Questions about Linux Mint and this list

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2022 11:42:17 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
>I am not sure why you are tagging me into this. I haven't participated
>in this subthread since it moved on to bug reporting.

My apologies. I tried to point out, that Ubuntu experts assume a lot,
that is far away from "averaged users" and I remembered your mother as a
good example for a "normal users".

Again this particular Ubuntu Wiki article:
"This article has been written so that any one at any skill level may
go from start to finish successfully, working through each section one
at a time. [...]
The rest of this page assumes that you know how to fetch a kernel from
the Ubuntu git repository, build it, and bisect it. If you can't do
that yet, try starting with this wiki page"

Sounds like:
"This article has been written so that any one at any skill level may
go from start to finish successfully, working through each section one
at a time. [...]
The rest of this page assumes that you completed studies in quantum
physics, mechanical engineering and geology. If you haven't done this
yet, do it first."

Yes, it's a Wiki, written by the community, but that is how almost all
Linux distros work and I don't know many Wikis with such strange
assumptions.

The web contains Linux explanations mentioning the level of difficulty,
and how long it takes to read. A 5 minutes reading easy noob level
explanation, doesn't contain an assumption such as being familiar with
awk and if not, to first become familiar with awk.

>Over the 18 years (!) I've been using Ubuntu, I've reported 2 or 3
>bugs that I consider to be serious. One resulted in a somewhat
>panic-stricken email from the release manager on this list.
>
>It did not get fixed. None of them received a serious fix.

Hm? I reported issues successfully upstream (not to package
upstream Debian, but to the developers of the software) and then build
packages with the upstream fixes replacing the once from the Ubuntu
repositories. Indeed, expecting bug fixes from Ubuntu is an issue,
since parts are maintained by the community and other parts are
maintained by Ubuntu/Canonical. 

>ChromeOS does what Ubuntu set out to do, and it does it better.

I experience a lot of issues with proprietary solutions, too, in my
case with iPadOS. However, after a while I learned what apps are a
waste of money and what are well maintained, even if Apple does enforce
something odd to the software developers and users. The big difference
is, that proprietary solutions are not for free as in beer.

>Mint offers Natively-packaged Firefox, Flatpak support, no Snaps, no
>GNOME, etc., and a choice of clean, attractive, Windows-like desktops.

I can't comment on the current state of Mint. However, as a fallback my
desktop PC is a multi-boot and I'm not bound to a Linux distro, I'm
even not bound to Linux. At the moment the machine is multi-boot
only, containing Linux distros, but in the past FreeBSD and Windows were
installed, too. As a last resort I would install FreeBSD or even
Windows or something else on bare metal again.

Regards,
Ralf