I have been testing for a few weeks Mint, originally started on 21.2 on an old 2012 MacBook Air… the OS was flying! As I was looking at this now 10 years old machine, now back to usable speed again I was pleasantly surprised. On my desktop was still running Fedora that is just a bit more shiny and has the latest “stable” packages.
I had a negative bias on Mint as I disliked the idea of a newbie’s distro and was two steps away from Debian so for some time I left it aside.
A couple of weeks after that I decided to dust off an old 2013 iMac for my wife to be using as desktop machine and, she being a windows gal, I thought a safe bet would have been Mint that doesn’t feel alien for those coming from that OS.
Again, mind blown by the performance.
I decide to play it risky and so I reimagine it with LMDE: everything works out of the box. I just install the NVIDIA driver from Synaptics and then the computer is set.
This was the drop that made me go on the rabbit hole. I went on a spree to install LDME on an old gaming laptop that was hidden in the dust for now 5 years and then to a few other machines. (Yeah I have a bit of spare hardware lying around)
The last few days I have been thinking to put mint on the main desktop but was afraid of letting GNOME go… and so I decided to test GNOME on one of those LDME machines…
Omg…. Mind blown again. Essentially we can now have Debian with all the delicious little Mint tools. This kinda feels like how Debian is supposed to be! But it is Mint! Even GNOME contains all the little things that, on Fedora for example, I used to have to install manually but now they were there already! Like Gnome Tweaks, or extensions like the Places indicator or other small ones…
I am not sure I am managing to convey how this feels… I have always wanted to have Debian but Debian has made it, one way or another, impossible for me to stay. Mint is making it possible today. What a blessing of a distro.
Rant over.
Side note: I think I have fallen in love with Cinnamon, oups!
What even is modern hardware? If your hardware is more than 2 years old you a never going to have a problem.
Not if it’s really old. My dinosaur is over 12 years old and Debian stable (on which LMDE is based) no longer officially supports my graphics card.
If I want the graphics to work properly, I have to install the proprietary driver the hard way, and reinstall it every time Xorg updates.
There are alternatives but all of them require more work or giving up features.
(And no, I can’t just buy a new computer.)
Really? It should be built into the kernel.
The card’s Nvidia. Mint comes with the Nouveau driver which doesn’t quite cut it, at least not for me. Maybe some of that’s baked into the kernel these days, I’m not sure.
Earlier Mints (LMDE included) provided an installable package of the OEM legacy driver for cards as old as mine, but Debian 12 (which LMDE 6 is based on) doesn’t.
I should point out that graphics works without the OEM driver, but it doesn’t work well. Work is offloaded to the CPU that the card is perfectly capable of doing.