electragician<p>For the past few weeks I've been playing with Linux distributions that I haven't used in a while, or in some cases ever, on one of my laptops.<br><br>I used LMDE earlier in the week, and thought I should probably try regular Linux Mint itself to see if I was missing anything. I guess I sort of did it backwards compared to most folks.<br><br>A few things I noticed, just from my own use.<br><br>1) Cinnamon is really quite good. I hadn't used it in years, really since back when it was newish and still a little unstable. It quite the nice desktop environment these days though and has a bunch of useful configuration options and added goodies that I can actually appreciate. I've been an unabashed Gnome fanboy for years, but Cinnamon is... well it's kinda awesome.<br><br>2) I swear I can't really tell much of a difference between LMDE and Mint in usability. I mean the driver utility in Mint, with it's Ubuntu underpinnings, is a pretty nice feature add... but not that big of a deal for a seasoned Linux user. I mean how often do you really use it? I don't game much, but in LMDE a quick "sudo apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree" and a reboot gets this aging, nVidia Optimus equipped, laptop able to do gaming related tasks just fine.<br><br>3)Mintinstall, the Mint software manager, is just better than Gnome's Software Center. I mean freakin' kudos for that. It's an easy to understand, good-looking, relatively fast app that doesn't annoyingly refresh itself when I'm trying to do something in it, making me wait 30 seconds for the interface to come back up.<br><br>4) It's a small quibble, but I might be misunderstanding something about Hypnotix, the included IPTV app? Maybe the channel list in it is old or something? It just strikes me as odd that on a distribution(s) that is(are) otherwise so dialed-in as far as usability and polish, that app just doesn't seem to work well a lot of the time. For me most channels just spin for ever and never play. I'll have to read up on it a bit and see if I'm doing something wrong... it's very possible.<br><br>Anyway... everyone recommends Mint for newbies, but it's pretty damned great for oldies too.<br><br><a href="https://electragicians.space/tags/linuxmint" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>linuxmint</span></a><br><a href="https://electragicians.space/tags/lmde" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>lmde</span></a><br><a href="https://electragicians.space/tags/linux" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>linux</span></a></p>