I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.

  • @[email protected]
    6•1 year ago
    • trying to install any software that isn’t already packaged explicitly for Ubuntu is a nightmare because there is no equivalent of the AUR for people to push build steps to and you’re quite often left guessing what dependencies you need to install to get something to compile

    In fairness it does have the PPA system which predates the AUR and does provide a good job of providing third party amd semi-third party software.

    But you’re right that Ubuntu has sold out on building snaps for software instead of ppas.

    • lemmyvoreEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      The PPAs weren’t that useful. I mean they worked fine for the purpose, but if you used too many of them you’d eventually get your system into a dependency hell. That meant packages were stuck without updates and also blocking others from updating.

      The other thing was that even if you kept clear of PPAs it was anybody’s guess if you could upgrade to the next release. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and you’d have to reinstall from scratch.

      Put together it meant after a while you didn’t bother upgrading period, or upgraded only major releases but by reinstalling from scratch every single time (and preserving /home). It was a chore and I resented it and kept putting it off.