Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 Now Shipping

[starshipeleven]

Nope, Mint was born and created to deal with shitty US laws (to take advantage of "not all laws works same way everywhere") Since they are from Europe (Ireland in particular, there these laws does not work) they started by providing blob codecs, mp3 support, flash, etc... everything what was missing from Ubuntu default and even illegal (particulary in US) to be shipped at the time

Only many years later on they started doing their own tools and UIs, Gnome forks, etc...

It became popular with the Ubuntu GUI change, not before.

[dungeon]

It became popular with the Ubuntu GUI change, not before.

Nope ss11, Mint was popular even before when Ubuntu was with Gnome 2 just because they were doing this (and because they can do it there) Flash in browser by default, all audio/video codecs working by default, etc... in Ubuntu nor Debian that wasn't a case. For Ubuntu you must intervene to do so, for Debian even more, third-party repos needed, etc...

Additionaly these GUI changes after Gnome 2 deprecation makes it even more popular, but it is not a primary reason they became popular really

[dungeon]

Would there be a difference if they added a bundle of packages to Debian, so you could get all their work with simple # apt install mint-desktop-cinnamon versus having a separate distribution?

edit: same question applies to most distributions ^^

edit 2: imagine ubuntu, red hat, steamos, clear linux, chromeos etc. as one.

There can't be one good as at beginning there was two I imagined that World is global, but if you look at history that does not ever worked People makes unions, people breaks unions, inventing all the time

In this World there are about 7K languages, about 7K ethnicities, but just about 200ish countries... these are like linux distributions, so there are major or minor players More and more you try to unite more, more and more the opposite effect happens and people invent something else

[Danny3]

Since Canonical is now best friends with Microsoft and is rapidly stepping in Windows 10's shoes with spyware, data collection and other crap, I really like that Linux Mint devs are offering this alternative.
I'm just curious now how easy it's to install KDE Plasma on it.

[Weasel]

Nice strawman you got there. Nothing stops you from fixing bugs and submitting code and patches to existing projects or submitting your work to the archives and maintaining it.

Right, nothing stops you.

Nothing stops them from being rejected cause some guy in charge there didn't like it, either.

A lot of time "patches are not welcome" is a much closer truth to open source in general, because it doesn't align with their shitty vision. Maybe you'd understand if you actually contributed anything anywhere.

[starshipeleven]

Right, nothing stops you.

Nothing stops them from being rejected cause some guy in charge there didn't like it, either.

A lot of time "patches are not welcome" is a much closer truth to open source in general, because it doesn't align with their shitty vision. Maybe you'd understand if you actually contributed anything anywhere.

That's right but you are pointing a loaded gun to upstream developers. It's not always the case of the upstream being asshats for no reason, sometimes they do have a point too. Let's ignore Ubuntu for a moment.

Many times upstream rejects contributions that are poorly written (i.e. hacks), or would increase their maintenance burden for no real benefit to their own project, like for example Gallium Nine.

And it's not always downstream's fault either, sometimes (many times in commercial products) it's not really worth it to actually doing a proper upstreamable job, and you just fork, make your little hacking around, and then ship a product powered by the opensource software you hacked.

[Weasel]

That's right but you are pointing a loaded gun to upstream developers. It's not always the case of the upstream being asshats for no reason, sometimes they do have a point too. Let's ignore Ubuntu for a moment.

I never said they are asshats tho? I just said that some have a shitty vision (in my opinion). Clearly that's just an opinion, but the fact is that this is why forks or alternatives exist: because people disagree with their opinions.

Many times upstream rejects contributions that are poorly written (i.e. hacks), or would increase their maintenance burden for no real benefit to their own project, like for example Gallium Nine.

Interesting example here so I'll answer this (but my reply is in general). Gallium Nine is not that much of a hack and could be integrated in Wine-Staging which has far worse hacks already anyway.

What irks me is this "No real benefit to their own project". That's the problem right there. It's their project and sometimes people disagree with that fact and their vision for the project. The amount of people who use Gallium 9 should speak for itself that it is a benefit to a lot of people, just not to the guy in charge of that project or whoever else was responsible (I don't think it was Alexandre who rejected it).

Furthermore the code is already written so it's not like people are asking others to waste their time coding it. Of course, reviewing it and maintaining it costs time , but how about the guy who wasted time writing the code in the first place? Does his time not matter? He wasted a lot of time and resources writing it and people benefit from it.

So... fork?

See? That's why it happens. (I'm not answering you here, cause I know you're aware of it already, but explaining it to the other guy who was clueless as to why forks exist cause he thinks you can contribute to a project anything you want)


Though technically speaking Gallium 9 is not a fork, so it's not quite the best example here, but whatever. ;-)

[Cerberus]

Right, nothing stops you.

Nothing stops them from being rejected cause some guy in charge there didn't like it, either.

A lot of time "patches are not welcome" is a much closer truth to open source in general, because it doesn't align with their shitty vision. Maybe you'd understand if you actually contributed anything anywhere.

You guys are nothing if not predictable in your reactions. Yawn. Not even entertaining anymore, just boring.

[ermo]

Debian as project spans every use case from boring servers to crazy, "just-so" configured programmer workstations. That (lack of? Overly broad?) focus is bound to yield more friction when optimizing for a specific use case (i.e. desktop-only for instance).

I get that duplication of effort is a thing, but from a management perspective (in a general sense), I'd guess that it's easier for an organization to deliver a well-honed product to its target audience if it can relentlessly optimize for said target audience. Forking an Open Source codebase such as Debian initially lowers the barrier to entry in the semi-boutique/derivative/niche OS space.

But this initial cost is small compared to the amortized lifetime cost of maintaining a fork, making its maintenance mostly pointlessly duplicated effort in the long run. There's obviously more than one side to issue at hand I guess.

[Vistaus]

If there is someone to blame for this specific case we can blame Ubuntu. Linux Mint was born when Ubuntu switched from GNOME2 to Unity.

But if Linux Mint wanted to keep the GNOME2 spirit alive, then why didn't just use MATE instead of creating Cinnamon? Note that I'm not against Cinnamon, I'm just saying that if what you say is true, they could've just used MATE.