma and Gnome DEs!

And their fanboys will come to support their decision with excuses, like "They are a small team" ignoring the fact that they waste a lot of time developing this old Gnome fork, so many other forks and on top of those, also using two distro bases instead of one as they just can't decide to use Debian and call it a day.

I agree that Cinnamon/Mint should follow more on the GNOME path, instead of inventing everything itself, if they don't have the manpower.

Cinnamon/Mint should just use libadwaita. libadwaita now has colouring support, so a major issue is gone. Theming is a nice thing, but because there is no manpower in the Cinnamon/Mint team they have no choice to ignore GTK4/libadwaita. If Cinnamon will stay on the same path, most of their apps will be very outdated soon.

I think Linux market share would've been higher if weren't for these traitor distros like Linux Mint and Ubuntu + its flavors making from Linux just a barely better experience than Windows and in some cases, a even worse experience, like for example the missing 10-bit colors and HDR support compared to Windows.

I do not think that Linux Mint and Ubuntu are traitor distributions. They did a great job to bring new users to Linux.

Actually there are not much alternatives to Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Fedora and Debian misses a lot of codecs and drivers by default, so a new user will have much work to make these distributions usable. OpenSUSE installs to much trash applications by default. Arch Linux is also not for new users. So the alternatives to Ubuntu and Linux Mint are very small. CentOS Stream 10 and openSUSE Aeon will be maybe an interesting choice.

[SpyroRyder]

I agree that Cinnamon/Mint should follow more on the GNOME path, instead of inventing everything itself, if they don't have the manpower.

Cinnamon/Mint should just use libadwaita. libadwaita now has colouring support, so a major issue is gone. Theming is a nice thing, but because there is no manpower in the Cinnamon/Mint team they have no choice to ignore GTK4/libadwaita. If Cinnamon will stay on the same path, most of their apps will be very outdated soon.

I like gnome and libadwaita but this would be a bad move. Gnome famously hate changing things for some invested parties, look at the unneeded split with PopOS for wanting more theming support. Cinnamon just using libadwaita when one of their oroginal and major bugbears was the dropping of the menu bar would go down awfully with everyone involved. They could howrver join with XFCE and Mate to create a joint equivalent to libadwaita that could provide those more traditional desktop widgets they want while being far more modern.

I do not think that Linux Mint and Ubuntu are traitor distributions. They did a great job to bring new users to Linux.

Actually there are not much alternatives to Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Fedora and Debian misses a lot of codecs and drivers by default, so a new user have much work to make these distributions usable. OpenSUSE installs to mush trash applications by default. Arch Linux is also not for new users. So the alternatives to Ubuntu and Linux Mint are very small. CentOS Stream 10 and openSUSE Aeon will be maybe an interesting choice.

On this you are almost 100% correct. Except now that Flatpak is a thing the codecs problem is honestly mostly solved, the flatpak runtimes arent beholden to the extreme fedora packaging requirements so you can just play most media. Fedora is almost at the point id recommend it to new users

[Malsabku]

They could howrver join with XFCE and Mate to create a joint equivalent to libadwaita that could provide those more traditional desktop widgets they want while being far more modern.

I agree with most of your words, but the problem with XFCE / Mate / Cinnamon / Budgie GTK3 / Unity GTK3 is, that the development activity there is nearly zero. They just maintain their big desktops, but don't expect much new things.

[discocat]

Arch Linux is also not for new users

It depends how much "new" you consider when mentioning "new users".

If folks tried linux a few times, they could use archinstall and go btrfs + snapshots (snappy or btrfs-assistant) + grub with the btrfs support, and then arch can be quite sturdy.

Or they could go Garuda, which does all of that + preinstalling yay + automated snapshots before package installation/upgrade with a graphical installer and pamac.

In both cases, those snapshots are bootable from grub if you break things. All of that makes arch more approachable I'd say.

[uid313]

Sounds good with the Captain and AptKit, I look forward to them.

But I wish they would improve the Synaptic package manager which I feel is underappreciated.

[You-]

And the Linux Mint developers, suffering from the NIH syndrome strike again with little modifications / improvements to continue with the excuse why they are not supporting in any way the modern and very popular KDE Plasma and Gnome DEs!

I am not a fan of Linux Mint, but as a Ubuntu derivative, why would they also support other desktops when you can just use Ubuntu or another of its other derivatives?

[mobadboy]

Well, to be fair, anything is better than Gnome.

haha hehe hating on an open source, long running project, i would just love to see your cool github!! please link it, you must contribute a lot. hehe

[Domojestic]

This theme looks like libadwaita. So why don't they use libadwaita?

Libadwaita, beyond its visual style choices, is still very opinionated in how its developed for and doesn't play well with theming, as the netire GNOME 40 ecosystem stopped trying to adhere to FreeDesktop standards.

So I figure Cinnamon is trying to be like GNOME but with better interoperability.

Not terrible, since a lot of people do like GNOME's polish, but it would've been nice to see it be at least a little more unique, for sure.